Deep Work, Disruption, and Over-Commitment 🕸️ Issue 16

Identifying the enemies of deep work within and without

I have been operating within toxic patterns and disruptive environments for a very long time. It cannot continue.

I only recently became aware of just how bad my internal wiring has become, and I’ve got 2025 to thank for making it starkly obvious to me. 2025 is my #GorillaYear (I made Little Simz’s “Gorilla” my theme song). It’s been my intention to move through the world with the level of swag and self-confidence which the song embodies, while being the most prolific version of myself. We are now 7 months into the year, and staying in #GorillaMode has overwhelmed me so much that at several points, I have felt tired to the point of death.

By January 2025, I was 4 months into my 2-year contract for an in-person 9-5 job (which I didn’t realize would be in-person until I was already accepting it). I had completed a zero draft of my fantasy novel which I planned to turn into a first draft as soon as I could. I began to have preliminary meetings about my role as the curator of the 2025 African Book Festival in Berlin. I was working on strategies to promote my On the Ceiling passion project. I worked, I wrote, I curated, I posted on social media, and in the middle of it all, did the occasional gig—facilitated a poetry workshop, did book readings and book club visits (if you’re in a book club, pick The Year of Return next!), writing retreats, being a guest at an international literary festival (not the same as the one I was curating). Of course, I also had to maintain my physical, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual health. Going to the gym at dawn three times a week, trying to reserve Sundays to catch up with my friends, trying to be a present and active member of my church community and my writing group/book club, trying to keep up with my commitment to reading 52 books a year. In the middle of these 7 months, there was also an intense travel period during which I flew on 9 planes in less than 2 weeks (Jamaica and Other Side Quests), after which I felt please-unalive-me-tired. I am very blessed. Also, adulting is a scam.

I’ve fought with my life to drag myself out of bed at 4 a.m. so that I can either get some writing done or go to the gym at dawn before I have to report to work. I’ve been a few minutes late to nearly everything, all year. I’ve squeezed as many minutes as possible from my lunch breaks at work to make progress on my novel (which I finished a first draft of, by the way!). I have dealt with sh*tstorms in my inbox for months, and for every 15 emails I have cleared, it has seemed to me that 30 new emails appeared instantaneously to replace them. I have not done a terrible job this year, but I also haven’t done the best that I could at any of my commitments, because I have overextended myself.

Current circumstances aside, I fear that neither my mind nor my body really knows how to function when limited only to a manageable number of commitments. From as early as age eleven, I can recall being engaged in so many curricular and extra-curricular activities that they locked me into perpetual busyness. I spent nearly the entirety of high school overwhelmed. By then, I seemed to gravitate unconsciously towards ridiculous choices like simultaneously taking up Additional Mathematics and Visual Arts—the two most time-consuming IGCSE courses in my high school at the time—while being a member of the school swim team, practicing nearly every single day after classes. And this is all before the depression became crippling. In college, the overwhelm got so bad that I had to take time off school, pushing my graduation date from May to December. Thinking back to my childhood, primary school, and the millions of extracurricular activities I was always involved in, it is immediately obvious to me that the toxic patterns of my life have had at least two full decades to set in and fester. (Sidebar: Those of you who are raising deebee kids and want to give them the whole world, I urge you to be mindful of balance. As much as they seem to contain endless sources of energy, kids can break.)

Now, I gravitate unconsciously towards overcommitment and therefore, overwhelm. As my obligations compound, I think to myself, “After all these are over, I’ll have some freedom to go about life in a saner way.” But when obligations reach their natural conclusions (completion of task/term of service) or artificial ones (abandonment), one of two things tends to happen. Either (1): I go into a freeze state where I can’t decide what to do and therefore do nothing because my brain doesn’t know how to function outside the perpetual overwhelm, or (2): I immediately fill up all the space I have gained from my concluded obligations with new obligations until I get overwhelmed again.

Overwhelm has become my normal state, which means low-grade anxiety has become my normal state. But no matter how normal dysfunction is, it cannot transmute itself into health. It is now rare for me to produce work in the most efficient manner or to the best possible quality, which is a shame, considering the brilliance I suspect I am capable of.

My mind and habits have been so badly scrambled that it has taken me more than a week just to be able to write this. If you count the days since I started putting the notes for this down, it’s more like 3 months. If you count from when I first had the idea to compose such an essay, it’s certainly longer. It has now been approximately two weeks since I’ve had some time off to be more distanced from my professional obligations, and I am still trying to calm my nervous system down from the chaos to which it was addicted, and which was decimating my psychological health.

As a person who plans to dedicate the majority of her professional life to writing novels, allowing this pattern to continue is one of the worst things I could ever do.

Deep-Sea Spider-Brain

The cognitive world is an ocean. My mind is a deep-sea creature. It can swim on the surface if it’s absolutely required to, but that’s not what it was designed for. And any creature which spends too long outside of the environment within which it was designed to thrive begins to deteriorate. The demands on my quotidian life keep my mind swimming on the surface when it yearns for deep submersion, thousands of feet below sea level. Activities like creating books, creating worlds, composing novels, are deep-sea activities, which means I must place myself in environments which allow me to remain submerged.

My brain also works like a spider web. I imagine that more organized minds are significantly more linear. But mine is sprawling. Several ideas occur to me at once, all the time, and I have to keep mentally switching tabs to get anything done. For example, in order to write this essay, I have had to frequently leave sentences or paragraphs unfinished because something else has occurred to me which I don’t want to forget, and so I have to insert it into another paragraph or create a new section, before allowing myself to go back to what I was writing earlier. Sometimes, something will occur to me that has nothing to do with the essay I am writing now, and I have to go make a note somewhere else for an entirely different piece of writing, before returning to work on this one. Imagine this process repeating itself every 2 minutes. It takes a hefty amount of concentration for me to get even the simplest things about my chosen occupation done.

And then there are the symptoms which I suspect are a consequence of the normalized overwhelm in my life. A first draft of this essay is so disjointed that I’ve had to print it out just to rearrange paragraphs and create better segues. This is after I’ve had to switch from tablet-and-stylus to laptop-and-keyboard, back to tablet-and-stylus, then to notebook-and-pen, back to laptop-and-keyboard. What I am doing as I write this with the printout version involves several different colors of pens, highlighters, and correction tape. The only reason I’ve been able to get this far in the essay at all is because my phone is turned off and tucked in a drawer somewhere out of sight. My capacity for uninterrupted focus is in shambles.

If my addiction to overwhelm is something that has grown over several years, why is 2025 the year it has suddenly become so obvious to me that I have to fight tooth and nail to break out of the pattern? My myriad #GorillaYear obligations have constituted only part of the reason. By my assessment, my office job accounts for so much more of my mental fragmentation than anything else, vastly amplifying the effects of my tendency to overcommit. It is not so much the nature of the tasks I am given, but the conditions under which I am expected to execute them, which I have begun to find untenable.

The Enemies of Deep Work

I consider myself a deep worker, with particularly strong experience and talent in the creation of longform pieces of writing. My guess is that these characteristics are what made me attractive to my employer for this position, given that my primary task involved the creation of a large and ambitious book constituted of several decades’ worth of content and that many of my other tasks also involve the generation of formal documents. (Sidebar: Cal Newport’s Deep Work is one of the few non-fiction books that I truly feel may have changed my life.)

If there’s anything that’s essential to my ability to do my job well, it is deep concentration; the ability to sustain focus on a large task for a considerable amount of time. Ideally, interruptions should be minimal, as should extraneous tasks. Instead, interruptions and extraneous tasks have been abundant, and have been combining with what I have begun to suspect is my own undiagnosed neurodivergence, to result in mental fragmentation which could, if unchecked, drive me crazy. I don’t feel like I am exaggerating.

Because of the haphazard ways my brain works (as described in the example of how difficult it’s been to write this essay and the over-commitments evident in my calendar), I am a person who thrives on self-manufactured artificial order and organization, careful planning and curation of my time and environment, especially with external tools (shout-out to Passion Planner!). I have developed careful systems which help me keep my own natural tendencies towards unproductive chaos largely controlled. Without the artificial order, the inside of my head sounds like a frying pan full of sizzling bacon, my heart beats twice as loud and as hard as it should, and I start to sweat, sometimes shed tears, and generally exhibit many symptoms of anxiety attacks.

I will not say that I cannot work in disruptive environments, because I have been working in disruptive environments. What I can say is that working amid constant disruption feels like speeding recklessly towards a death which I should otherwise be approaching at a reasonable, perambulatory pace. I feel like I am working in an environment in which the enemies of deep work have been accepted as completely normal. My occasional requests for conditions which will allow me to work better, while acknowledged, have not resulted in much positive change. This is generally not because the people to whom I make my case don’t care (I hope), but because the spirit of the status quo is so overpowering that accommodating my requests is like trying to mix oil and water. Despite the efforts made, the two liquids separate again and again.

At some point within the last five years, I became acutely aware of how much my brain hates it when my body is enclosed in a box. Even in my bedroom in Accra, which has cross-ventilated louvre blades which allow me to see the sky and feel fresh air, I experience the kind of mental shutdown which is grossly amplified when I get into my office. I knew from reading The Sorcerer’s Stone, on a superficial level, that Harry Potter had it bad, living in the cupboard beneath the stairs of the Dursleys’ home, but I have now reached deeper levels of empathy for this fictional character.

Severance is an Apple TV show I recently got into. Central to the plot is the in-universe existence of technology which enables people’s memories to be spatially defined. A “severed” worker is a person who, when they are at work, remembers nothing of their life outside of the hours they are clocked into work, in the physical building of their workplace. Outside of the workplace, severed workers remember nothing of their lives inside the workplace. When they are clocked out, it is for them as though, for eight hours of every working day, they have simply blacked out. The severed workers who are the show’s main characters, while inside their austere, windowless office building, often make a big deal about having never seen the sun, or the sky, or the world outside.

This sci-fi concept has become shockingly relatable in my quotidian life. I walk into my office and at once, I start to feel almost like a different person, as though there are processes in my brain which are spatially defined. In my case, it feels like my environment is suppressing my cognitive abilities rather than my memories. My anxiety levels shoot up and refuse to come back down. Being creative starts to feel like pushing boulders uphill. Reaching for focus feels like swimming against a violent tide. I am in an unrelenting state of internal discomfort, and it takes incredible amounts of energy to try and function well enough to accomplish the simplest of tasks. I attribute my reaction to this physical space mainly to two things: the lack of windows, and the cumulative effects of the constant interruptions and stresses I face while in that room.

The location, size, and design of the room (which I usually occupy alone) makes me think that it was originally designed to be a storage closet. The only windows in the space look out to the back of someone else’s office chair. There is no way, either from the views afforded by the door or the windows, when they are open, to see the world outside. There have been occasions of dangerously stormy weather to which I have been completely oblivious until I have left my office to go to the water dispenser or some other errand. The pining with which the Severance characters speak of the skies they are denied is more than justified.

In order to minimize the feeling of being contained within a box while in my office, I tend to leave the door open. This invites several distractions. Ghanaian culture has nurtured people towards an obligation to greet nearly everyone they cross paths with, and serious offense is often taken when this courtesy isn’t given. Several people pass in front of my open office door and will therefore stop to greet me even if whatever they are in the area for has nothing to do with me, even if they have no idea who I am. People who do know who I am may stop for a short conversation. People who need something from me will pop in to make their requests. When the receptionist is not available, mine is often the first face people encounter. Short of closing my door and boxing myself in once more, I cannot see a productive way to get everyone in my vicinity to understand that every single time my attention is diverted from whatever task is before me on my computer screen—even if it is just to say “Good morning”—I have to climb a mental mountain to regain enough concentration to get back in the zone.

The digital distractions are equally competitive. Ideally, I would complete deep work in conditions as close to airplane mode as I can get: phone out of sight and/or on “do not disturb”; all digital notifications silenced, even if I have to be connected to the internet to use the cloud or conduct research. I have been working in the opposite of these conditions. I am constantly worried about missing emails that may require immediate action, in either of the accounts to which I am signed in for work. At any time, a phone call could come in through my workplace’s local network extension line, startling me promptly out of deep work. I am often pulled out of deep work to complete spontaneous tasks in the capacity of a personal assistant. (I think there should be a person in my department whose sole responsibility it is to act as a personal assistant, but at this moment, there is none.) In all these cases, I have to climb a mental mountain to get back into deep work mode when I return to my main tasks.

There is yet another type of interruption which has been making me even worse off: assigned side quests. Creating a book full of several decades’ worth of content was a huge task, and I was given a pressure cooker timeline within which to complete it. Yet I often went several days, sometimes weeks at a time, without making any progress on this task, in favor of completing sometimes spontaneous tasks which appeared to be more immediate. Most recently, the duties that have taken precedence in my office life involve activities more aligned with retail vending and customer service than knowledge work, making me liable to interruptions by individuals I’m obligated to attend to at random moments. And then I’ve had to climb a mental mountain to attempt deeper work again. (I have also developed much more empathy for customer service workers than I ever had before, because the way some people talk to and treat other people when conditions aren’t ideal for them… my God.)

Imagine a car with a bit of an engine problem, such that it often fails to spark on the first or even the second try. Imagine that the engine has to be carefully coaxed each time it’s required to start by its owner, the only person who is intimately familiar with its quirks. This takes patience, time, effort, and concentration. Once the engine is up and running, the car is more or less fine, even impressive, on the road. But imagine, also, that the car is in use in a busy, hectic African city like Accra, and that every single time it reaches a junction, a stop sign, a red light, or is otherwise stalled in traffic, the person in the passenger’s seat forces the driver’s hand to turn the engine off, so that when the road is clear and/or the light is green, the driver has to begin the process of coaxing the engine back to life all over again. Imagine the frustration. This is what it feels like to attempt deep work in my current conditions.

I do not document these conditions here to make it seem as though I am uniquely afflicted. From my observations, every member of my department is plagued with constant interruptions, and I think every member of my department is worse off for it. These conditions seem to me to have been accepted as normal, but if anyone’s intention is to get the best quality of work out of us according to our job descriptions, it should not be. I will say, however, that not everyone has a deep-sea spider-brain, and these conditions may make others much less prone to insanity than is the case with me.

Closer to the beginning of these chaotic work patterns, I started to think that my conditions were providing me with ample and necessary resistance to make me more productive. During weekends, public holidays, or any other breaks from work, I did as much as I could to squeeze in hours of work on the things my heart is really in—primarily, my novel. The idea that I was running out of time until I had to be present again at work seemed like good motivation, as did the low-grade anxiety this came with. But now, after several months of mounting chaos, an increased number of responsibilities and obligations, and enough time in the Dursley cupboard office that my brain is no longer bamboozled by the sheer novelty of an environment other than my bedroom, my reaction to “free time” is drastically different.

Lately, when I find myself with a day, or even a half-day that I don’t have to go in to work, I panic so hard that I enter a freeze state. Outside the physical environment of my greatest dysfunction, my brain is still stuck there. It doesn’t seem to know what to do when it is not under immediate pressure to do a million things at once. When I actually have the opportunity to choose one thing to focus on—out of the 5 non-office-job-related projects I still have going on—I apparently cannot. At least, not without astounding difficulty.

Addiction to overwhelm feels like addiction to a lethal substance. For the love of all that is good, you cannot seem to function without it, but it sure as hell is making your life worse instead of better. I imagine that recovering from brain fragmentation would therefore be non-equivocally comparable to recovering from addiction—which, I shall understate, is abominably difficult.

In the moment, I am trying to change what I can. Writing this down is a necessary part of my process. But there are some things which must be temporarily—and major emphasis on temporarily—endured. For various reasons—which can be summarized as “Accra”—I have not come across a convincingly better alternative working space that is right for the intersection between my brain’s requirements and the nature of my ongoing projects. I have also made a kind of pact with God to see through the things that I prayed for, and so I’ll have to consider seeing through my term of service in these conditions as His way of building a particular brand of endurance within me. But the luxury I yearn for most intensely right now is enough time off to recalibrate my brain into healthy patterns. I must get free.

They Won’t Break My Soul

If there is anything (besides financial compensation) I am grateful for in #GorillaYear, it is all the lessons I’m learning in the inverse manner, about what kinds of conditions I need to intentionally curate for myself in order to healthily manifest the talents my Creator placed within me. I am learning practical lessons about light and walls and greenery and technological (dis)connection and leadership and insidious corporate exploitation strategies and intentional rest and boundaries and charisma and focus and the necessary symbiosis between available personnel and outstanding work, and planning and preparation and straight-up neuroscience.

I am determined to break out of my toxic patterns and anti-deep work conditions as soon as possible. I will retrain my brain into patterns of health I haven’t yet had adequate opportunities to enjoy. And I will accomplish this without sacrificing the very talents and activities which renew my will to carry on whenever I feel depleted. As prophetess Beyoncé said in her Renaissance banger, “They won’t break my soul.” I intend as much as possible to document my journey.

I will be free. My destiny is flourishing. 🕸️