Cultivating a deep work ethic will produce massive benefits. Follow these strategies and transform your mind and habits to support this skill.
Video Summary By Productivity Game
Key Takeaways
Deep work is professional activity performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that pushes your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.
One to two hours a day, five days a week, of uninterrupted and carefully directed concentration, can produce a lot of valuable output. As a consequence, the few who cultivate this skill of going deep, and then make it the core of their working life, will thrive.
The ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare at exactly the same time it is becoming increasingly valuable in our economy.
It’s because every day we are bombarded with emails from co-workers that expect us to answer them immediately. Bosses want us to work in open offices, with massive distraction all around us.
This type of work or ‘shallow work’ doesn’t allow us to go deep. It’s noncognitively demanding, often performed while distracted, doesn’t create much new value in the world and is easy to replicate.
There are two core abilities for thriving in today’s economy:
1. The ability to quickly master hard things.
2. The ability to produce at an elite level, in terms of both quality and speed.
To learn hard things quickly, you must focus intensely without distraction.
If you’re trying to learn a complex new skill, like programming, in a state of low concentration, for example while having your Facebook feed open. You’re firing too many circuits simultaneously and your brain can’t focus properly. This is called attention residue.
- Let’s say you’re working on a deep work project, for example writing an article. And you happen to glance at your email box and you see a few emails that need answering. Now even if you return back to your deep work, you’re going to be producing at a much lower rate of cognitive capacity, because there has been a residue on your attention from that quick distraction.
- When you switch from task A to another task B, your attention doesn’t immediately follow. Even if you finish task A before moving on, your attention still remains divided for a while.
- So to produce at your peak level you need to work for extended periods with full concentration on a single task, free from distraction. No emails, no Facebook, no co-workers asking you what they should eat for lunch.
There is a way to incorporate deep work and escape the constant distraction. Here are a few strategies you can use:
Deep Work Strategies
1. Transform Deep Work into A Habit
The easiest way to start deep work sessions is to transform them in to a regular habit. Adding routines and rituals to your working life is designed to minimize the amount of your limited willpower necessary to transition into a state of unbroken concentration.
If you suddenly decide in the middle of a distracted afternoon spent web browsing, to switch your attention to cognitively demanding task, you’ll draw heavily from your finite willpower to direct your attention. Such attempts will therefore frequently fail.
On the other hand, if you deployed smart routines and rituals – perhaps a set time and quiet location used for your deep tasks each afternoon – you’d require much less willpower to start and keep going.
In other words, to generate a rhythm for this work removes the need for you to invest energy in deciding if and when you’re going to go deep.
- For a novice, somewhere around 1 hour a day of intense concentration seems to be the limit, while for experts this number can expand to as many as four hours.
- Deep work is best practiced early in the morning. Typically at that time you will have no distractions.
2. Allow Yourself to Be Lazy
Regularly resting your brain improves the quality of deep work. So when you work, work hard. But when you’re done, be done.
Another key commitment to succeed is to create a shutdown ritual. Only the confidence that you’re done with work until the next day can convince your brain to downshift to the level where it can begin to recharge for the next day.
- Put another way, trying to squeeze a little more work out of your evenings might reduce your effectiveness the next day enough that you end up getting less done if you had instead respected a shutdown.
3. Schedule Internet Time
Schedule in advance when you’ll use the Internet, and then avoid it altogether outside of these times.
- Write it down on a notepad and record the next time you’re allowed to go online. Until you arrive at that time, absolutely no network connectivity is allowed – no matter how tempting.
The point is that we increasingly recognize that these tools fragment our time and reduce our ability to concentrate. This is especially dangerous after the workday is over, where the freedom in your schedule enables internet to become central to your leisure time.
Such behavior is dangerous, as it weakens your mind’s general ability to resist distraction, making deep work difficult later when you really want to concentrate.
In other words when it comes to relaxation, don’t default to whatever catches your attention at the moment, but instead dedicate some advance thinking to how you want to spend your free time.
Video Summary By Productivity Game
Key Takeaways
Deep Work Professional activities performed in a state of distraction free concentration that pushes your cognitive abilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill and are hard to replicate.
Neuroscientists have found that intense periods of focus in isolated fields of work causes myelin to develop in relevant areas of the brain. Myelin is a white tissue that develops around neurons and allows brain cells to fire faster and cleaner.
When we practice deep work, we upgrade our brains and allow specific brain circuits to fire more effortlessly and effectively. The brain upgrade we get from deep work allows you to rapidly connect ideas and uncover creative solutions.
In today’s economy, the ability to do Deep Work, is increasingly valuable and increasingly rare.
- Increasingly Valuable because when you produce something great in our hyper-connected world, it has the ability to spread to billions of people. Producing something great is necessary to stand out amongst the noise and avoid to be forgotten by the flood of information that we deal with on a day-to-day basis.
- Increasingly Rare because deep work requires undivided attention and our world is being filed with more and more tempting distractions. So the ability to do deep work is becoming increasingly difficult. It’s not enough to try to annoy distractions like social media, emails etc. We are hard wired to be distracted and pay attention to novelty.
3 Deep Work Strategies
Heighten your ability to focus and produce results hard to replicate.
1. Schedule Distractions
Schedule your distraction periods at home and at work. Most of use allow ourselves to go online at any moment or check our phone whenever it buzzes, but doing so is training your brain to avoid deep work. A day full of unscheduled distraction is training your brain to give in to any and all distractions.
- To build your tolerance to avoid distractions, you need to place boundaries on your distractions. Have a notepad nearby and put down the next distraction break you’ll have. Hold your focus until that time.
2. Create a Deep Work Ritual
The easiest way to consistently start deep work sessions is to transform them into a simple, regular habit. The goal is to generate a rhythm for this work that removes the need for you to invest energy in deciding if and when you’re going to go deep.
Scheduling chunks of deep focus in an ad hoc manner doesn’t yield much productivity at all. For people who are not seasoned at doing deep work, it’s best for them to have a reoccurring time each day or each week to go into deep work. Early morning is typically the best time to do this because at that time you typically don’t have to deal with incoming requests.
- The research shows that people new to deep work can typically only do it for one hour.
- Masters of deep work can only hold their attention up to four hours, in intervals between 60-90 minutes throughout the day.
- So the ultimate goal each day, is to plan deep work rituals throughout the day with the ultimate goal of building up the sum of your deep work practices 2-4 hours a day.
3. Evening Shutdown
Have a daily shutdown complete ritual. Sleep is the price we need to pay in order to do deep work. It’s the interest we pay on the loans of intense focus required to do deep work.
To ensure that we get adequate sleep and restore our attentional reserves for the following day, Cal recommends that we have an evening shutdown into our daily routine. An evening shutdown ritual involves making a plan to complete any unfinished tasks, goals and projects the following day.
- Getting a series of steps lined out is enough to get items off your mind so you can disconnect for the rest of the day.
- When you get things off your mind, you restore the ability to sleep well and do deep work the following day.
- After Cal completes his plan for the following day, he will say to himself, “Shutdown complete”
Deep work is incredibly valuable because it changes your brain and allows you to produce innovative work that is hard to replicate.
