Where focus goes, energy flows.

We need Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

Concentrated work is the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task. It’s a skill that allows you to quickly master complicated information and produce better results in less time. Deep, focused concentration will make you better at what you do and provide the sense of true fulfillment that comes from craftsmanship. And yet, most people have lost the ability to go deep—spending their days instead in a frantic blur of e-mail and social media, not even realizing there’s a better way. Instead of choosing the most important tasks, THE ONE (most important) THING to work on, most people go the line of least resistance and pick shallow work to fill their time.

In the bestseller Deep Work, author and professor Cal Newport flips the narrative on impact in a connected age. Instead of arguing distraction is bad, he instead celebrates the power of its opposite. Dividing this book into two parts, he first makes the case that in almost any profession, cultivating a deep work ethic will produce massive benefits. He then presents a rigorous training regimen, presented as a series of four “rules,” for transforming your mind and habits to support this skill.

A mix of cultural criticism and actionable advice, Deep Work gives no-nonsense advice, such as the claim that most serious professionals should quit social media and that you should practice being bored.

TIME BLOCKING

Time Blocking is dedicating ten to twenty minutes every evening to building your schedule for the next day. During this planning process you consult your task lists and calendars, as well as your weekly and quarterly planning notes. The goal is to make sure progress is being made on the right things at the right  pace for the relevant deadlines.

This type of planning is like a chess game, with blocks of work getting spread and sorted in such a way that projects big and small all seem to click into completion with (just enough) time to spare.

Three Concerns

Such a detailed level of planning generates a massive amount of productivity. A 40 hour time-blocked work week produces an estimated same amount of output as a 60+ hour work week pursued without structure.

Sometimes people ask how time blocking can work for reactive work, where you cannot tell in advance what obligations will enter your life on a given day. The answer is again simple: periods of open-ended reactivity can be blocked off like any other type of obligation. Even if you’re blocking most of your day for reactive work, for example, the fact that you are controlling your schedule will allow you to dedicate some small blocks (perhaps at the schedule periphery) to deeper pursuits.

(Another smart strategy in this context is to give open-ended reactive blocks secondary purposes: e.g., “process client requests; if I have downtime during this block, work on project X.”)

Sometimes people ask if controlling time will stifle creativity. If you control your schedule: (1) you can ensure that you consistently dedicate time to the deep efforts that matter for creative pursuits; and (2) the stress relief that comes from this sense of organization allows you to go deeper in your creative blocks and produce more value.

Deep Habits: The Importance of Planning Every Minute of Your Work Day

Fixed-Schedule Productivity

The system work as follows:

1.    Choose a schedule of work hours that you think provides the ideal balance of effort and relaxation.

2.    Do whatever it takes to avoid violating this schedule. The door is open to colleagues for established and known times, and other periods where you isolate yourself to focus completely and without distraction on a single IMPORTANT task.

This sounds simple but it is not easy. If you took your current projects, obligations, and work habits, you’d probably fall well short of satisfying your ideal work schedule. Here’s a simple truth: to stick to your ideal schedule will require some drastic actions. For example, you may have to:

• Dramatically cut back on the number of projects you are working on.
• Ruthlessly cull inefficient habits from your daily schedule.
• Risk mildly annoying or upsetting some people in exchange for large gains in time freedom.
• Stop procrastinating.

In the abstract, these all seem like hard things to do. But when you have the focus of a specific goal — “I do not want to work past 5 on week days!” — you’d be surprised by how much easier it becomes deploy these strategies in your daily life.

Let’s look at an example…

To reach my relatively small work hour limit, you have to be careful with how you go about your day.  Here are some of the techniques you can regularly use to remain within the confines of a fixed schedule:

• Serialize your projects. Keep two project stacks. At any one moment you are only working on the top project from each stack. When you finish, move on to the next. This focus lets you churn out quality results without the wasted time of constantly dancing back and forth between multiple efforts.
• Be ultra-clear about when to expect results from yourself. And it’s not always soon. If someone (boss-grr) slips something onto your pile, make an honest evaluation of when it will percolate to the top, then communicate this date.  Make it happen when the time comes. You can get away with telling people to expect a result a long time in the future, if — and this is a big if — you actually deliver when promised.
• Refuse. If your stack is too crowded for a potential project to get done in time,  turn it down.
• Drop projects and quit. If a project gets out of control, and starts to sap too much time from your schedule: drop it. If something demonstrably more important comes along, and it conflicts with something else in your stack, drop the less important project. If an obligation is taking up too much time: quit. Here’s a secret: no one really cares what you do on the small scale. In the end you’re judged on your large-scale list of important completions.
• Don’t be available. Perhaps you can work in hidden nooks of the office or in libraries. Check and respond to work e-mail only a few times a day. People have to wait for responses from you. You can set up an auto-respond that tells the writer when you’ll be working on emails. Don’t be easy to find.  People generally don’t really need immediate access.  Always respond within a reasonable timeframe and get them what they need. So they adjust. And you get things done.
• Batch and habitatize. Any regularly occurring work gets turned into a habit — something you do at a fixed time on a fixed date. For example, I write blog posts on Sunday morning. I do work/planning/reading for my seminars on Sunday and Monday mornings. Habit-based schedules for the regular work makes it easier to tackle the non-regular projects. It also prevents schedule-busting pile-ups.
• Start early. Sometimes real early. On certain projects that you know are important,  don’t tolerate procrastination. If you need to start something 2 or 3 weeks in advance so that your stack proceeds as needed,  do so.

Why This Works

You could fill any arbitrary number of hours with what feels to be productive work. Between e-mail, and “crucial” web surfing, and to-do lists that, in the age of David Allen, grow to lengths that rival the bible, there is always something you could be doing. At some point, however, you have to put a stake in the ground and say: I know I have a never-ending stream of work, but this is when I’m going to face it. If you don’t do this, you let the never-ending stream of work push you around like a bully. It will force you into tiring, inefficient schedules. And you’ll end up more stressed and no more accomplished.

Fix the schedule you want. Then make everything else fit around your needs. Be flexible. Be efficient. If you can’t make it fit: change your work. But in the end, don’t compromise. No one really cares about your schedule except for yourself. So make it right. Make it work.

Jumpstart Your Concentration with a Depth Ritual

Develop rituals that lead into a high performance action for the most priority. Don’t do shallow (routine/unimportant) work in your most attentive and productive times!

In Search of Deep Concentration

Aaron is a PhD student. This requires him to spend a significant fraction of his time thinking about hard things.

To accommodate the necessity of depth in his working life, Aaron developed a ritual he uses to quickly shift his brain into a state of concentration.

Here’s how it works:

• Aaron puts on headphones and plays non-distracting meditative music.
• He launches a stripped-down text editor that hides all the features of his computer.
• He loads up a template that contains seven questions about the deep task he’s about to begin. These questions force him to specify why the task is important and how he’s going to tackle it.

Getting through these steps takes around five minutes. As soon as Aaron’s done typing in his final answer he turns immediately to the scheduled deep task.

The Results of Ritual

Here’s how Aaron describes the impact of this ritual:

“Every time I have done this (well, nearly every time) I [entered] a deep thinking phase quite effortlessly. I think the reason why it works is that the barrier to entry is quite small (filling out the template) and the returns (clarity on session objective, momentum) are tangible.”

Achieving unbroken concentration is a mindset: and a non-natural one at that! To slip into a concentrated, focused state, we need all the help we can get.