Deep Work

Two years ago, I read the book Deep Work by Cal Newport and he defines deep work as:

Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.

To do deep work, you need to understand what shallow work is. Shallow work is non-cognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted. These efforts do not create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate. Simply, those work which won't add value towards achieving your goals.

As you can research and read the book itself to understand more. But, I will tell you in simple words what I understood.

Schedule deep work blocks

Yes, you need a time block to perform deep work. I normally do at most 6 hours of deep work, from 1pm to 4pm and 9am to 12pm. During that time period, I focus and work effectively. Honestly, 6 hours daily is a bit too much for work. But, as I work full-time, daily work is necessary and during the night I like to sharpen my skills or work on side projects. So, you should schedule your time block. I recommend starting with a 2 hour time-block for a month and see the wonders.

Decide where and how you'll perform Deep Work

Scheduling time is not enough. You need to decide where and how you will do deep work. We have already discussed how your environment should be in Chapter 5.

How to work deeply?

First, you need to understand that we are not robots to work with high efficiency. Sometimes we don't have time, we get tired and don't want to do anything, and that is totally fine. Taking rest, doing nothing also helps to focus as it gives you time to restore yourself.

Once you get yourself a place and positive mindset ready, you can isolate yourself for the scheduled time-block. If you cannot picture it, let me help.

When I get ready for deep work, I pick a bottle of water, a notebook, and my laptop. I sit on the chair and start doing the work. Device notifications go off. It seems simple to say, but actually doing it is harder. What if you don't have an active internet or no electricity? Well, that will be an unusual situation to begin with.

The point is to get yourself ready and just start working for the scheduled time period that you decided earlier.

Execute without excuses

Talking from my experience, you will get a lot of distractions and unnecessary things when you try to work in peace. Either in an office where you have a deadline or on your personal project — you will get distractions from every possible direction. You'll get hungry, you'll get thirsty, you'll remember something from months ago. Due to that, most people get distracted before they start working.

How often do you make excuses? Like when you missed a deadline, couldn't complete the project that you started. I believe we don't like to admit that we are the problem. We like to blame others, make countless excuses but deep down we feel guilty but we pretend not to show.

Making excuses is cheating with oneself.

It's not that easy not to make any excuses. But, when you mess up or couldn't complete it on time, try to take full responsibility yourself. It will hurt at the beginning but you feel better after some time. When you become responsible and work hard, you ought to succeed. If you do it with discipline for 2-3 hours a day, I believe you won't miss any deadlines.

Shutdown from Deep Work

Yes, you need to shut down like a computer. What happens when your PC gets shut down? It stops all the running processes. Likewise, you have to switch from work mode to normal mode. Stopping everything. When your tasks are incomplete after doing 3 hours or deep work, try not to worry. If you have 3 more tasks to do, shut it down, quit the software, stand up, and close everything. You can do it tomorrow/next time. Shutting down after deep work helps to recharge your body. You will feel more energized when you resume the work the next day. It also depends upon the resolve you have towards the project. If you have a deadline tomorrow, you may not afford to shut down. So, you can be flexible to it.

Rewire your brain for deep work

As we have discussed scheduling, finding where and how to do deep work, executing it, and shutting down when you need to, it's time for a mindset shift. You just need to think things more differently from now on. Rewiring refers to recreating, organizing our thoughts and beliefs.

Embrace doing nothing

It's not possible to deep work straight for 3-4 hours. It's hard to do that. Up to this point, our brain expects and requests distraction. For example, we check our smartphones at any moment. Sound familiar? Unknowingly, we pick up our smartphones to see the time while we wear a watch. Simply put, we've been affected by distractions for so long. So, there is nothing you can do to instantly change that behavior. But, you can try a few things.

Don't take breaks from distraction but instead take breaks from focus.

You can schedule a distraction time and use the internet, smartphone, or anything, and then avoid it altogether while you work. Instead, open your phone 30 times a day for nothing. Try opening it and actually using it for news, social media updates, and playing games maybe in that particular allocated time. Think about it, we are reducing the device's opening frequency and rewiring our brain to open TikTok at 6-7pm maybe?

Quit Social Media but in a smart way

Believe it or not, our attention span has been shortened over time as we consume short videos for a long period of time. I feel like I lost my ability to concentrate, making it difficult to improve work quality.

What about you? Can you concentrate?

If not, a potential cause can be social media. You cannot stop it and isolate yourself from the world, can you? We need information on a daily basis, we need to know what's happening around us.

Let's assume you uninstalled Instagram for 10 days. Was it impossible for you to stay away from it? Did anyone care?

I believe you were stuffed at the beginning and eventually you can do it.

So, I am not telling you to uninstall everything right, but try to use it in a smart way. Why do you use social media?

• To connect with your friends and family.
• Get updates from your favorite player, actor, or artist.
• Get news updates.
• Watch memes maybe.
• Personal branding

I cannot remember more reasons why you may use social media. All of the above reasons are valid and you should know it all. I'll not write about the dark side of social media here. You can watch a Netflix video about it here: Social Dilemma.

Honestly, I cannot afford to uninstall any social media. I use it to get news updates from Twitter, see what my friends are up to on Instagram, and what my relatives are up to on Facebook. If I don't use it, my parents will tell me why I am not using it. So, I didn't uninstall it. But, you can use it smartly.

Being smart means you are aware of your consumption. If you watch Reels for 2 hours and you don't even realize it, that would be the problem. But, if you know you are going to use it for 30 minutes, then you can stop it after the time elapses.

Deep Work is rare. Not everyone can do it.

I tried to do it myself too often and failed as the world around me is noisy and wants my attention. I got to know about deep work 2 years ago and since then, when I work for more than 2 hours, I label it as deep work. My definition of deep work is being able to put utmost effort into my work and embrace distractions if they happen. I believe in pivoting our focus towards our focus when we get distracted.