How to stay focused in a distracted world...
In a world full of distractions and noise, the ability to focus is a competitive advantage. In today's newsletter you'll find out how I've managed to stay focused and achieve more in less time.
Happy Monday everyone!
I hope you’ve had a restful Easter weekend!
In a world full of distractions and noise, the ability to focus is a competitive advantage.
Cal Newport, author of ‘Deep Work’ describes this using compelling arguments, solid advice, and various strategies to help you maximise your productivity. Deep Work has had a positive influence on my style of working and allowed me to achieve much more in less time. It has also helped me feel more satisfied with my work. It will challenge you to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.
‘Deep Work’ isn’t a new phenomenon, if we look back at the past, we’ll find that there are many stories of important historical figures who owe some of their success to deep work. Psychologist Carl Jung, who is considered one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century, built himself a two-story tower out of stone to do most of his writing and thinking. Bill Gates has “Think Weeks” twice a year, where he is tucked away into a secret two-story cabin and spends the week secluded from civilisation to think big thoughts.
The world is extremely noisy, there are millions of things competing for our attention. Bouncing between your inbox, pointless meetings, and social media notifications are markers of busyness not productivity. Newport coins this as shallow work. Shallow work makes us feel like we are productive because our diaries are full and we have been working nonstop, juggling different tasks at the same time even though our brains weren’t built to multitask. Attempting to do two things at the same time will just take you double the time. When you switch from one task to another, your attention doesn’t immediately follow. There is a residue of your attention that remains stuck thinking about the original tasks. When working on a single task you minimise the negative impact of attention residue.
We are humans, not machines, we can’t be expected to operate at our optimum every hour, every day. If you do 1-2 hours of deep work every day, this amounts to a lot of work being done in the long term. I use deep work to do my most important and complex tasks at my optimum time, 9 am-12 pm. Once it clocks 12 pm my productivity decreases, so I try not to take any calls before 12 pm so I can focus on the wildly important. After 12 pm I do all the other stuff that does not require a huge element of focus and I can sign off knowing I've had a productive day.
A few tips on deep work:
Focus on the wildly important - direct your effort to your most important goals during your deep work hours. Get the biggest objectives out the way.
Act on the lead measures - lead measures are the highest leverage actions or activities that can accomplish goals. Lead measures can influence the chance of success in achieving your goal. For example, if I focus on the number of hours spent writing, I know I’m going to achieve my goal of writing X amount of blogs.
Keep a compelling scoreboard - keep count of how many hours you spend in deep work mode and display your tracking somewhere visible to keep you motivated. Kaizenflow.co does a great job, having a leaderboard and letting you know and share how many sessions of deep work you’ve had in a day.
Create a cadence of accountability - keep your word to yourself by committing to frequently reviewing your progress. If you are exceeding your goals with ease you might need to push yourself further.
Big shout out to @bysamkaizen who created a great tool for Deep Work, Kaizenflow.co it helps you to work in 25-minute sprints whilst listening to some lo-fi music or white noise. You can use it just as a clock, a way of tracking your deep work sessions whilst listening to your own music. Kaizenflow also has a leaderboard, so there’s a bit of productive competition.
Wishing you all a productive week. Let’s make it count.