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Notes

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

Shallow work - non-cognitively demanding, logistical style tasks, often performed while distracted. These efforts tend to not create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate.

1. Deep work is valuable

We live in a new economic landscape which rewards: 1. Those who work well and creatively with intelligent machines 2. Those who are the very best at what they do 3. Those who are owners, or have access to capital

We can use deep work to attain the first 2. The last one is difficult.

Core abilities in the new economy: 1. The ability to quickly master hard things. 2. The ability to produce at an elite level in both quality and speed.

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Deliberate practice: 1. Tightly focused attention. 2. Receive feedback and correct.

2. Deep work is rare

The metric black hole - often the bottom-line effect that certain shallow activities have on company performance can't be measured easily.

This means that even though we know that certain activities are not adding value to the company, we can't not do them or limit them as we can almost never point to empirical evidence or metrics on how those activities effect the company.

The principle of least resistance - behaviours that are easiest in the moment are favoured, regardless of long term overall impact.

Even though it will be better for the company to create systems or learn how to use a system to allow easy retrieval of things, a simple email in the moment alleviates the anxiety of having to deal with creating such a system or learning how to use such a system.

Busyness vs productive - people do not value what you are doing vs how much it looks like you are doing. If you want to appear important, appear visibly busy.

People may even comment that you are not working very hard because you are not stressed or you are not working endlessly into the night.

3. Deep work in meaningful

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Sharp focus, intense attention, analysis of all areas of our life bring meaning. Structure your time, especially your free time. Jobs are easier to enjoy than free time as they have built in goals and feedback loops and rules. Free time requires greater effort to be shaped into enjoyable time.

Neurological - deep work allows our brain to grow, our grey matter improves, pathways are made, our emotions improve, our brain chemistry stabalises which keeps our body healthy.

Psychological - deep work is rewarding, the flow state is healthy for our mental state, we find a sense of meaning, we find value in our work, wrestling with difficult tasks.

Philosophical - deep work answers the question, what should I do with my time? what is important to me? What will the output of my efforts contribute to the world? Develop the craft.

How to build up your deep work

Rule 1 - Work deeply

Ritualise, ritualise, ritualise

  • Where will you work?
  • When will you work?
  • How long will you work for?
  • What will the rules be?
    • No internet? No youtube? Music?
    • What metrics will you use to measure a successful session?
    • What are the things you should be doing vs not be doing?
  • How will you support your work? Coffee? Walks? Food? Stretching?
  • Do not be scared to make grand gestures - investing significant money into tooling or systems shifts the importance of that task in our minds.
  • Build a work-space that is clean and enticing.

Implementation

  1. Focus wildly on the important and limit everything else to the time you have left.
  2. Act on lead measure and not lag measures. Measure your success. Have a visible score board that measures the input you give, not the results. We can control what we put in, not the results.
  3. Mark milestones with how many deep work hours it took to input them.
  4. Cadence of accountability - every so often, look at what was done, what worked, what didnt work and adjust accordingly.

Be lazy

  • The subconscious is powerful.
  • Switch off at 5pm and on weekends.
  • Downtime aids insights.
  • Downtime gives energy for deep work.
  • Work done during down time is often shallow and needs to be redone anyway.

Rule 2 - Embrace boredom

Do not take breaks from distraction, take breaks from focus. Our ability to be in the moment and not flit from one post to the next works our deep work muscles. - Resist constant phone use, put your phone in your bag. - Dont entertain yourself on your work computer. (Especially the internet). - Do not entertain yourself at school. - Quit social media - Do not leave your email tab open or constantly check your email. - Do no have whatsapp open.

Rule 3 - Choose your tools well

The tools that we choose to do our work are vital. This is our lives that we are talking about. Do not choose tools that allow easy distraction.

Have a craftsman approach to your work and your tool choice rather than an any benefit approach.

Rule 4 - Drain the shallows

  • Schedule every minute of your day.
  • Most people only get 2 hours of proper work in a day.
  • If you are going off your schedule, reschedule your remaining time. Keep doing this.
  • Finish work at 5pm.