deep work.
Key insights:
There are 3 types of people that will thrive in this current economy:
The current economy rewards those who can focus consistently.
- Those who can work well and creatively with intelligent machines
- Those who are the best at what they do
- Those with capital to invest
Deep Work Ritual must address: where you work, and for how long.
It’s best if the space (environment) is used for deep work only. That allows the body to understand that the environment changed, and the brain should enter focus more.
General questions must be addressed for Deep Work:
The idea behind answering the following questions is to relieve your brain from the decision making, which depletes energy. From Page 119.
- Where you’ll work, and for how long
- The environment where you work matters. You want a place where you’ll find no distractions, and that will shield you from distractions (no one will interrupt you while you’re there).
- How long is important both for others (letting your wife know how long you’ll lock yourself in a cave), and for yourself: the sense of a “deadline” approaching helps create focus.
- How you’ll work — routines and metrics
- Routines help set yourself up for success. Either putting on some chill lo-fi and disconnecting from the internet, or making a coffee. Whatever gets you in your “it’s time to work” mode.
- Metrics are good to keep you accountable. It’s a good idea to have a metric to follow through.
- How you’ll support your work
- What you do outside of work matters. All you do can (and should) support each other, eg: having an evening routine helps you sleep well, and sleeping well helps you stay rested and present in the following day.
Be Lazy
Downtime can actually help formulate insights. Remember that time you had a problem at work that you would not solve, and then you took a shower, and suddenly, the answer came screaming at you in your head? I’ve had a lot of these.
Downtime also helps your mind to rest and be ready for the next day.
Schedule time for distraction, make focus the default
When you intentionally schedule time to be distracted (at work), you make focus your default state.
Disconnecting from the internet is one of the best strategies, because it will block your access to digital environments very difficult to get away from. Sometimes, that’s not possible. My work requires me to be online sometimes (to use Webflow, or Figma). In this case, probably using an app to limit my access would be ideal (but I haven’t tested this hypothesis recently).