Did you know  that every time you check your phone when you get bored, you reinforce your brain’s rewiring to be addicted to distraction - and in turn, lessens your ability to focus on 'deep work'.

Principles

• Deep work is focused, uninterrupted, undistracted work on a task that pushes your cognitive abilities to their limit.
• The best ideas and the most meaningful progress come from deep work, not shallow work.
  • Shallow work answers emails, produces reports, and flits from meeting to meeting.
  • Deep work creates breakthrough business ideas, exposes new research questions, and solves complex problems.

Deep work is critical for your performance as a knowledge worker. It helps you develop new skills and employ those skills to produce output. If you can do both more effectively than others, you will take a leading position in the “information economy.”

• You have two challenges:
  • Develop your ability to focus more intensely and for longer periods.
  • Develop your ability to resist distractions

The ability to concentrate must be trained like a muscle. You can’t use it if you haven’t trained it. But if you train it in a structured way and push yourself to your limit, it will get stronger.

Every time you get distracted and indulge the distraction, you weaken your ability to focus and to resist distractions. If you check your phone every time you get bored, you reinforce your brain’s rewiring to be addicted to distraction.

Furthermore, the switching cost is high (taking more time to get back on task), and you retain some mental residue from whatever distracted you.

Studies show that the capacity for intense deep work is about 4 hours per day, even for experts. Novices can do only about an hour per day.

Focus on the wildly important goals, ruthlessly. Exclude all the other frivolities that don’t add meaningfully to your life.

• Resist the temptation to justify your distractions because they confer some mild benefit (eg “Facebook helps me keep in touch with my high school friends.”) It is very likely that the opportunity cost is high – you can put that time into something that more effectively accomplishes your goal (eg taking Facebook time to call a friend).
• Don’t see focus as a special period in the day. See distraction as a break away from focus.

Strategies

• Make deep work a ritual. Don’t make it about willpower.
  • The most common forms are to schedule regular blocks of deep work everyday (say, 8AM-11AM) or to take regular >1-day deep work sabbaticals every week.