How to Optimize Your Life for Deep Work
Deep Work is becoming rare because our personal and professional lives are increasingly driven by distractions.
Here‘s how to up your deep work game:
Eliminate Decision Fatigue The average person makes over 300 decisions a day. Most of those decisions are low-value, like what to eat or wear. Automate low-value decisions. This will look different for everybody. Given that your decision-making power gets depleted over the course of the day, what matters is that you use the earlier part of the day for the highest value decisions
Develop Rituals and Routines Rituals help you defeat resistance signal to your unconscious that it’s time to sit down and do your work. Make sure you develop a morning routine of the same processes, such as brewing coffee, meditating, showering and having breakfast, for example
Implement Safeguards To Protect against Sources of Distraction Sources of distraction are difficult to resist. So you have to put safeguards in place to avoid this. Block distractions from 8 pm until 12 pm and then block them again until 5 pm. When you initially do this, you’ll probably feel anxious. But if you do this for enough days in a row, you’ll find that you experience flow-style concentration that facilitates deep work
Do the Work Once you’ve optimized for deep work, then comes the most important part. You actually have to sit down and do the work. Whether’s writing, painting, programming or reading, everything above means nothing if you don’t actually sit down and do the work. Spend 80 percent of your time on the 20 percent of things that create the most value. If you spend more time preparing to do your work than on the work itself, resistance has kicked your ass.