Rating: ⁹⁄₁₀ Read: 2016.01.27

Living in the 21st century means that more and more technology ventures try to capture our attention, to increase their revenue through clicking ads or watching videos. The problem with that, our attentiont and brain rewire itself to crave constant updates, information or just messages. So to be able to handle these kind of problems, more structured and better methodologies we need. Fortunately we have Cal, as avid efficiency hacker (writing it with good intentions), so we can tackle the big-bad IT companies’ temptations better.

I’ve written a short post about Cal and his deep work hypothesis, here I list my notes about it.

• In today’s shallow workforces, the more you can concentrate, the better results you have in the long term.
• Create long, uninterrupted blocks (day/hour and month/year)
  • Eg.: Half year teaching, half year researching-> Thematic time periods
• Attention residue: after task switching, the previous task will stay under the subconscious mind, draining your energy
• Open offices and Slack are rising due to the lack of measuring of knowledge works, so the presence is the metric->metric deep hole
• Ignore the negative, savor the positive, the mindless mind is unhappy
• Doing work under flow leads to greater happinnes, and satisfaction than resting without goals
• Different types of deep work:
  • Every day (Donald Knuth)
  • From time to time, intensive longer periods (Jung)
  • Whenever you have free time (journalistic approach)
  • Routine based, 1-2 hours a day
• Questions for clarifying your work:
  • Where, how much time’ll you do deep work?
  • What will you do after you start?
  • What are the supporters of the process?
• The bigger the commitment, the bigger the efficacy
  • Rent a hotel room
  • Flying trips
  • Woodhouse in the garden
• Have a precise, clear goal which is achived through deep work
• Have immediate feedback (tally: how much time have you spent on deep work?)
• Have a visible, visual scorecard next to your working place
• Have a weekly and daily plan, with hourly breakdown
• Shutdown ritual for better recovering
  • Have stimulus positive leisure time, but without effortful concentration (camping, cooking)
  • Emerging tasks should be written on your to-do list
  • From the list, create the next day schedule
  • “I’ve finished for today”
• Between focus periods, do not check social media, just after work time. Have limitations in that case too.
• Thinking about an exact problem during walking or travelling can have really fascinating results.
• Have some kind of memory/concentration-improving techniques.
• Schedule fulfilling programs for afternoon instead of slacking and social media.
• Work 9-5 and lock out every physical and non-physical stimuli as possible.
• When writing emails, try to come up with a solution that answer his/her problem beforehand. “Let me suggest a time and place, etc”