If you're struggling with scheduling work time and getting things done I'd like to recommend https://www.focusmate.com/

You book 50 minute video sessions and are paired with a random other person who wants to get work done. You start by saying what you intend to work on, and you finish by saying what you accomplished. That's it, other discussion is strongly discouraged.

I work from home and have nearly unlimited leeway over my time. This is not such a great thing, with unlimited freedom I tend to wander or do nothing. This service has helped to provide a human expectation and environment conducive to work. It's free and the days I schedule sessions are distinctly more productive than the days I do not.

The real challenge is attention management. Switching gears from an execution orientation (knocking off tasks) to a careful thinking orientation is hard. The hardest aspect of deep work (for people used to a structured form of productivity) is immersion in the task/topic without a concrete plan of "how" to tackle it. (The necessary immersion is what makes "deep" a good metaphor) Every such session is a risky investment where you don't know what you'll come up with. Unless you believe it's a risk worth taking, trying too hard to de-risk endeavors will rob you of opportunities for deep work.

Deep work involves situated thinking -- thinking while doing, making use of feedback.

OTOH, the structured approach biases towards separating the two closely knit parts into "planning" and "action" -- so much so that in our organizations the two are done by different people/teams!

Drucker said that a decision has been made only when it's clear what the actions are. Correspondingly, deep work is required to the extent that the analysis can't be front loaded in that manner.

>For instance, if you’re working on an important project but feel constrained or unmotivated by your office setting, initiate a grand gesture by asking your manager to let you work from home for an entire week to get it done.

I'm not surprised this conclusion was reached so quickly. I find it a bit dysfunctional that working from home has become the go-to solution for distraction-filled workplaces.

How about we make work more like home instead? Companies will see the value of a beautiful, effective workplace in the form of increased productivity. Tech parks should offer restaurants, a gym with a sauna, a shower, pods for taking naps. Expecting the employee to keep a distraction-free home office seems strangely feudal, unless you really need the tax deduction.

One of the biggest factors is having large chunks of uninterrupted time. If your manager and team value deep work, having no meetings days can be a huge help.

And once you have an uninterrupted time block, it's important to ignore potential interruptions. I find this extremely difficult.

I read the article. Some of the advice might be valuable.

For me though, it's fairly straightforward:

- Decide what I need to work on, and try to visualize the end result as clearly as possible

- Put phone on DND

- Turn off email clients

- Close browser tabs not related to work

- Put on noise-canceling headphones with some music that has no lyrics (e.g. electronic, synthwave, etc.)

Then I work.

I can stay in "the zone" for many hours using this method, and tend to accomplish my best work. Furthermore, I can do it uninterrupted, except for the occasional 5-minute restroom break.

What is being branded "Deep Work", was just work before the electronics arrived. Really shows how the new mediums have eroded our attention span.

Does anyone else find the term "Deep Work" to be pretentious? Most people who say they were busy doing 'deep work' makes me feel like they are a bit self important.

Why not just say you need to focus?

Over the last few months, I've found I just can't focus on anything. Unless I find it interesting on challenging.

Generally, at work this is ok as I enjoy what I do. However, I study for a degree part time, which is in 'Computing and IT' - the same field as my work, BUT it's so out of date, and the content is so boring I just can't do it, until last minute when I have to.

I genuinely think if I had studied this course, before working in tech I may have changed my mind. It's mind numbingly boring. Even if they just taught the content in a better way, something like A Cloud Guru where you have videos, guides to follow along etc. but all I get is books. It's awful.

(While we're on the topic of it, I should be studying... getting back to it now, promise!)

Learn a musical instrument. Without deep work you will get nowhere. Music teaches really deep work in an obvious manner and the very satisfying reward from it. That is why children should always learn an instrument.

One thing I wish Cal Newport's book had done better was to explain ways to be better at managing Shallow Work. Deep Work competes for time with Shallow Work. Therefore, if you want to have time for Deep Work, you need to either

A) Do less shallow work.

B) Do shallow work more effectively. Or schedule it more effectively.

-------

How possible is option A? Well, what is Shallow Work and why does it matter. Some examples of Shallow Work off the top of my head:

1) Phone-Interviewing people to work for your employer.

2) Looking at Sentry and Dead Mans Snitch and seeing if any of the exceptions reported from your backend this week are actually real problems that should be investigated.

3) Editing the notes you took at a meeting so that you can send them out to attendees.

4) Writing a response to a well-structured question which a junior engineer emailed you about a task which you delegated to them.

5) Creating and sending out a doodle poll to pick a restaurant to eat at before contra dance.

6) Scheduling a time to talk to your father who lives 5 time zones away.

7) Filling in a PDF listing your bank accounts to report to the US Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network by April 15th.

Each of these is backed by a responsibility -- either you're being paid to maintain a system or relationship for your employer or you are doing something to keep your social life running. You can dial back that responsibility, but that does have consequences. If nobody organizes pizza night, then you don't see your friends in real life and you end up scrolling through facebook out of a vague sense of loneliness.

So there is a certain amount of Shallow Work that needs to get done if you have certain goals or want to avoid particular sadnesses.

--------

How possible is option B? How possible is it to do Shallow Work so that it interferes less with Deep Work?

For #1, you can push phone interviews to the beginning or end of the day...when the currently-employed will find it easier to get time to interview.

For #2, you can establish a team habit to triage your Sentry and Dead Mans Snitch dashboards to Inbox Zero, that way you only need to glance at them and you don't need to load anything into your working memory.

For #3... actually I'm not sure what is a good way to be more effective at this. Any tips?

For #4... also not sure.

For #5, you can establish a default restaurant and go there every time.

For #6, you can have a default time every week.

For #7, there's nothing to be done. It is annoying and Adobe Acrobat is the worst.

--------

What techniques do you use to be skilled at Shallow Work or to at least get it out of the way of Deep Work?

I struggle with this everyday

Maybe the real problem here is capitalism and productivity porn.

Would CEOs or Execs / Managers perform better with deep work?

Beautifully articulated! On a tangent, I always seem to have issues with my superiors because of the way I work. Most of the initial part of a project I do nothing but think about how to approach it, best ways to solve some of the problems and what pitfalls to avoid. During this period they don't get much of the status updates or progress and they get mad. Then in a short burst I finish off everything when they think that project may be delayed, and this gets them extra mad because according to them I have been secretly working hard but never told them. I really don't blame them but sadly I don't work like most people do and admittedly it is a bit of a problem for project managers..

There's no reason why "figure out what to do next" can't be a concrete task. I set up a daily schedule and I schedule reassessing and specifying more detail into my work.

I set aside a day of the week, Tuesday, for all my planning for that week. Basically the deep work for that day is figuring out the plan for the week. The rest of the week is accomplishing that work. Basically Scrum applies to deep work.

Thank you for this concise summary. At my job I'm often accused of not being a team player because I refuse to get sucked into other people's shallow-work emergencies. It feels good to know that I'm not alone!

> The real challenge is attention management

See, I think you have that backwards - the problem is management attention. When management is giving you their full attention and micromanaging, meaningful work becomes impossible.

That is about the opposite of what works for me. A total absence of other signals isn't good. What I need is an "attention sponge". When attention lifts for a moment from the actual work, the "attention sponge" will hold it for a while, but that sponge is specifically chosen to not hold on to it.

An example is a background where a TV series runs that I watched 9 times already, let's say Babylon 5. The work computer has an attention accident (maybe just slow or whatever). My attention lifts from work, and B5 catches it before it goes off who knows where. Since B5 is not interactive and since I've seen it 9 times already it easily releases the attention so that it can go back to work.

I wrote more here: https://medium.com/@MartinCracauer/on-attention-focus-and-au...

Unfortunately this is a no-go for so many people that do not have concept of "respecting the zone". People get angry at me for not being available at the drop of a pin these days, and when I cut off my email clients I miss important impromptu meetings, and so much more!

What we need is a messaging service that can only do preset phrases that comprise 99% of the distractions: Impromptu Meeting. Catering. Potential Hire. Change of plans. Emergency.

You would only have a few messages you can send a week, too, so you can't spam it with nonsense.

Cal Newport's work is essentially a reaction to the fact that all the literature on time/task management succeeds mostly at shallow work but isn't optimal for deep work.

So if shallow work is your weak spot where you'd like some improvements, then all the classics like David Allen's Getting Things Done or perhaps Covey's 7 Habits of highly effective people would be relevant.

I think the key with shallow work you can't avoid is to schedule your day thoroughly. Batch the shallow work together into a single 30 minute to 1 hour block, as much as possible.