A Guide To Focused Work

Photo by Luca Bravo on Unsplash

An Actionable Summary (because 20 minutes is a long time)

Here’s a process that helps me consistently do deep, focused work, which I otherwise am not good at. I’ve laid it out in brief to start, because your time is precious to me and 20 minutes is a long time. Read on for lots more detail!

1 — Plan Deep Work Sessions

Disambiguate and schedule. If I don’t know what my task is, figuring it out becomes my task, because deep work is at odds with ambiguity. Turning a vague project into a set of concrete tasks is always worth the time. After disambiguating, scheduling the work session makes sure that it actually happens — plan when it’s going to happen, and how much time is allocated to it.

2 — Remove Distractions

The three main sources of distraction are people, technology, and other work. People should be told/signalled to that I am not to be distracted, with big headphones, a Slack status, or a whiteboard on my door. Technology should be cut back on a micro level — turning off all notifications, putting my phone away, and turning on a website blocker — and on a macro level — batching social media/tech conversations, having publicized conversational office hours, and setting my browser to default-open non-distracting pages. Other work should be scheduled for a different time — planning is never a waste of time. If I’m ever not sure whether what I’m working on is most important, I am allowed to pause for 2 minutes to think about it; if something else is more important, I can switch tasks.

3 — Getting Started

If I’m in a bad state and am having trouble starting, I use a self check-in to triage issues. I take 10 breaths to clear my mind and try to articulate what exactly is causing resistance, label the issue(s) by writing them down, and address each issue or make a pact with myself to address it after the work session. If I still believe that I should not be working, I don’t work.

Lowering expectations can also greatly reduce friction — setting a short timer to only work for 5 minutes, removing passion as a prerequisite for deep work, and recognizing that every day will not be my best have all been super helpful.

Finally, I perform a ~ three minute ritual before each deep work session to activate a flow state. I breathe to gain presence, remember other times when I did great work, start my “Zoned In” playlist, gather everything I will need and remove anything I won’t, write down my goals for the session and how long it will take, and perform a little physical token action to get me in the zone.

4 — Working Well

A few of the practices that help me work effectively once I start are channeling any powerful emotions into the work, choosing audio to match the complexity of the task, using an anti-distraction notebook to save any ideas that come up, and cultivating presence.

Motivation

Focus does not guarantee great work, but great work does require focus. We all want to consistently do great work and grow, and do so as enjoyably and effectively as possible. This is true regardless of the nature or amount of work we want to engage in. Unfortunately, it turns out this whole focus thing is hard!

Among knowledge/creative workers, deep, focused work is perhaps the opposite of what naturally occurs. When left to our own devices, our work gets done in distracted stretches that lend themselves well to shallow, administrative work but make impactful, creative, generative work a rare, incidental, and often brief occurrence. Instead of existing either at a 1–2 (leisure) or a 9–10 (true focus), we spend most of our time at a simmering 6, making both rest and work lackluster. I’ve found this true throughout my life, but especially true over the last little while, as bedrooms, study rooms, and offices have all become one.

This shallowing of work not only has a profoundly negative impact on the quality and quantity of our work, but also worsens our lives in a number of ways:

1. It makes us feel perennially incompetent at our chosen pursuit without quite knowing why, damaging our self-esteem and leading to impostor syndrome.
2. It leads to long hours of work, reducing time spent on leisure, hobbies, relationships, and all manner of beautiful non-work things.
3. It makes work less enjoyable — this can kill passion and lead to a duller life.
4. It prevents us from growing — we rarely improve at our craft via shallow work.
5. It’s a gigantic waste of talent and potential — we are capable of doing great work that generatively contributes to the world, and the less of that work we do, the poorer the world is for it.

Overview + How To Use This Guide

This guide’s purpose is to define a clear, actionable process to consistently do deep work. I wrote it because I’ve struggled to do so myself over the past few years and wanted to change that, and after lots of experimentation have found a method that really works for me. Thus, this guide has been practically applied, at first by me and now hopefully by you!

When I refer to deep work, I mean creative or generative work performed in a focused state. Cal Newport popularized the term with a similar definition, more narrowly defined as professional activity done at or near the cognitive limit and generating unique value.

The mental model is that deep work requires a few simple steps, each of which I’ve synthesized from books and self-observation. Of course, work does not exist in a vacuum. Other topics worth understanding and acting upon, such as creativity, mental illness, learning, addiction, presence, task selection, capitalism (oh boy), behaviour change, and more, are major contributing factors to the quality of the work you do. With that in mind, deep work still does not happen on its own — that’s what this guide is for!

The basic four step process to consistently doing deep work is:

1. Plan Sessions
2. Remove Distractions
3. Get Started
4. Work Well

Take from this guide what you find useful — don’t let the amount of suggestions overwhelm you, or shake any trust you’ve built in processes that work for you. That said, if you read through the article and want to make some changes in your life, but aren’t sure where to start, I’d suggest implementing the steps in order. Planning sessions will give you the most bang for your buck, then removing distractions, then implementing the ‘getting started’ and ‘working well’ strategies.

1. Plan Sessions

While deep work must sometimes happen on an ad hoc basis, I am far happier and more productive when I feel in control of and intentional about my work. To do deep work, I need to know what I am going to do and when I am going to do it. This has two components — disambiguation and scheduling.

Disambiguation

Disambiguation just means clarification — removing ambiguity. The principle is simple: if I don’t know what my task is, figuring it out becomes my task, because deep work is at odds with ambiguity. If a task seems vague, the first step is to make it less so, until you can clearly and concretely envision what you need to do.

Disambiguation is key to beating distraction. When we think of distractions as obstacles to progress, the questions to ask are: if I weren’t distracted, what EXACTLY would I be doing? What direction do I want to be moving in, and what EXACTLY does that entail? If you can answer these questions, you’re in good shape; if you can’t, then you likely never had traction in the first place.

For example, instead of “design the website” — a highly ambiguous task — “write out a list of necessary pages and what the content of each page will be and who will use it, then do design sprints to make low fidelity prototypes of each page, and then use the company colours to fill it in” is much more actionable.

It can often feel that this outlining/planning takes a long time and delays the start of work. This is an illusion — outlining and planning the work IS the work. Many of the world’s best authors write by creating progressively more detailed outlines until they arrive at their final document. Disambiguation is incredibly valuable, and pays huge dividends in busting procrastination and increasing the amount of time spent on deep work.

Disambiguation should be done in advance whenever possible. Planning/defining is often rife with lateral thinking and nitty-gritty practical considerations, while deep work is about focus — these two mental states are often incompatible. More importantly, doing so greatly reduces the friction of starting to work! If I know exactly what to do, all that remains is to get myself in the right state and start doing it. It’s far easier to give instructions to tomorrow-me than to present-me.

Scheduling

It doesn’t really matter how you schedule, but that you schedule at all. Personally, I have separate to-do lists for each project/job (e.g. employment, reading, design learning, socialization), I put any recurring or scheduled events into my Google Calendar, and then I fill in my available time in Google Keep with the tasks I consider most important for the week from each to-do list every Sunday. This is what works best for me, you probably know best what works well for you — if not, there are plenty of methods out there you can adopt.

The important part is simply that you plan what you’re going to do, when you’re going to do it, and how long you’re going to spend on it. That last point is important — deep work is hard, and telling yourself that you’re “going to spend the day working on this task” is vague, unlikely, and unsustainable. Planning 2 two hour sessions after disambiguating is likely more helpful than waking up and thinking you’ll figure it out.

Scheduling takes diligence — I find it easy to convince myself that I can play a day by ear, wing it, and work on whatever I feel like if I feel like it. Invariably this results in an unproductive day without quality rest — a day spent at a simmering 4–5, rather than a leisurely 1–2 or a roaring 9–10.

In this way, far from stripping leisure from your life, scheduling improves your leisure! By knowing when you should be working and when you should be resting, you can truly work and truly rest. If I have “hang out with family 3–6pm” in my day plan, I can hang out with my family for that time and think about nothing else.

You decide the level of flexibility and the amount of rest/work you’d like to have in your life — regardless of your decision, any planning is far superior to no planning.

2. Removing Distractions

There are three main sources of distraction in my life, and I’d wager in the lives of most creative/knowledge workers: people, technology, and other work. Each of these requires its own strategies to defuse. While there are plenty more sources of internal distraction, such as the many flavours of depression and anxiety, I will not be delving into them here.

People

The most important way to prevent people from distracting you is to signal to them that, unless urgent, you are not to be distracted. For those you work/live with, something like headphones usually does the trick, but a sign on the door telling them you’re doing deep work also works. I fully recognize that living situations and relationship dynamics make this far easier said than done — that said, having conversations about these boundaries can go a long way, and people can rarely accommodate your needs if they don’t know them.

For those not as close to you, big headphones should send the signal clearly. Combined with turning off all notifications prior to starting deep work — email, Slack, Messenger, etc — should solve the problem.

Technology

Technology is not necessarily a distraction unto itself, but it GREATLY exacerbates even the smallest of slips.

Removing the distracting external triggers works on 2 levels: micro and macro. The micro level is making sure technology doesn’t interrupt each individual work session, and the macro level is reducing the negative distracting effects of technology on a more permanent basis.

Micro (prior to a deep work session):

• Turn off all notifying/distracting technologies — this means all other work (e.g. Word documents), all communication (e.g. Slack, Facebook), and all other non-critical sources of information (e.g. Reddit, tabs with articles you were reading).
• Put your phone out of sight but within earshot — I use my backpack.
• Use a website blocker for the duration of the session — I use Freedom.

Macro (generally implemented in your life):

• Batch social media/text conversations to specific times of day — I do “after meals”, find what frequency/structure works for you.
• Set your browser to default-open non-distracting pages, such as your daily to-do list.
• Extreme but effective if you can pull it off — have publicized conversational office hours (e.g. 3–4pm on weekdays) during which anyone can call/ask about anything, and promote them to the people who matter. This reduces logistical/helping text conversations that tax both time and attention.

There’s a lot more to reducing technology use, and I don’t mean to make it sound trivial — it’s taken me a lot of time and effort to progress with and I’m far from done. Indistractable and Digital Minimalism are two books that have greatly helped me on this front — I’ve linked my summaries of them, but they’re worth reading in full.

Other Work

Your best defense against other work distracting you is disambiguating in advance. If I find that shallow or unimportant tasks are preventing me from starting deep work, I redouble my commitment to planning, both on a weekly and daily level. I should be confident that the work I am doing is the most important work to be doing at the moment.

A principle to follow — it is always ok to pause. If I’m not sure that I’m doing the work I should be doing, I pause and consider what I should be doing in the moment. If my previous task is what I should be doing, then the pause doesn’t hurt — I can just get back to work.

3. Getting Started

Even after scheduling a session and removing distractions, I very often don’t feel like working. This is normal, and I’ve learned not to judge myself for it. However, overcoming these states or being creative/generative despite them is a wonderfully empowering, fulfilling, and often joyful experience. Here are some practices that have allowed me to do so consistently.

Self Check-In

The initial feeling of resistance may just feel like malaise, general ickiness or discomfort, or just “I don’t want to do anything”. My instinctive response is to tune it out with something like YouTube, because if I don’t know what’s causing my pain/discomfort, I just want to numb it.

The goal here is to tune in instead of tuning out. There are a couple of powerful tools that have worked in tandem to consistently triage, then remove or work past this state of resistance.

The first step is checking in with myself. Whenever the thought of working fills me with dread or makes me want to curl up on a couch, I close my eyes and take 10 breaths. I then focus on being kind to myself and curious about what’s going on in my head/body. What’s actually making me feel like this? Is it physical — low sleep, hunger, dehydration, restlessness? Is it emotional — pain/anxiety related to a different part of my life? Is it task-related — lack of confidence/excitement, lack of clarity on how to progress, fear of failure? Is it something else?

The next step is to label the issue(s) I’ve identified; I write them down, either on paper or a digital notepad. I might write down something like:

“I really don’t feel like starting to design this website because:

1. I’m dehydrated and haven’t eaten in 8 hours
2. I feel both physically restless and tired because I missed my run this morning
3. This website needs to be pretty and I’m not confident in my graphic design skills”

Finally, I look to immediately address each issue I’ve identified, or make a pact with myself to address it soon after I do some work. For the above, I might go drink some water and eat a small snack, promise myself to go for a short run right after the work session, and write out exactly why the graphic design issue isn’t that important, and even if it is then this is the best way to learn! Don’t leave an issue unaddressed — I’ve found having any kind of answer to be far more soothing than just letting it eat away at me.

Of course, there are going to be times when it’s simply a terrible idea to attempt deep work: states of deep depression, grief, extreme sleep deprivation, illness, etc. This self check-in process has greatly improved my ability to distinguish between those states and milder issues that can and should be overcome. If the problem is indeed more severe, I do whatever I can to improve my state, and let others know I’m pushing work back — there are very few cases in which whoever I am working for, be it myself, a teammate, a subordinate, or a superior, will not be understanding of the issue and help alleviate the burden or remove it entirely.

Lowering Expectations

Along with improving my state, removing false prerequisites for doing work has been extremely helpful to me, as my brain is exceptionally good at coming up with reasons why I shouldn’t do the work I planned yesterday. Here are the three mindset points that have helped me most.

1. Set A Short Timer — rather than telling myself “I will do 2 hours of work” when I’m in a sub-optimal state, I tell myself that I will do 5–10 minutes of work, and have full permission to stop after that. This makes starting much easier, but I’ve only actually stopped after that 5–10 minutes on a handful of occasions; once I start flowing, I keep going.
2. Passion Has Nothing To Do With It — while I am very passionate about the things I choose to work on, I’ve found that seeing a feeling of passion as a prerequisite to doing work leads to very little deep work getting done. Recognize that passion comes from work just as much as work comes from passion — the goal is to do the work, and if you had passion before it will come back in due time.
3. Every Day Is Not Your Best — it’s the bad work sessions, the bad workouts, the bad practices, that matter most, because they are the difference between getting to the good ones and beginning the cycle of procrastination/avoidance. Not every work session will be incredible, though the ritual described in the next section can make more of them so. Also, the feeling of flow usually crests ~30 minutes into a work session — don’t expect to enter it immediately.

Ritual

Regardless of whether I had to do a self check-in or remind myself of any mindset points prior to starting work, I always do a little 3 minute ritual prior to beginning deep work. The goal is to put myself in the right mental space to be focused, generative, and creative. While I don’t think there is a catch-all uber higher state of being, much has been written about the state of flow — this ritual gives me the best shot at attaining it.

1. Breathing — I take 20 breaths to gain presence, focusing on nothing but my breath.
2. Memories — I remind myself of a few times when I was in the flow state I am trying to attain. I try to recall times when the task/circumstances were as similar to the present as possible, but I have a few back-pocket flow memories that work no matter what.
3. Music — I start my “Zoned In” playlist, which consists of up tempo music without lyrics — mostly the soundtrack to The Social Network, Two Steps From Hell, and a few other movie scores. I may turn this off later if it doesn’t jive with the work, but it helps get into the right state either way.
4. Materials — I gather everything I will need to do my work, physically and digitally, and close/remove anything that would stop/distract me.
5. Goals — I write down explicit goals for the session, how I will know if they’ve been accomplished, and the length of time the session will last. This is a final bit of disambiguation, and is worth the effort.
6. Token: I inhale with pursed lips, and do LeBron James’s Silencer as I exhale.

This ritual may seem long written out, but it takes 3 minutes at most and is highly effective. I do the token at the end to create an association between a very concrete physical action and flow — over ~3 months, I’ve become able to enter a mini-flow state in 5 seconds just by performing the token, though I do the full ritual whenever possible.

4. Working Well

Once I’ve started, the only thing I have to do is keep working — effectively, and if possible enjoyably. I find working for a few hours once I start to be significantly easier than starting to work, which is perhaps why 3 of the 4 steps for deep work are about getting me to this point. However, there are still a few practices/tricks that have served me well.

Effectiveness/efficiency should speak for itself as a virtue, so long as it does not come at the cost of quality. Enjoyability is something of a double-edged sword in my experience. On one hand, making work sessions enjoyable makes them easier to do, presumably reducing the friction of doing them on a regular basis. On the other hand, the expectation that work be enjoyable has allowed me to justify not working when I don’t think I would enjoy it, which I don’t like and doesn’t make me happy in the short or long term.

The balance I’ve found is making sure that I actually do the work, using my planning and disambiguation processes to clarify it — I hope that the work I’ve chosen to do is important to me or enables me to do important work in the near future, making it intrinsically enjoyable.

Here are a couple of practices that have helped me do efficient and focused deep work:

Emotional Judo — if a certain emotion — be it anxiety, anger, wildness, sadness, or anything else — is powerfully alive in me as I head into a work session, I don’t look to suppress it in favour of clear-eyed focus. Instead, I look to leverage it to give me energy and channel it into my work. I’ve had great sad, angry, wild, and anxious work sessions — the skill of turning those emotions into output is extremely helpful, highly empowering, deeply fulfilling, and has led to some of my proudest and most authentic work across a variety of fields.

Yerkes-Dodson Law — this is a principle of cognition that states that we operate best with an optimal amount of stimulation, not too little or too much. This means that to enter a flow state for a simple but repetitive task, like a series of addition problems or data entry, we may perform best while listening to something like a podcast. In contrast, entering flow for doing math proofs or writing a philosophy paper may require lyric-less music or total silence. While I always start a work session with music, I calibrate the level of stimulation to the complexity of the task at hand.

Anti-Distraction Notebook — because creation begets creativity, I’ll often have interesting ideas while working, be it to google something or an idea for an article or something to do with a different project. I don’t want to lose the idea, but I also don’t want to act on it, because that will distract from the task at hand. Having a notebook nearby to quickly jot the idea down and get back to work is a great compromise — I have cool ideas to follow up on without disrupting flow!

Presence — this is a much deeper topic than covered in this document, and is a crucial skill to cultivate through meditation, journaling, and other practices. While developing presence is essential to doing my best work, I always have to remind myself that it’s so much more than a productivity hack.

Other Tools/Concepts

Here are some tools/thoughts that have been vouched for by smart people and have helped me, but don’t fit into my process on a regular basis.

Grand Gesture — when work really needs to get done and it’s really not getting done, and the process above is simply not working to get me started, I’ve found changing my circumstances or building a narrative around my work — a ‘grand gesture’ — to be monstrously helpful. This can be something like visiting a new library to get started on a new project, writing out a story about how my day went before it happens, turning my work into a game (30 pushups for every page written), or frankly whatever I come up with in the moment. The reason why I only do this when necessary, despite it being quite fun, is because I don’t want to become reliant on grand gestures to do work.

Disambiguating Hard Problems — some problems are genuinely thorny and vague and icky, and defy easy breaking down. These are the problems most worth working on! Oftentimes actually taking 30 minutes or longer to write out what all the component parts are or might be, and identifying a foothold/place to start, does work — in my experience, this constitutes deep work in and of itself, and is worth setting up a session to do.

That said, whatever I think will get me unstuck is what I will do. Sometimes it’s googling how others approach similar problems and copying them, sometimes it’s discussing it with a friend, sometimes it’s committing to a super shitty first draft and just starting on the first thing that comes to mind with no expectation of keeping any of it — whatever works.

If I don’t have a looming deadline, I will often let my subconscious work on the problem. This works best if I write the problem out to the best of my ability and articulate the questions that are preventing me from starting on it/doing deep work. From there, I bring my focus to it during quiet moments/when my conscious mind is occupied by something else, putting me in a meditative state. A few common culprits:

• during chores, such as cleaning or washing dishes
• right after waking up
• on walks
• just by sitting and thinking about the problem for 10 or more minutes, and letting my mind fill with whatever comes — this is uncomfortable, but almost comically effective

Bundle Shallow Work — while this document is about deep work, shallow/administrative work is at times unavoidable. I’ve found I can make it far more efficient, enjoyable, and less distracting by letting it build up in my to-do list until I have ~2 hours of it. I then allocate a deep work session to mow through it as quickly as possible.

Work Or Do Nothing — several prolific writers, among them Neil Gaiman and Jerry Seinfeld, embrace this strategy — for the duration of the work session, you’re allowed to sit and do nothing or write, but nothing else. I’ve occasionally found this helpful as a way to get past “I don’t want to work”, as I technically don’t have to. Doing nothing is good for a little bit but then starts to suck, so I end up starting to work.

Horror Vacui — artists and authors will tell you there’s nothing worse than a blank page, and in fact this document is by and large a playbook on how to get the first stuff on that page. If I am aware of the projects that I have on my plate, and ESPECIALLY if I know I’ve been avoiding a project, I will often use the tail end of a work session to start on it. These 5 minutes of work can make a world of difference in reducing the friction of starting the next deep work session.

Contributing Books/Resources

The ones with links have summaries I made while reading. These summaries are the salient points I got out of the book — they’re not comprehensive, and certainly no substitute for reading. Every item in the list below is worth consuming in full!

• Deep Work, by Cal Newport
• Digital Minimalism, by Cal Newport
• Indistractable, by Nir Eyal
• The War of Art, by Steven Pressfield
• Stillness Is The Key, by Ryan Holiday
• The Art of Learning, by Josh Waitzkin
• What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, by Haruki Murakami
• The Burnout Generation, by Anne Helen Peterson
• Josh Waitzkin interview on the Tim Ferris Show podcast

Huge thanks to Erica Yarmol-Matusiak and Tomkreynin for reading drafts of this!