Some notes I've taken over the years on how to focus. I'll definitely update this as I go.
My credentials for this are none other than the fact that I am terrible at being productive.
Deep work is the kind of work that really pushes the limits of what you can do, it requires complete focus and allows us to do what we know we can but rarely manage to. Importantly, we cannot be in deep work all the time, there's a maximum of around 4 hours or less for most people, and yes, you are most people.
Even the action of mindfully choosing the environment you think works best for you helps to put you in the right mindset. Dedicate a total time for deep work, set the requirements of what you need beforehand. That is, do not change the scenery during deep work—same drink, same music, same place.
Schedule every minute, but acknowledge that this will not go as planned. The more you do it the better you will get at it. This is super important, no matter how busy, it is always better to have a plan. The point of time blocking isn’t to create a schedule you can stick to perfectly each day. Instead, this exercise forces you to be more intentional with your time and how you direct your attention.
Focus on the widely important. Try to keep most important goals at the forefront, dedicate the most time to these goals.
Breaks are not optional, they help unlearn the wrong solutions—sounds silly but it is absolutely true. Decide how you will spend your breaks. The best things to do are to move and talk. Social interaction is especially useful as it is more distracting than just going on a walk. Although breaks should be no longer than 15 minutes. Be disciplined with this.
You want this. When you're in the mud, that is, actually working, the motivation should primarily derive from the fact that you want this and you chose this. This is intrinsic motivation.
Give yourself the satisfaction, track how many hours you've worked. I like to keep a stopwatch up on my screen at all times, this way I can see how long I've been focused for. This provides a weird recursive loop where I feel good about having focused for X minutes/hours which motivates me to stay focused longer. This also works towards the end of the session where you can tell yourself "only Y minutes left!"
Remove the option of distraction. Being distracted is a choice, the sooner you realise this the better. If you don't want to be distracted then remove all distractions. If you keep using your phone then put it in another room or leave it at home. I guarantee the excuse you tell yourself as to why you need to keep your distraction around, keep notifications on etc is just that—an excuse. The best tool I have found for this is Opal. I use this to block every app on my phone and laptop which is not essential to the work I am currently doing.
Recognise thought patterns. If you catch yourself thinking about anything that is not the task at hand, notice it and bring your attention back. Identify thought loops—if you find yourself going in circles, make an active decision that will change this and move to the next step.
There's no such thing as "I don't have time". You choose how to spend all of your time. You can make excuses for the gym and for projects but really, if you changed your priorities you wouldn't have to.
Motivation is not real. To get from thought to action we only need discipline.
Choose to not be distracted by removing all distractions. Tools such as Opal can facilitate this, also you could place your phone in a different room or leave it at home.
Parkinson's Law — Tasks expand to fill the time they are allocated.
The best way to work around this is the following exercise:
Pareto Principle — 80/20 rule: the first 20% of input is probably where all the value came from.
Identify what 20% of work is deriving 80% of useful output and vice versa—what's taking up 80% of your time and not contributing much to your outcomes?
Newton's First Law — Objects in motion stay in motion, objects at rest stay at rest.
If a task takes less than 2 minutes to do, just do it—don't put it on the to-do list.
If you don't want to do a task, do 5 minutes of it.
Lower the activation energy: if you don't want to work, make a cup of coffee and set up the workspace, clean desk, so all you have to do is sit down.
You need to change the view you have of yourself to what matches your goals. If I view myself as a productive person then doing anything unproductive would just feel wrong.
Use small bits of downtime—like a break at work or taking a shit or commuting—to get things done. Make it easy to do these things by having them accessible.
Is what it says on the tin.
Making things fun is the best hack. Make the task social or gamify.
The craftsman approach to tool selection:
Identify the core factors that determine success and happiness in your professional and personal life. Adopt a tool only if its positive impacts on these factors substantially outweigh its negative impacts. Reddit and Instagram are not such tools.
Work with my brain not against it.
Need to train my brain to keep good habits, it won't happen just because I want it to. I'm so used to bad habits that it needs practice to break them.