Practice #4: Make the Most of Your Focused Time
Once you have the schedule and the environment, you must actually do deep work. Newport offers several suggestions to make the most of your focused time.
The 4 Disciplines of Execution
Newport outlines four principles of deep work that come from the book The 4 Disciplines of Execution. During deep work sessions, use these principles to optimize your time and focus on the right things.
- Focus on what’s important. When choosing what to work on, figure out what things have the largest impact. Then, instead of trying to say no to trivial distractions, simply say yes to the most important task or goal. This process helps crowd out shallow tasks that don’t support your goals.
(Note: In Built to Last, Jim Collins outlines steps to creating “big, hairy, audacious goals,” or BHAGs— he urges you to create goals that are clear, push you outside your comfort zone, and are aligned closely with your core values.) - Use the right metrics. The most useful metrics in deep work are leading metrics, or metrics you can use in real-time to tweak what your result will be. For example, Newport suggests leading metrics like the number of pages you’ve written or the number of new ideas you’ve generated. These give real-time feedback that helps you see how effective you are at deep work. In contrast, a lagging metric would be how many papers you’ve published at the end of 2021-at that point, you can’t go back and change your behavior in order to publish more papers in the year.
(Note: The authors of The 4 Disciplines of Execution warn that leading metrics are more difficult to measure than lagging metrics (for example, it’s easier to measure how much you weigh-a lagging metric-than it is to measure how many calories you’re eating-a leading metric). You’ll have to make a habit of collecting data on your leading metrics.) - Keep your metrics visible. Making your leading metrics visible will motivate you to keep up the habit and allow for more frequent celebration of successes. Newport suggests keeping a physical display in the workspace that shows your leading metric, like a small whiteboard where you mark off hours spent in deep work.
(Note: Studies show that continuously celebrating small achievements and feeling a sense of progress is a fairly easy way to boost your overall happiness-this is important because the strongest indicator of productivity is the way you feel. Research reveals that when you feel positively toward your work, your productive performance naturally increases.) - Create accountability where possible. Periodically analyzing your deep work will keep you honest about how well you lived up to your goals. Newport explains that this exercise will show you where you can improve. He suggests setting up a weekly review to see what you’ve achieved in the past week and make a plan for the coming week. If you’ve had a negative week, make changes to your schedule to cut out factors that led to it.
(Note: If you struggle with making behavioral changes based on a review of your own behaviors, you might try adding a more social aspect to your accountability practices. In Indistractable, Nir Eyal recommends social precommitments, which make it harder for you to perform undesirable behaviors. For example, you might make a precommitment to have someone else review each week’s deep work report. You’re more likely to stay away from shallow work and focus on hitting your goals because of the added pressure of being “watched” by someone else.)
Learn to Say No to Shallow Work
Newport warns that like most knowledge workers, you’ll face invitations to partake in various forms of shallow work, such as meetings, committees, and travel. He suggests saying no to this shallow work by providing a vague enough response that the requester cannot find a loophole that they could use to get you to say yes. For example, you might say, “Sounds interesting, but I can’t make it because of schedule conflicts,” or, “Thank you for inviting me, but I won’t be able to make it.”
(Note: Critics point out that in many industries, it’s important for each team member to contribute to the group-it’s unfair to expect others to take on shallow tasks while you refuse to do them. Newport’s role as a professor isn’t an exception to this expectation: Joining committees, networking, and doing other shallow tasks are becoming increasingly vital parts of finding employment in academia.)
Ritualize Your Workday Shutdown
To fully get your mind off work and relax, Newport suggests creating a shutdown ritual. He says this ritual should help you check your work for anything you forgot and plan your next day’s work. For example, you could check your emails for any last urgent items, update your to-do list, check your calendar for upcoming deadlines, and say, “All done,” or a similar phrase to explicitly mark the end of the workday.
(Note: You may want to add reflective time into your workday shutdown-research shows that employees who spend 15 minutes at the end of their workday reflecting on what they learned during the day perform about 23% better in their work than those who don’t take time for reflection.)
Newport stresses that an important benefit of the end-of-day ritual is that it helps reassure you that things will be fine when you shut down. When you create a shutdown ritual, instead of feeling anxious about unfinished tasks, you’ll feel confident that all the important tasks are accounted for, and that you’ll make meaningful progress the next day. This gives you more time to fully relax in your time off from work.
(Note: This ritual also sets clear boundaries between work and not-work, which is especially important as more knowledge workers fall into the trap of overworking when working from home.)