How to keep your focus strong
Deep Work is key
The only way to truly focus on a task is to only do that one task and to go deep. It’s not that simple, because we are constantly fighting off the barrage of distractions. We also think that juggling multiple tasks gets more done — this seems self-evident, but that’s wrong, and there’s a cost. Every time we multi-task, we have attention residue left over from our last task, and it takes a long time to subside.
Attention residue occurs because part of our mind is holding on to the last task we were doing and also trying to focus on the current task we are doing. Now, think about switching between multiple different tasks — that residue only builds up in a cumulative fashion; leaving us feeling foggy and faded. This is no way to produce out our best work.
Cal Newport, PhD in computer science, coined the term Deep Work to explain the correct way for people to buckle down and actually make progress toward an intense task. Deep work is all about doing one cognitively demanding task for a long period of time whilst maintaining our focus exclusively on that task.
Deep work has 4 main tenets:
1. Block out a chunk of time in your calendar to ‘go deep’ on a task
2. Embrace boredom and develop your concentration skills
3. Be ruthless with minimising social media and app usage
4. Aggressively minimise optional shallow work; ie, admin tasks, emails, phone calls, meetings
“Concentration is like a superpower” — Cal Newport
Why we procrastinate
Making progress is really hard. It’s not something that we can just achieve one morning when we feel motivated and enthused. It takes consistent and diligent work, and this work takes up a lot of energy from our brain. It’s no surprise that we’ve evolved to avoid cognitively demanding tasks and save our mental energy for life-threatening fight or flight moments. Humans are not just smart, we’re agile, too. So, our poor brain is juggling intellectual progress and long-term safety. Ultimately, our brain chooses long-term safety (thankfully), and we see the symptoms of this when we come up against procrastination.
Procrastination is just our brain's way of telling us to not waste our precious mental energy on something because it’s not going to determine whether we live or die. However, we exacerbate procrastination when we continually seek it out when we’re faced with hard tasks. We end up building a feedback loop in our brain that gets hooked on procrastination and turns it into a habit. So every time we’re in the middle of a demanding task and we get the urge to look at our phone or open up our social media, watch a funny video or switch to an easier task — we’ve got to make sure that we don’t follow through because our brain is a habit-forming machine. And, we don’t want to build habits that promote expedient and unproductive results.
Minimising distractions
This is why we need to remove any and all distractions when we’re planning to do Deep Work. It’s harder to procrastinate when the distraction or stimuli isn’t there in the first place.
Doing deep work is doing hard work, so don’t just block out 10 minutes to focus on a task. You need to be skilful in arranging your day so that you can pull together chunks of time (around 2 hours) where you can wrestle with tough concepts and thoroughly learn the important skills to get your task done well.
The benefit of deep work is that you actually make progress towards your learning goals. You get to be immersed in a task which allows you to engage with it beyond mere novelty. You’ll also engage your problem-solving abilities and creativity within that task. In the end, you’ll be more of an expert after doing deep work.
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