How Do I Avoid Burnout Due to DEEP WORK?

00:00:04.640 | Alright, our first question comes from Shankar, who asks,

00:00:08.720 | "How do I avoid burnout due to deep work?"

00:00:13.040 | He elaborates, "It is clear to me that time blocking and deep work are useful

00:00:17.360 | for my career advancement, but I have found that constantly

00:00:20.400 | forcing myself to do hard things leads to burnout.

00:00:23.600 | Instead, following my gut and working from list,

00:00:27.200 | as David Allen suggests, seems to be healthier. How would you advise one

00:00:31.040 | should avoid burnout while working with time blocking and deep

00:00:33.920 | work?" Well, Shankar, if you're burning out, I would say do less

00:00:37.920 | work as opposed to making the work you do less effective.

00:00:42.480 | This is one of the key ideas in my still developing philosophy of slow

00:00:48.400 | productivity, which is focusing on less things but

00:00:51.600 | doing those things better is almost always the right formula, almost always

00:00:54.720 | the right formula for producing the best quality work, but also

00:00:57.840 | the right formula for keeping your working life as sustainable as

00:01:01.600 | possible. So it is really intense. When you're time blocking,

00:01:05.840 | it's intense. People are going to wonder, "Why did you not respond to my text

00:01:09.440 | messages? How do you not know about what's going on in the world?" Because

00:01:11.760 | you're locked in doing one thing after another. You know what you're supposed to

00:01:14.880 | be doing, and that's what you do whether you feel like it or not.

00:01:17.680 | When you're doing deep work, no distraction, no context shift, full

00:01:20.800 | concentration on the thing I'm doing, you're going to produce much better work,

00:01:23.600 | but it is draining. There's only so much of this you can do.

00:01:28.560 | So do less. Put breaks into your time block schedule.

00:01:32.800 | End your day earlier. Pull back on the number of projects that you're giving

00:01:36.640 | intense deep work to. I think that's going to

00:01:39.200 | be the right formula, right? As opposed to saying, "Let me just stop

00:01:42.480 | tracking so carefully what I'm doing." As opposed to saying, "Let me just sort of

00:01:45.840 | think what do I want to do next and move from inboxes back over to

00:01:49.520 | random to-do list." That's going to give you a pleasing sense

00:01:53.200 | of generic busyness. Urgent stuff will probably get taken

00:01:56.640 | care of. Big stuff will happen slower, not as well.

00:01:59.760 | I say do the work right and then figure out what the right amount of work

00:02:04.880 | is. That's going to be the better formula.