Alright, so let's move on now to some questions about deep work. Our first question comes from Brendan. Brendan asks, "Are you familiar with Patrick Liccioni's working genius model? And if so, how might someone's working geniuses be best suited to deep work and time block planning and which types may have to work harder at it?" Well, Brendan, I don't know this particular framework from Patrick.

I have actually met Patrick before. We were both speaking at the same conference that was outside of Dallas. This would have been maybe four or five years ago, and we had lunch together. Fascinating guy, great writer, sells a ton of books, by the way. He really has his finger on the pulse of the business market.

I don't know working genius, but I know the general type of book you're talking about here. These are books in which you try to discern something about you as your personality or as a worker. So you talk about in your elaboration here that your "geniuses" in Liccioni's framework are discernment and tenacity.

And you're trying to ask, are there going to be some of these personality or worker types that are better suited for some of this advice than others? Generally what I like to say, because I encounter this a lot, is that deep work and time-block planning are universal. So in other words, regardless of what your personality or genius type is, the fact remains that if your brain is focusing on one thing at a time without context switching, it's going to produce better output than if it's context switching, than if you're kind of working and you're kind of distracted.

It doesn't matter if your genius is discernment or tenacity or whatever else they are. With time-block planning, the same thing holds. If you give every minute of your day a job, so you are intentional about, "Here is the time that's available. What do I want to do with it?" You are going to be better off, you're going to produce more, you're going to be less stressed, less will get forgotten, than if you're instead just reactive and say, "What do I want to do next?" So I don't believe there's a personality type for which deep work is not relevant.

I don't believe there's a personality type for which time-block planning is not going to help. Now that being said, how much deep work you do, how much work you have in your life that requires deep work, how you set up and structure that deep work, what blocks you're putting into your time-block plan, whether the time-block plan is very tight, meaning that you have lots of blocks precisely timed, or very loose where you have really large blocks and maybe buffer blocks to give yourself room if something takes longer than something else, all of that could be affected by you and your particular personality.

So let's make the underlying idea that deep work produces higher quality and quantity than shallow work. Let's take the underlying idea that intention about your time is going to be much better than being random, haphazard, or reactive, and say that's universal. But your style for applying those ideas, I think it's completely fine to think that that style might differ.

And your style might be someone who really needs five hours in a cave, don't bother me doing deep work, or your style might be, this is like pulling teeth, it's two hours, it has to be first thing in the morning before other things get going. That's fine. That's stylistic.

Your style with your time-block plan might be very tight. I want to be like an assembly line rolling through a lot of things incredibly effectively, or it might be like we talked about, very loose. And I think that's fine too. So we have universal ideas, individualistic, however, applications of those ideas to your working life.