All right. So we have a question here now from Nana, who says, how do I apply deep work to my life? I am a student. I have a full-time job and a business. Well, I think it's a good question because it, again, gets to an issue that I think we come across often, which is that the meaning of deep work can metamorphosize, for some people, into something bigger, into some sort of image of life that seems unattainable, some sort of image of I spend my winters at my cabin with the wood-burning stove going as I sit with my moleskin and a quill from an eagle that was killed on George Washington's property in the colonial period and has been passed down through generations.

And I stare into the flames before every 30 or 40 minutes writing one well-crafted sentence. And then I have a sip of bourbon, and this is what I do. Sometimes deep work gets translated into a crazy image of a life that is depth to the extreme. And then you say, well, I can't do that.

I'm a student. I have a job. I'm trying to run a business on the side. I can't be at a cabin looking into the fire with a quill from George Washington's property drinking bourbon, right? OK, but let's get more specific, and I think we can start to make some progress here.

All deep work really is is a particular type of way you can work on something. It's an approach to working on something where you don't context shift. You just focus on the thing you're working on and give it your full concentration. And you do it for a non-trivial amount of time without checking email, without looking at your phone, without looking at your web browser.

The idea is if you give something your full attention without context shifting, you get much better results. You get the results faster. And then therefore, this is the main argument of the book, Deep Work, is you should prioritize that and make sure that during your work, whatever your work is, during your work hours, whenever your work hours happen to be, don't just call all work work.

Say, well, during these working hours, there's the periods where I'm focusing on one thing, and there's other periods where I'm doing a bunch of things. And let me make sure that I have a reasonable amount of those focusing one at a time. Don't just keep interleaving back and forth.

That is way more achievable. That has nothing to do with dizziness, et cetera. It's like, okay, just one thing at a time instead of interleaving, you're gonna get better work done. Okay. So for your situation, Nana, what this would mean is, okay, be very careful with your time during the time that you're working on your student stuff, when you're working in your job, when you're working your business stuff, whatever you're doing, whatever this block of time is for, just be very aware of attention and maybe try to be more sequential when possible, do this and this, and then handle all my emails, as opposed to do these two things while doing all my emails, right?

Just like, hey, I wanna give the stuff that's gonna make the most difference, the studying for this test, the report I'm writing for my boss, the new product I'm making for my business. You should be in that intense concentration, boom, full concentration, intense, high quality product, move on to the next thing.

This will actually give you probably more breathing room in your schedule, because when you give the core things intense attention, they don't take as much time. It can actually give you more breathing room in your schedule than if you say, well, let me do this work while always having Slack open and always doing email and interleave it all together.

The things you actually get done take longer, you need more hours, you get more frazzled. So it actually could be a strategy for saving time. One thing at a time, laser focus, boom, done, what's next, especially when you have a lot of things competing like you have right now.

So that's all I want you to think about, Nana. Again, we're not trying to get you to this image of the cabin with the fire and the quill from George Washington. We're just trying to get it so that you're not going back and forth between 17 screens at the same time and doubling the amount of hours it takes for you to get your work done.

We gotta be in your situation 'cause you got a lot going on here. We gotta be super intentional about our time. One thing at a time, do that thing with intensity, move on to the next. That's gonna be helpful in almost any situation. And it's not only possible, it is actually gonna make most people's situations less hectic, less crowded, less overloading.

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