How Do I Apply Deep Work To My Life As a Student, Full-Time Employee, and as an Entrepreneur?

00:00:00.000 | [MUSIC PLAYING]

00:00:03.360 | All right.

00:00:06.560 | So we have a question here now from Nana, who says,

00:00:10.080 | how do I apply deep work to my life?

00:00:13.000 | I am a student.

00:00:13.700 | I have a full-time job and a business.

00:00:18.720 | Well, I think it's a good question because it, again,

00:00:21.880 | gets to an issue that I think we come across often, which

00:00:25.280 | is that the meaning of deep work can metamorphosize,

00:00:31.480 | for some people, into something bigger,

00:00:34.640 | into some sort of image of life that seems unattainable,

00:00:39.480 | some sort of image of I spend my winters at my cabin

00:00:46.160 | with the wood-burning stove going

00:00:48.800 | as I sit with my moleskin and a quill from an eagle that

00:00:54.480 | was killed on George Washington's property

00:00:56.840 | in the colonial period and has been passed down

00:00:59.400 | through generations.

00:01:00.280 | And I stare into the flames before every 30 or 40 minutes

00:01:05.320 | writing one well-crafted sentence.

00:01:06.880 | And then I have a sip of bourbon, and this is what I do.

00:01:11.040 | Sometimes deep work gets translated

00:01:14.240 | into a crazy image of a life that is depth to the extreme.

00:01:19.520 | And then you say, well, I can't do that.

00:01:21.560 | I'm a student.

00:01:22.200 | I have a job.

00:01:22.840 | I'm trying to run a business on the side.

00:01:24.000 | I can't be at a cabin looking into the fire

00:01:26.480 | with a quill from George Washington's property

00:01:28.360 | drinking bourbon, right?

00:01:29.360 | OK, but let's get more specific, and I

00:01:31.440 | think we can start to make some progress here.

00:01:33.600 | All deep work really is is a particular type of way

00:01:37.880 | you can work on something.

00:01:39.960 | It's an approach to working on something

00:01:41.600 | where you don't context shift.

00:01:42.880 | You just focus on the thing you're working on

00:01:44.720 | and give it your full concentration.

00:01:46.200 | And you do it for a non-trivial amount of time

00:01:47.840 | without checking email, without looking at your phone,

00:01:50.140 | without looking at your web browser.

00:01:52.720 | The idea is if you give something your full attention

00:01:54.160 | without context shifting, you get much better results.

00:01:57.320 | You get the results faster.

00:01:58.560 | And then therefore, this is the main argument

00:02:01.200 | of the book, Deep Work, is you should prioritize that

00:02:04.840 | and make sure that during your work, whatever your work is,

00:02:07.400 | during your work hours, whenever your work hours happen to be,

00:02:09.960 | don't just call all work work.

00:02:12.800 | Say, well, during these working hours,

00:02:14.720 | there's the periods where I'm focusing on one thing,

00:02:16.320 | and there's other periods where I'm doing a bunch of things.

00:02:17.960 | And let me make sure that I have a reasonable amount of those

00:02:21.000 | focusing one at a time.

00:02:22.000 | Don't just keep interleaving back and forth.

00:02:24.680 | That is way more achievable.

00:02:26.320 | That has nothing to do with dizziness, et cetera.

00:02:30.720 | It's like, okay, just one thing at a time

00:02:32.680 | instead of interleaving, you're gonna get better work done.

00:02:35.640 | Okay.

00:02:36.920 | So for your situation, Nana, what this would mean is,

00:02:40.400 | okay, be very careful with your time

00:02:42.920 | during the time that you're working on your student stuff,

00:02:45.780 | when you're working in your job,

00:02:47.080 | when you're working your business stuff,

00:02:48.160 | whatever you're doing, whatever this block of time is for,

00:02:51.280 | just be very aware of attention

00:02:54.360 | and maybe try to be more sequential when possible,

00:02:58.000 | do this and this, and then handle all my emails,

00:03:00.260 | as opposed to do these two things

00:03:01.640 | while doing all my emails, right?

00:03:02.720 | Just like, hey, I wanna give the stuff

00:03:04.580 | that's gonna make the most difference,

00:03:05.840 | the studying for this test,

00:03:07.320 | the report I'm writing for my boss,

00:03:09.240 | the new product I'm making for my business.

00:03:12.680 | You should be in that intense concentration, boom,

00:03:15.400 | full concentration, intense, high quality product,

00:03:17.800 | move on to the next thing.

00:03:20.160 | This will actually give you probably more breathing room

00:03:24.440 | in your schedule, because when you give the core things

00:03:27.120 | intense attention, they don't take as much time.

00:03:29.620 | It can actually give you more breathing room

00:03:32.780 | in your schedule than if you say, well,

00:03:33.880 | let me do this work while always having Slack open

00:03:36.120 | and always doing email and interleave it all together.

00:03:38.600 | The things you actually get done take longer,

00:03:41.400 | you need more hours, you get more frazzled.

00:03:43.160 | So it actually could be a strategy for saving time.

00:03:45.820 | One thing at a time, laser focus, boom, done,

00:03:49.760 | what's next, especially when you have a lot of things

00:03:51.960 | competing like you have right now.

00:03:53.440 | So that's all I want you to think about, Nana.

00:03:55.000 | Again, we're not trying to get you to this image

00:03:58.000 | of the cabin with the fire and the quill

00:04:00.960 | from George Washington.

00:04:01.960 | We're just trying to get it so that you're not

00:04:04.200 | going back and forth between 17 screens at the same time

00:04:08.140 | and doubling the amount of hours it takes for you

00:04:10.040 | to get your work done.

00:04:10.880 | We gotta be in your situation

00:04:12.240 | 'cause you got a lot going on here.

00:04:13.440 | We gotta be super intentional about our time.

00:04:16.360 | One thing at a time, do that thing with intensity,

00:04:18.200 | move on to the next.

00:04:19.940 | That's gonna be helpful in almost any situation.

00:04:22.560 | And it's not only possible,

00:04:24.500 | it is actually gonna make most people's situations

00:04:28.960 | less hectic, less crowded, less overloading.

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00:04:34.740 | (upbeat music)

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How Do I Apply Deep Work To My Life As a Student, Full-Time Employee, and as an Entrepreneur?

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