How to keep working if you are constantly distracted: top most important lessons
In today’s world, the real rewards are not for those who can use social media skillfully. It’s easy to learn. Those who are able to think deeply and create unique ideas become special.
In the age of social networking and constant communication, it is extremely difficult for us to concentrate on one thing and immerse ourselves in work. We are constantly responding to messages, keeping in touch with colleagues, and solving urgent issues, and there is less and less time left to perform direct professional tasks. In “Deep Work: Rules for focused success in a distracted world” Cal Newport brings us back to the focused creative work that is essential to excel in our profession and helps us to put aside the secondary tasks that distract us.
1. In the era of networked communication, people engaged in intellectual work are increasingly replacing focused creative work with secondary tasks, sending and receiving emails, with frequent breaks to “gulp down” some entertainment. More important work that requires intellectual immersion, such as formulating a new business strategy or writing an application for a large grant, is done in fragments, without concentration, and thus produces mediocre results.
2. An employee engaged in mental labor spends an average of more than 60 percent of his or her working time during the week communicating via electronic means and searching for information on the Internet. Of this, up to 30 percent of the working time is spent just looking at emails and writing responses.
3. The two main skills for prosperity in the new economy:
a) The ability to learn complex things quickly.
b) The ability to produce an elite product, with high quality and fast. If you want to become a superstar, the ability to learn quickly is a necessary but not sufficient condition. You have to materialize your potential into a very specific product that people need.
4. Practical measurements have shown that people are happier at work than during leisure, as was thought. Studies using the experience sampling method have shown that the more often such states of flow occur during the workweek, the higher the level of life satisfaction of the employee. It seems that people feel best when they are deeply immersed in a challenging task.
5. People struggle with desires throughout the day. The top five most frequent desires that the subjects fought included the desire to eat, sleep and have sex. The rest of the list was made up of the desire to take a break from hard work to check email or social media, surf the Internet, listen to music, or watch TV. The temptation of the Internet and television was particularly strong: subjects were able to resist it only in half of the cases.
6. If you’ve been surfing the Internet in the afternoon and then decide to switch to a complex intellectual task, leaving the alluring world of the web, it will take a significant amount of your limited willpower. Therefore, such attempts will often end in failure. However, if you adopt well-designed habits and rituals, such as a set time and a quiet workspace where you work every day, you will need less willpower to start and continue focused work.
7. Create rituals to utilize the periods of time you have for focused creative work. An effective ritual should always answer the following basic questions:
- Where will you work and for how long. It is better to find a room exclusively for focused creative work, such as a conference room or a quiet library.
- How you will work once you start. You can ban yourself from using the Internet or set a work standard, for example, the number of words to be written in twenty minutes.
- How you will maintain your ability to work. For example, you can make it a rule to start work with a good cup of coffee.
8. The grand gesture method is a radical change in your usual environment, combined with a significant amount of effort or financial investment to accomplish important creative tasks, which increases their significance in your eyes.
