if you're watching this video you might be procrastinating
and taking away from really deep work that you could be doing work that's going to fulfill you
work that's going to kind of push your life further than where it is right now
and make you a lot happier person not saying that's the case but hey it's youtube right it
might uh might be so if it is if you think it might be stay tuned because i'm going to talk
about how to get real deep work done that's satisfying that can push your projects and and
what you're doing in your life forward no matter what that is so stay tuned we'll talk about it
hey everybody welcome back to the channel great to have you here i finally made the
move to amsterdam successfully i got a great apartment with a canal view it's really beautiful
very happy to be here and so if there's a bit of an echo it's because i'm in my new place
and there's not a lot of furniture until my stuff comes from overseas so great to have you back here
and today i want to talk about deep work because so much of us so many of us are doing all kinds
of shallow work and it's not that effective and we're kind of going through the motions of life
but it's not that fulfilling so i want to talk about really getting things done in deep work that
you might not be doing today you might think you are you might feel really busy really really
busy but you know what you're probably not as effective as you think you might be so i want
to talk on how you can get more effective and some of the things that have helped me
in in this whole journey so if you like this kind of content please like and subscribe
uh down below hit the notification bell and all of that would be great helps me out an awful awful
lot okay recently i've been working on starting a business as many of you know and it's a tech
company and so i you know i have engineers and and all kinds of people that i need to bring on
and i'm thinking very deeply these days about how to make that the most awesome
place to work that any of us have ever worked and i'm serious because i think i think there's a lot
of throwbacks to the industrial revolution and the 1900s or 1800s that don't make sense today
for knowledge workers for engineers and so on got so much more research so much more technology
that we can use to be incredibly effective and really make an amazing amazing time out of work
so one of those things i've been looking into is the concept of deep work and the concept of of how
to get people to be as effective and fulfilled as they possibly can and i'm not talking about
like ringing you know 16 hours a day out of them and all of that that i think that's crap i really
i really don't think that that's the best way of doing it and the research backs me up on this
so how do we do these things i'm i'm exploring things like a four-day work week
which would give people more focus in a shorter amount of time and then give three days where
people can refresh and be with their friends and family and think big thoughts and there's a bit of
of research around that that supports it mckenzie did a study on this that looks like it increased
not just productivity but real effectiveness and output uh compared to a five-day work week
and in 2019 microsoft tried this back in uh in japan and they found that they the the entire
office in tokyo was more more effective than on a five-day week so they they continued it
but of course the whole you know the whole pandemic came on and you know so we don't
have the final results of that but there's good strong evidence that more focus during the week
really helps you be more effective and i would argue it also makes you be more fulfilled because
as you go deep and you're focused in things that that you really can master and really can can can
deeply work on you're more fulfilled and you have better results and and it works out better for
everybody so recently i've been reading a book called deep work from cal newport it's great
book definitely recommend reading it and wanted to share a few things that really struck out to me in
reading through this book and and you know things that have helped me in my life and they might help
you as well so why don't we get into a few of them first of all let's talk about the opposite
to deep work and that would be shallow work right so so this is work where you're not really putting
all of your mental capacity into it right so this is about about droning through your email box and
and just answering emails with a with a quick yes i i think so what should we do with thoughts right
have you ever gotten an email that somebody forwards to you and says thoughts it's like
what you person put no mental effort into that email all they're doing is shuffling nonsense
around and disturbing you right so this this idea of shallow work is is all of this drone of
work that goes on that keeps us so busy it makes us so so just activity based but not outcome based
and the only way to get real outcomes as knowledge workers and as tech workers is to go deep to focus
for a limited amount of time saying one to four hours a day of just deep uninterrupted work
and all of these distractions that that come around so email notifications uh
whatsapp facebook instagram tick tock all of these things that that buy for our attention
are simply sapping our ability to go deep and get that satisfaction that that really exists there
really when you're when you're deep inside something and you you you trying to figure
it out and you're struggling with it and then you get the solution man there's nothing more
satisfying than that well there might be things more satisfying but that's pretty satisfying so
how do we get to that sort of depth of work well well the first thing is to avoid the shallow work
right so i know many many many people who go through the day and they're expected to answer
emails within you know an hour or that's what they pride themselves on but i want to encourage you
to look at the emails that you're answering to i was talking to a friend last night and
you know he was telling me how how he's you know he spent the morning going through emails and
and i asked him what what value did those emails bring like what what did you actually get forward
oh nothing i just got to answer the email and so many of us especially in the corporate
world are like that right we just feel compelled to to watch for these emails
and and answer them when in reality most of the emails are garbage that you get i mean
take a a hard look at the emails that you get in any company today and a huge percentage
has nothing to do with actually making significant progress towards them i challenge you to do it
it's it's i've done it in the past and i realized like most of it's nonsense i set up very definite
alerts for people that i want to hear from and when that comes up i go to my email and i limit
it to only you know an hour a day at max even less if i can thanks to the four hour work week
which is also a great book and nothing bad happened i think nobody nobody got upset
anybody who really wanted an answer could call me or or you know get in touch with me some other way
and it was fine it was totally fine so i encourage you to get rid of get rid of the
email distractions anyway as much as you can makes you feel busy you're not doing much uh
often with email but there are other distractions right that i mentioned like you know kind of going
on facebook or then switching to youtube right great distraction i know i'm guilty of that
of of just you know it's so much easier to go for the distraction than to really focus
and go on deep work and especially today when there's so many great distractions
right there's so many cool things to to to pique our dopamine receptors all of those interruptions
if you are a knowledge worker who is trying to go deep in a problem or some piece of writing that
you are doing that you really have to think about every interruption no matter how small it is will
sap your efficiency and your effectiveness like like nothing it it will take you
10 or 20 or 30 minutes to really get back into a really hard problem
and i'm reminded of this when when i was you know first studying computer science and early in my
career where i would i would be digging into very complex algorithms and and recursion and things
like that and i'd be deep in and and if somebody came into my office or i got disturbed somehow
it would literally take me 20 or 30 minutes to get back into it so i had to be a bit
militant about removing distractions and this was before the age of of facebook or instagram before
the age of instant messaging and it's just those distractions that really take you out
and so now there's infinite distractions that that will that will vie for your attention and that's
the most valuable thing you have so protect it really really strongly so first thing to think
about is to remove those distractions so your phone is probably the biggest thing that's that's
killing you turn it off or put it on airplane mode right so so try it out to to focus for a bit
simply on the work that you're doing many of us think that we can multitask and it becomes this
this mantra in corporate world that oh i can multitask i can do emails and talk to my colleague
and attend a meeting and chat you know you can't you really can't with any particular depth you
can't go into the second order third order insights that you need to really have intelligence
conversations and and deep deep work so people do things they have a lot of activity
and i'm guilty of this as well but none of it is really deep it's all very shallow work
and the reason for that is that our brains are pretty much single thread processors right they
can do one thing of any sort of depth at once and you know to say that we can multitask it's
really a fallacy the best that we can do is do some things that are muscle memory
like like driving and chatting with somebody but even that we we know that that increases
the amount of accidents right it's all driving is really easy unless there's there's an emergency
you need to deal with and that's where people get into trouble so even that is a is a example of
how we cannot multitask right and that goes for hands-free phones as well they've seen
they've seen the evidence there so if you're trying to get something done that's deep turn off
your distractions okay turn off notifications turn off your email don't check it don't have it open
in your screen the whole time that's just that's it's just begging you
to go out and and look through that email for no real good reason okay so we're turning off
distractions but is that enough to get really deep work done maybe but probably not so so
one of the examples that the author goes through is how really great people throughout history
would make a bold commitment towards deep work and and what do i mean by this so they would do things
like like build a cabin out in the woods where they could just go away disconnect and spend weeks
or sometimes months in that cabin and simply do deep work and have uninterrupted times where they
can really go deep now not all of us can build a cabin but you know some people would actually
build a shed or something on their property where they could go in and it would be their sanctuary
right so so this big commitment towards towards depth and towards non-distraction
really helps to push us into a way that that we can get into a non-distracted state so
maybe you don't have property you can build a shed on i don't and that's fine right is there
a place in your house or apartment that you can make a sanctuary that you can say
this area is only for deep work this area when i enter this area i am all about no distractions
and thinking deeply thinking big thoughts and and diving deep into the edges of my intellectual
ability and so set aside a room set aside a space a time or so on where you can really really get
into that and uh some of the things that he also talked about were about about waking up and not
checking your mail right away right which is which is a great reminder right not checking the news
every day because it scatters your brain news is usually not very optimistic or pleasant
it's usually pretty negative so why open up with that or with your messages or so on
take some time for yourself wake up sometimes those are the most insightful times of the day
all right another thing another point that he makes in deep work is to take walks and this
i've been seeing from a number of different places that i am i'm reading about being more
effective and really making the most out of the time we have that that deep deep thinking
happens when your mind is relaxed when you're not feeling threatened or stressed or getting
distracted by a lot of things and you don't feel all these tuggings on your attention and your time
and a walk is a perfect example of that where you can you can go out hopefully in nature but can
also happen in a town or city where where you go and you just become one with your thoughts
and just let it flow and actually helps an awful lot to to just walk around and think think big
thoughts um and also turn off those distractions from your phone and so on so that you can really
just just let those thoughts flow because the brain is an amazing it's an amazing organ and it
really works the best when when we can let it flow and let it just open up to what it can think both
consciously and subconsciously in the back to the company that i'm i'm creating some of the things
that i'm thinking about to implement uh based on this kind of research and these kind of thoughts
is thinking about turning off email servers one or two days a week like no kidding like really just
shutting them off so nobody can send emails or a few hours a day or something like that
same with slack and some of the instant messaging that we use um thinking about doing that um i've
seen a number of companies google included that do no meeting thursdays or no meeting days they never
i've never seen them actually work effectively maybe there's some companies out there that do it
but the meetings always creep in and and it just eventually gets ignored so i'm thinking of taking
real steps to to keep people from being distracted at the same time i don't want to be draconian
about it so i want to make these decisions together with my team and my leadership team
and yeah thinking about a four-day work week or shutting off emails and meetings on friday
say and let people focus on those four days a week and get really deep work and trying to reduce the
distractions there the nonsense meetings the nonsense emails and make a culture out of focus
and a culture out of deep work so that people can spend you know six hours a day instead of 12
on really really coming up with good work so that's kind of the insight that i was getting
i encourage you to like turn off your phone get rid of distractions put up a sanctuary someplace
where you can really focus and get into deep work and try it it's a muscle it's just like
a muscle you have to exercise it you're not going to be able to do 10 hours of deep work
but start with an hour start with setting aside just an hour of time all the distractions away and
diving deep into some project or something that you want to get done single heartedly just that's
what you are working on and nothing else and see how effective it is they say that a maximum to do
this is about four hours a day so don't expect much more than that but you can get a lot done
in four hours a day of deep work so i hope this video helped you uh it's great to see you glad to
be back and i hope you have a wonderful day like and subscribe talk to you later