How To Succeed In A Distracted World

Do you know social apps are a major challenge with some studies estimating?15~28% of the workday is spent on social media? There are 3.78 billion social media users worldwide in 2021,?and in the US alone, as many as 82 percent of the population use social media.?

Our family members and friends have access to us 24/7. On top of that, marketers are pushing information into our newsfeed and inboxes. Notifications and updates are constantly competing for our attention.

When is the last time you were fully engaged in one thing? When did you shut off the noise and immerse yourself in a project??

Chances are if you had this experience at all, you weren’t able to stay in the focused state for long. Deep work is essential, but it’s difficult to find. Deep work is the superpower of the 21st century.

Mostly everything meaningful that has ever been created by people has come from some variation of deep work from masterpieces in the art to scientific breakthroughs. Billion-dollar products and everything in between have come as a result of someone's intense concentration on that single piece of work. But what really is deep work? professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that pushes your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skills, and are hard to replicate

Bill Gates used deep work in 1974 to program the first version of basic in just eight weeks. Gates worked with such intensity for such lengths during the two months that he would often collapse into sleep on his keyboard in the middle of writing a line of code. He would then sleep for an hour to wake up and pick up right where he left off. The basic software that Gates wrote in eight weeks, well in a state of deep work became the foundation of a billion-dollar company.?

JK Rowling used deep work to complete the final book of her Harry Potter series "the deathly hallows" in 2007. She needed to escape the distraction of screaming kids and barking dogs. So, she checked into a suite in a five-star hotel, downtown Edinburgh Scotland. She says I didn't intend to stay there, but the first day's writing went well. So I kept coming back, and I ended up finishing the last of the Harry Potter books here.

In today's world, the ability to do deep work is increasingly valuable and increasingly rare. It's valuable because when you produce something great in our hyper-connected world it can spread to billions of people. Producing something great is necessary to stand out amongst the noise and avoid being forgotten by the flood of information that we deal with on a day-to-day basis.?

Think of your last tweet; how long did it last? How quickly was it forgotten? Deep work is becoming increasingly rare because it requires undivided attention, and our world is filled with more and more tempting distractions.?

So the ability to do deep work is becoming increasingly difficult.

Co-workers expect you to respond to emails or messages promptly.?

Employers want you to function in an open office concept of constant distraction.

Your online friends and followers expect to maintain a social media presence.

It's not enough to try to ignore these distractions. We are hard-wired to be distracted and pay attention to things that are new to us and grab our attention.

A 2012 study led by psychologists Wilhelm Hofmann and Roy Baumeister involving 205 adults found that we only resist temptations to take a break from work to check email, surf the web, or watch TV just fifty percent of the time.?

But there is hope you can build a scale of deep work and escape the trap of constant distraction.?

Here are three deep work strategies that you can incorporate into your schedule to heighten the ability to focus and produce results that are hard to replicate.?

1. Schedule your distraction periods

At home and work, most of us allow ourselves to go online at any moment and check our phones whenever buzzes. But doing so is training your brain to avoid deep work. A day full of unscheduled distractions is training your brain to give in to any distractions. To build your tolerance to avoid distractions, you need to place boundaries on your distraction.

Have a notepad nearby and put down the next distraction break you'll have. Hold your focus until that time. At first, it's going to be painful but remember that doing this is effectively doing the repetition of a set of exercises that build your ability to concentrate.

2. Develop rhythmic deep work rituals

The easiest way to consistently start deep work sessions is to transform them into a simple regular habit. The goal, in other words, is to generate a rhythm for this work that removes the need for you to invest energy in deciding if and when you're going to go deep. We can use several examples to show that scheduling chunks of deep focus in an Adhoc manner doesn't yield much productivity at all. People who are not seasoned at doing deep work should have a reoccurring time each day or each week to go into deep work. Early morning is typically the best time to do this because at that time you typically don't have to deal with incoming requests.?

The research shows that people new to deep work can typically only do it for about one hour. And masters of deep work can typically only hold their attention up to four hours in intervals between 60 and 90 minutes throughout the day. So the ultimate goal of each day is to plant deep work rituals throughout the day with the ultimate goal of building up some of your deep work practices to four hours a day.

3. To have a daily shutdown

Sleep is the price we need to pay to do deep work. It's the interest we pay on the loans of intense focus required to do deep work. To ensure that we get adequate sleep and restore our attentional reserves for the following day, it's recommended that we incorporate an evening shutdown into our daily routine.

An evening shutdown ritual involves making a plan to complete any unfinished tasks, goals, or projects the following day. Getting a series of steps lined out for the following day is enough to get items off your mind so you can disconnect for the rest of the day. When you get things off your mind you restore the ability to sleep well and do deep work the following day. After completing a plan for the following day we will say to ourselves shut down completely. It's pretty cheesy but it's a great cue to unplug.?

In the end, deep work is incredibly valuable because it changes your brain and allows you to produce innovative work that is hard to replicate.