I've been doing a lot of travel to Europe lately, and the return flight has become my greatest deep work experience ever. I enjoy it so much that I actually look forward to it now and wish I could do it more than ~4 times a year.
I fly either Zurich or Frankfurt to SFO on United and get an economy bulkhead seat (nobody in front to recline). Wifi is solid. In-seat power. It's a ~12 hour day flight (leave around 1pm CET, land 4pm PT). It's dark since many people sleep so they turn the lights off and close the shades. There's enough ambient noise to be calming without annoying. There are zero distractions otherwise. The are regular coffee refills on-demand.
Every time I've done this flight (I've done it 6 times now) I get into a solid and excellent flow state. I've accomplished more on various coding projects in that one flight than sometimes in a week or two of regular at-home time.
Obviously as I said it's not practical to fly around the world to get work done :) But I try to use that as a roadmap for setting up an environment at home to emulate it as much as possible.
I mentally prepare 30-60 minutes beforehand.
A cup of coffee is nice and warm while I read HN, check socials, etc. It perks me up, puts me on a track.
Work is distant here. It's going to happen, but it's not important now.
I finish my coffee at the pace I finish reading, clean up, and then setup my work space.
This is vital to me. The more work I put into ergonomics early on, the less I have to readjust later.
I have a set of rules to follow for efficiency.
1. I need minimal distractions. Headphones and instrumental music work great for me personally. Visually I can focus on a rectangular screen and that becomes a visual boundary for me. Among other people I set rigid boundaries.
2. I need minimal movement to accomplish a task. My peripherals are in arm's reach. If I need to break from work it takes maybe two motions maximum to set aside anything I'm using. Coming back to work, just reverse the motions.
I then focus on reassessing the problem(s) I left the previous day.
I find the smallest problem I can fix and gradually descend into larger structural issues I would like to solve or build. With my design these are usually emergent as I take the small problems, but the benefits are double-fold because I like to ease in and gain confidence as I work. It's like starting a marathon at a steady pace versus a sprint I guess.
Rinse and repeat. Take breaks. If you are having issues with some deep work, pull yourself up and give yourself a mental snack like (for gamedev) a simple shader that you can just play around with.
Nothing wrong with checking socials or your phone, but I physically go somewhere else. To me, it's an invitation into my workspace and because this space is sacred for me, I can determine what signals come and go.
My 2c.
Just as music attached to a time and place can make us remember how we felt back then, music attached to memories of deep work can make us feel more focused. I don't have any sources to back this up. It's just my personal experience.
Don't know if that counts as deep work, but it is a technique I've used repeatedly over the years and had good success with.
Cardio helps me get into flow state. At 15-20 mins my body goes on autopilot and my mind begins to go in and out of flow.
Meditation. I’m still new at this but it helps clear my head and allows me to silence my brain.
Practicing these two disciplines has made huge improvements to my cognitive function.
It seems like the real question in this thread is "How do I avoid being distracted" more than anything else.
The best analogy I can give you is a good state of mindfulness is like a really strong windows task manager. You can actually see the processes of your mind, like thoughts popping up and begin to take up system resources. If you are mindful you can see this with much more clarity than if you don't have a meditation practice. With the clarity gives the side-effect of "control"
- Disconnect from the internet
- Unplug your laptop from the charger, or go somewhere else
See how much work you can get done on a single laptop charge, without internet. No commute these days? Leave your charger in another room and start working. Once you get in the zone, you'll find it hard to leave to get your charger, similar to how you delay going to the bathroom when watching a movie, even though you could just hit pause.
You'll be surprised. By the time your laptop's battery is at 6% or 5% you'll be slaying dragons.
This is extremely useful when you want to implement a feature or fix a bug and you've been dragging your feet. The code doesn't need to be great, but you'll often have a prototype/proof of concept with the rightish abstraction, which you've been dragging your feet on.
Some of my most effective work was done on a bus: "Come what may, I have 40 minutes to solve this issue". When I did it twice a day, that's a lot of issues taken off the backlog.
It also works with learning something you've been delaying. "I have 40 minutes to go through this tutorial on Kubernetes/Docker". I won't learn all the subtleties, but it does work.
Call it Bus/car Driven Development, or Battery Driven Development. Basically introducing a hard, physical, constraint that is a bit more real than a pomodoro timer. You actually have to get off the bus/car, or the laptop actually dies. It's more exciting than an alarm going off.
My brain is only ever comfortable in Deep Work mode.
More abstract, I got rid of social media and started reading again in order to increase my attention span. "Feed" style sites decimated my ability to concentrate.
1. Getting into flow state on a conscious level implies that you are already there on a subconscious one.
2. Practically speaking to get into flow you need two components: Passion (you have to be driven by whatever it is you’re going to; “because I have to” won’t cut it. It won’t click.) and discipline (basically keeping temptations under control.)
For me that means absolute silence (which means I can't ever get any work done in an open office). In these covid times I've rented a small private office very close to the house where I can hole up and concentrate (I have a younger child so silence isn't happening at home).
I turn off all notifications from every possible source. No emails, no slack, no phone. (My phone is always 100% on mute for everything, except calls from my wife in case there's an emergency).
Maybe most importantly, I take 20-30 minutes in the evening to make a plan on what to work on the next day. In the morning I just work on what I pre-planned. I will not check email or slack or anything at all until I've done 3-4 hours of solid work. Only then I'll check email in case there's anything new to care about. As soon as I check these communications the day tends to go downhill on distractions from dozens of discussion threads so I won't get anything else done in the day. But I banked in those 3-4 hours in the morning on progress.
When times are slow, sure, I'll check email/slack in the morning and won't get anything done all day.
That means you're probably not going to experience any flow when you're just starting on something.
Anecdotally, I find it a very transferrable skill, which, once acquired from one subject or activity, would boost your capability to apply in another.
I suppose that's why meditation and yoga have been all over the place these days, as it goes along the same line of logic. On that note, perhaps just mediate and do yoga.
I don't know why i am saying this here. Any hint on how i can stay focused on problem/study at hand, like always.
All you need to do is remove distractions and temptations and make the thing you want to do but are easily pulled away from the most interesting thing to do within your immediate reach.
It's incredibly common to find smart people trying to engage their mind in the intense pursuit of too many things at once. Therefore it's important that one narrows their focus.
Once the above is done, you need create a schedule to do deep work. The schedule should be frequent and consistent.
Deep work is achieved when you're in the state of flow. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has a great book called Flow:The Psychology of Happiness which you can find at https://amzn.to/2F4QR80
You also need to ensure that you have the right environment to do deep work. What a right environment is a bit subjective. What's important is that your environment does not have anything competing for your attention.
I go somewhere without other people, silence notifications, and start working while listening to light music or a familiar audiobook/podcast/etc.
There's nothing magic about listening to things, but over the years I've avoided doing things other than creative or deep work while sitting alone in a room half-listening to something, and now when I do that my mind sort of takes the hint.
Back in college, I saw a lot of people do this sort of thing to study. You'd see the same people at the same library tables week after week, friends didn't let friends study in bed because beds were mostly for sleeping, and there were always a few people who staggered unsteadily into exams to try the whole "state-dependent memory" thing. It wasn't particularly evidence-based, but after a few years of wildly oscillating between thinking about different topics, you notice that your brain likes to associate modes of thought with sensory input. I doubt my experience is unique there.
Here are my tricks, in summary form:
(1) Start your key task for the day when you first wake up, and you have peak energy.
(2) Trick your brain into focusing by tackling something that is a bit of a puzzle, something that intrigues you.
(3) Go and live in another city or country where you are separated from your usual distractions.
(4) Allow the subconscious to work its magic by sleeping on a problem. The Eureka moment often comes during the morning shower.
(5) The inability to leave work undone is a personlity trait - the truly driven person cannot rest till it is done. (I, for better or for worse, am not that type.)
(6) Resilience is one of the most highly regarded qualities in an employee, so persist, if you wish to keep your job.
(7) Realise that your particular skills, combined with your work experiences, have given you unique insights: you need to voice those insights, you need to self-promote.
(8) Overcome procratination by tricking your brain: rather than thinking that you have to spend 3 hours on a task, turn that mountain into a small mound by saying, "I will spend 10 mins on the task". Once you are started, you can keep going.
[1] https://www.quora.com/How-do-I-study-hard-I-mean-100-flat-ou...
I find that going to a nice place to work with good company (whom you don't know very well) is quite effective from my prior experience.
A) (If this applies to you) work at a time when rest of the world is asleep
B) Have some medium quality thing going on at the same time
Ideal is NEtflix as they have a lot of mediocre shows. It should not be too good or it will distract you. It should not be too bad or it will distract you. Just good enough so that it is OK to watch but you don't care what happens in the actual movie or show
*
That's it. As quiet as possible + one medium quality distraction ongoing so the part of your brain that wants distraction gets it
Then just focus on your work
Also there is probably a limit to the deep work per big rest too. Doing a straight 8 hrs is the anthesis of deep work for me.
Definitely check out kitchensafe
1. As everybody said media is off atleast 3 days before I got into this state. Nothing chatty or noisy in the environment. 2. No too much thoughts in the head, like decision making(not even like should I write this down or keep it in the mind). 3. Slowing down thought process like thinking yes I have time(relaxed mode). 4. Papers, pen and pencils to write down pseudo code, flowchart or algorithm. It can be a mixture of that as well, just going with the flow not trying to be perfect here. Being perfect stresses out the flow. Mainly it doesn't have to be complete. 5. I start to code with the incomplete design or logic and change on the go till part I had designed. Write down the next steps descriptively as next day I might not be in the flow. 6. It's good when i do this alone at home and occasionally walk to all the rooms just thinking about the logics. As I found when people are around when they speak I tend to context switch to eavesdrop what they are talking. 7. During these times I check emails only in the evening, when I am almost done and close off. If it's important they will call.
8. It also really helps when they're are people to take care of you and home. Make Food & Tea. You can ask them not to distrub you for anything. Sometimes felt keeping doors open was lot better than closing stops people from knocking doors and you go to open it.
This sort of worked for me. Deepwork max time 10hrs per day.
I would say people are lucky who can do this much often. 10times in 15years is too less. But that state of work and clarity of thought process, it doesn't stress out as well. For me music during that time doesn't help, TV can be low volume(once in that mood, I won't know if tv is on or not), at home if people don't scream or talk loud that will be fine.
Sometimes motivations to finished that todo triggers the mood of deep work.
There is also some amount of luck also to it. How often do you find answers to what you were looking for in less than 5 search results and enough to test and proceed.
Everything has to play out. To many variables I think.
The way to do deep work is to not do shallow work ever.
Hire people to do shallow work for you.
If you can't sell the product of your 'deep work' yet, try, say, flipping burgers or Shopify.
Hope this helps.
1. Obvious, but not obvious: Quit social media. It's an subconcious addiction factor. Stop checking instagram, stop checking tiktok, stop checking your phone. If you can't (which is normal at first), remove yourself the internet capabilities to do so.
2. In my case I quit my ISP bill. Quite literally. Now I'm on tethering and 2G slow most of the time, which sucks but is great, too. It only allows browsing the web for text based research, and only when I do not download images or any other distractions.
3. Put your phone in DND mode and uninstall all social media apps. Keep communication apps but disable notifications for all apps. Add your loved one as a "starred" contact so she/he can contact you in case of emergency by call or short message.
4. Remove outside distraction factors from your environment. TV running constantly? Sell it, you don't need it anyways. Too bright working spot? Change your flat layout. Too noisy next to the flat's door? Move your office desk somewhere else and isolate it by using matrasses or hanging up cushy blankets to reduce noise.
5. Get a working routine. Make it possible to be able to work offline, no matter the cost. Issues on github? Use my offline scrumboard extension [1] to sync issues while online, and read them later offline.
6. Don't listen to vocal music, because it distracts you. In my case I use ambient original glitchy type of music (none of that dubstep shit), because it lets me keep my focus for hours. Funkstoerung, Glitch Mob, Telefon Tel Aviv, Brothomstates ... to name a few.
7. Do all your meta stuff when you take a break, don't do it in between, it's pointless and inefficient. By meta stuff I mean cleaning the flat, buying food, or the need to go outside to get something done.
8. Don't set yourself tasks during the day that have a synchronous dependency on outside factors. Don't have phone calls, don't talk socially, it's just a distraction factor that helps your subconcious to have an excuse for being lazy.
9. The phone notification rule applies for your working laptop/computer, too. If your OS pops up notifications all the time (read as in: M$), don't use it. In my case I love gnome shell not for the UI, but for the UX. Zero notifications or popups that get in my way when I accidentially left my email client or telegram open.
10. Don't mix gaming and coding. If you do, you'll end up in a lazy state when you decided to work. It's an addiction and therefore can reward your brain with the wrong perceptive measurements. You should reward yourself only after a deep focus state, not before it.
This is probably a more controversial opinion than it should be.
1. I personally give a shit about the subject matter at hand.
2. I feel confident that i have a potentially small but secure foothold on the problem domain.
3. Strong external validation that I am free to dive into this, take as long as it takes, without anyone breathing down my neck about it or tapping their foot waiting for me to hurry up. Shame's a bad driver.
2. Exercise
3. Eat healthy
All 3 above feed into each other, and will make the biggest difference in your deep work
- getting somewhere with no wifi (train, plane, in the nature, coffee, hotel lobby, or even disabling the wifi on your laptop)
- pomodoro
- chains
- seeking no interruptions