Deep Work and the Mystery of Losing Time
Imagine one of those classic Hollywood movie montage moments where our main character is deeply engaged with the task of the movie; they’re tying strings around thumbtacks on a corkboard covered in sticky notes and images, or they’re flipping through hundreds of textbooks while feverishly taking notes. We all know those scenes, and I’ll assume that most of us have always wanted one of those moments for ourselves. If you’re one of those people who have yearned for a Limitless moment, there might be something here for you.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve noticed that the single greatest impediment to my goal of being a productive and resilient powerhouse is my ability to hold attention to tasks without being wiped away. Whether it’s by the bright, vibrating box that is always within arms reach of wherever I happen to be or whatever other form of distraction part of my brain might be craving, my attention seems to be the Golden Snitch that my surroundings are constantly chasing (and successfully capturing, I might add).
The value of attention is at an all-time high these days; high demand and low supply. Much of the modern world has focused its effort on capturing and maintaining our attention, making the mundane tasks that we must do to reach our goals appear even more mundane, and outright aversive. Well, I’d like to put forward a potential solution, in hopes that you, just like the obsessed detective, can figure out that the culprit was under your nose the whole time.
I want to explore the idea of deep work, what it is, and how you can immediately begin to extract the benefits that are made possible from this practice.
What is Deep Work?
Deep work is an intentional decision to disengage from your environment and deeply engage with a given task, be that writing, drawing, working or any form of task that benefits from allowing your entire being to focus on. Deep work allows us to dig deep into whatever we truly want to do instead of skirting along the surface, doing 5 things at once, never really finishing anything, and certainly not achieving that sense of accomplishment.
Simply put, deep work is the practice of sitting down with 1 task while intentionally putting everything else on pause. This means your phone is put away and on silent, and your family, roommates, and anyone else who may meander by has been notified that you would like not to be disturbed for the next 60-90 minutes.
By allowing yourself to engage with 1 single task, you give your brain a chance to shift to the required gear and allow it to stay there. This allows for all the associated cognitive processes that need to happen, such as increasing blood flow to areas of the brain that are required for maintaining attention and our specific task, suppressing urges to check emails or text messages, and setting up the optimal cognitive environment for those eureka moments we all crave. When our attention is spread thin between many tasks, the likelihood of our brain making novel associations between ideas and allowing them to bubble to the surface of our minds where we are actually capable of being aware is impossibly small.
How to start
Installing a deep work practice into your life requires very little buy in; it actually requires more selling than it does buying.
A deep work session might look like this:
Phone is removed from environment
All of our biological needs are met; we’re fed, watered, walked, and stretched
We’ve preplanned a chunk of time in which to disengage from environment and responsibilities
(I like to) Set a timer
Do the task! And when your mind begins to wander, notice the wandering, remind yourself that you’ve set this time for this specific task, and reengage.
Thats it!
