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The modern world is filled with distractions and entertainment that steer us a way from the path of success and fulfillment. It is often hard to sit down and do the necessary work when TikTok, porn, videogames, and other activities of instant gratification surround you and beg to indulge in them. Practice of deep work can help you defy the odds and succeed in the world where focus is rare.

In this article, I want to tell you about the habit of deep work, what it does for you, and rules you can use to integrate it into your daily routine.

What is Deep Work

Before we start with practical advice, what exactly is deep work?

Cal Newport, a Georgetown University IT professor and author that published several books about productivity and digital minimalism, created the concept of deep work. He describes this concept in detail in a book of the same name, explains why it’s helpful, and how readers can implement it to boost their results.

Deep work is focused, uninterrupted, cognitively demanding work done to solve difficult problems and bring significant value.

Great examples are writing a non-fiction book or article (yes, I’m engaging in deep work as I’m writing this), brainstorming ideas for new products or content, and producing a research paper for university.

On contrast, there is shallow work – easy to do tasks that require no big effort to be completed, and that bring little value upon completion. These are tasks like checking emails, attending unnecessary meetings, sorting documents, or answering to various phone calls.

Despite deep work obviously having more value, it is becoming increasingly rare these days. Shallow work and unproductive habits are taking over the world, and you’re about to learn how they pull you away from achieving your goals.

How Shallow Work Limits Your Potential

Mindless scrolling on TikTok, checking and responding to emails, attending unnecessary meetings – they all deal massive damage in form of wasting your time.

An average person spends 2,5 hours on social media, 3 hours on work email, and many more hours on attending meetings every day. Whenever you engage in these activities on an excess level, you lose time that you could’ve spent on productive work that can truly matters.

Do not misunderstand it: I’m not saying that checking email or other types of routine tasks are bad and must be completely erradicated. That’s not the main point. In fact, communication is important when it comes to running a business or working on a project.

However, overindulging in shallow work and scrolling on social media can lead to serious consequences. The more shallow and easy activities you do, the more you procrastinate, become lazy, and the less your ability to focus gets.

On average modern people now have the attention span of a goldfish – measely 8 seconds. Do you think an average person can succeed in business, writing, or doing any other kind of valuable work with such focus?

The obvious answer is no. To achieve more results in less time, you need to find ways to do more deep work and limit the time you spend on shallow work. If possible, you should also eliminate the habit of scrolling completely, so that it doesn’t constantly fry your brain with new information.

Some Advice to Help You Reduce Shallow Work

Shallow work is inevitable, and you will have to deal with it during the workday. However, there are still some strategies that you can use to drastically reduce it.

Check email once a day. As said above, tons of people waste tons of time on email without doing actual work that brings results. Instead of checking it every 10 minutes, limit your visits to just one or two per day. One in the morning after you finish the morning routine, and the other in the evening, after you finish the most important tasks.

Make it more difficult to contact you. This is a bit tricky, and takes a lot of time to explain properly. The best books to help you with limiting time you spend on unnecessary conversations are “The 4 Hour Work Week” by Tim Ferris and “Indistractable”by Nir Eyal.

To summarize the advice, though, tell your coworkers or customers that you’ll only answer emails and phone calls at a certain time period, and will only answer them quickly if the situation is urgent. Other than that, if you have enough money, you can hire a personal assistant that will take responsibility of doing routine tasks, so that you can focus on engaging in productive deep work.

How to Build the Habit of Deep Work

Deep work is a difficult habit. It’s much harder to do than meditating, binge-watching TV shows, or even working out. It puts all of your cognitive abilities to extreme limits.

There are four rules you must implement to work effectively and without distractions. If you want to achieve more results than your peers in less time, whether it’s in business, studies, or job, you must implement the advice listed below:

1: Work Consistently

There are several types of deep work. One is working hard on the weekends for 5-6 hours straight. The other is to dedicate several months to deep work only.

The most effective and applicable one for most people, however, is the consistent deep work. It says that one needs to work for 1-2 hours every day without distractions on a certain project. This mode will allow you to make consistent progress, help you experience flow state regularly (which in turn will make you happier), and achieve goals more quickly. Aside from meditating, deep work is the best way to experience flow more and make your life incredible.

Set a certain time period when you’ll work hard every day without stopping. It can be either in the morning, or in the evening, depending on when you’re the most productive. You can work 7-8 AM, or from 8 to 10 PM based on convenience.

Set a clear goal for the work session (for example, write 1000 words for an article), prepare a cup of tea, put unnecessary technology away to the other room, and start working without distractions interrupting you.

It may be challenging to build this habit, especially when you have trouble procrastinating. However, you can use the 5-minute rule to help you begin and enter the flow state regularly.

Tell yourself that you’ll only do the uncomfortable task for 5 minutes, and then stop. This may seem illogical at first, but in reality, it’s an effective technique to help you do the uncomfortable but necessary tasks. 5 minutes is usually enough to enable the flow state and help you finish the task in 1-2 hours.

2: Kill Distractions

By definition deep work cannot be done if one is distracted by objects in the environment. Before you begin your first deep work session you should get rid of stuff that may sabotage your progress.

Optimize your physical workspace by removing your phone, eye-catching stuff (bright objects that are unnecessary), trash, and other things that may distract you.

Set up your digital workspace by cleaning the desktop (delete unnecessary files, put remaining objects into the folder titled “Everything”, set a motivational picture as your background), turning off the Internet (if it’s not needed), closing unrequired apps and browser tabs, and turning on the distractiong free mode.

This way you’ll be better prepared for doing hard work, especially when you don’t feel like it. While 95% of people waste their time on social media, partying, being a degenerate, and scrolling on social media, you’ll have your focus right. Speaking of social media…

3: Quit Social Media

Apps like TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, Telegram, Netflix, and others are poison for your productivity. Most of the time they bring zero value to you, and make you addicted to them.

One may argue that social media is a good way of marketing and promoting your brand, or that it’s good for networking. I disagree with that.

Social media rarely brings great leads, or boosts conversion rates. It may be useful to contact more useful people, but for business to succeed, its workers must focus on work that truly matters: writing quality articles and ebooks, analyzing feedback from customers, improving the product and its quality, and making sure your customers are so satisfied that they keep coming back for more. This, and not wasting 4 hours a day on promoting stuff on TikTok builds real success.

Other than that, just like tasks of shallow work, social media drastically decreases your attention span, and hence, your ability to focus and do the job well. How can you expect to finish at the top of your class, finish that project, build that blog or company, when you can barely focus?

That’s right: you can’t. Limit the time you spend on social media as much as possible. I recommend you delete these degenerate apps completely, but if you really want to keep some of them, set strict rules on when and for how much you’ll use them.

Real fun is when you work on bringing value to others through work that you love. Do you truly get enjoyment when you scroll mindlessly just to avoid boredom?

4: Embrace Boredom

Boredom is an amazing feeling. It helps us generate ideas, kill complacency, and motivate us to work harder to make it dissapear.

It is one of the uncomfortable states of mind that is good for us, and that we should embrace on a regular basis. Sadly, many people don’t get to experience it as much, or do it in an unproductive way. For deep work to bring significant results, you must have good ideas and drive to make them come true. Boredom creates both of them.

Whenever you feel the urge to scroll, watch porn, play videogames, or do other bad habits that destroy masculinity, do the opposite: sit in a quiet room and do nothing.

Resist the urges to indulge in brain-killing activities, and allow your mind to generate ideas for things to do. You can do the boredom practice for as long as you want: 10, 20, or 30 minutes. The key is to get used to boredom and use it to your advantage, whether it’s to build a business, or to become a straight A student.

When you finish being bored, write down ideas that popped up in your mind, save them for later, and sit down to do meaningful and purposeful work.

Summary

Deep work is a pretty hard habit that may take time to build on a consistent level. If you do manage to do it, though, and follow the necessary rules for deep work, then you’ll outperform all of your competitors. You’ll get the rewards you always desired: money, status, freedom, and fulfillment.

Work consistently, kill distractions in physical and digital worlds, quit social media, and embrace boredom. That’s all it takes to skyrocket progress and achieve more results in less time.

Remember: a man is the happiest not in times of relaxation, but in times of flow state and pursuing goals. Make sure you experience such happiness as often as possible.

If you have any questions about the article, or wish to share your opinion about it, feel free to do so in the comments below. See you next time.