Why you don’t improve? Because you waste too much time in shallow work.
Shallow work characteristics:
1- Easy, anyone can do it.
2- Attractive, because it is easy.
3- Rich in personal interaction, which we enjoy.
Shallow work examples:
1- E-mail replies.
2- Logistical planning.
3- Tinkering with social media.
Shallow work leads to job dissatisfaction.
Deep work leads to real satisfaction and remarkable career.
Deep Work characteristics:
1- Cognitively demanding activities.
2- Leverage our training.
3- Generate rare and valuable results.
4- Push our abilities to continually improve.
Deep Work benefits:
1-Continuous improvement of the value of your work output.
2- An increase in the total quantity of valuable output you produce.
3- Deeper satisfaction (aka., “passion”) for your work.
How to integrate deep work into your specific job ?
1- Prepare:
Go around deep work and prepare the scene for the action by stopping every other shallow work first then bring all the requirements for deep work.
2- Goal:
Set a big goal for weeks – a valuable goal and why it is valuable, then a small goals for every session. At the end of this one or two hours deep work, I expect this result.
3- Improve:
You have to struggle but not blocked while doing deep work. Google, read a book, think deeply, do sketching, ask an expert, google again. Find a task that is not easy and not very difficult, so that you extract the most out of your current ability and then improve.
4- Stats:
Calculate how much time you spend per day in deep work sessions.
Resource: Knowledge Workers are Bad at Working (and Here’s What to Do About It…)
