Deep Work – Focus without distraction & Let your mind become a lens

One of my goals for 2018 is to read more self-help books and I wrote about the list of books here. Self-Improvement is one of the key energy that we must carry on for our personal development, which has direct benefits in our professional life as well. To start of this year study, I picked up the book – Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World by Prof. Cal Newport. It’s been a while since I’ve read this book, and I am really excited about the positive changes I see in my daily routine.

‘Deep Work’ is the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding work

This book is all about the distractions we face in the daily busy life, the impact of these distractions that reduces our ability to achieve meaningful work, and recommendation for several approaches we can follow to deal with this distraction.

In this book, Prof. Cal define Deep Work as follows

“Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.”

We need to spent time with intensity of focus for a high value productive output.

Let your mind become a lens

In today’s economy Deep work is extremely valuable and meaningful, however it’s becoming very rare.

The Core Ability for Thriving in the New Economy

The ability to quickly master hard things
The ability to produce at an elite level, in terms of booth quality and Speed

Deep work will make you better at what you do, let you achieve more in less time and provide a sense of true fulfillment that comes from the mastery of a skill.

Keep in mind, Deep work doesn’t just happen like that. You must plan it consciously and embedded it in your daily routine . Be it in the early morning, or few hrs. in day or for a complete day. It’s your time. Plan your time, place and what’s is the outcome. Make yourself hard to reach and just focus on your priority and outcome from the deep work session. You will find the output is faster than ever

Building New Habits – Develop Self-Disciplines

Here is my key takes from the book:

Every day, technology is transforming our lives. In today’s world, we are continuously attacked by provocations from every direction. Uninterrupted messages in messengers, Flow of emails, desert meetings, peers stopping at for talks and of course – social media and other notification preventing us whenever we need to sit down and get some work done. We are continuously blocked by things that are urgent at present, but not important. We must overcome this..

It is very easy to get absorbed into the distraction and waste valuable time.
Instead, Plan for a block of hrs. and put in all your focus without distractions. – Be it designing your solution, developing your personal project, preparing slides for customer workshop, writing a chapter for a book. it could be anything as per your profession.
Deep work is difficult to do and requires uninterrupted concentration. Review your schedule and see what time best works for you.
Keep away from social network destruction, notification most of the time.
There are huge rewards on the outcome.

A highly recommended book for everyone…

I personally plan my day the night before to start with a better morning and I blogged about it here – Plan Your Day Effectively – Work Faster, More Efficiently and Achieve More. Keeping myself focused with Pomodoro technique is been extremely beneficial to me. Deep work is all about focus more with a long time with deeper intensity and provide an elite level of output. I see the value of having this in my daily schedule and I would highly recommend to read this book and start building up your own habits of deep work.

Next in my reading list (currently reading) ….