How to do Deep Work (and actually stay focused)

Are you constantly bombarded by emails from your boss, slack chats from your colleagues, and messenger notifications from demanding friends?

Does your life get thrown off course the moment you wake up?

Are you dissatisfied with the amount of work you produce each day?

It doesn’t have to be like this.

With time block planning journals, you decide how you want to spend your time each day.

You are the boss. You get to work on what will truly bring value to your life.

And, you 10x your production overnight.

What is Deep Work?

Newport defines Deep Work as any activity that is performed in a “state of distraction-free concentration”. 

These tasks are crucial to push our cognitive capabilities to the max. 

If you want to expand your mental capabilities, learn at a faster rate, and be more productive, deep work is a must.

Newport says:

“these efforts create new value, improve your skills, and are hard to replicate”

If you want to produce anything at a high level and use your intellectual capacity to perform, it is impossible to do so without deep work.

Deep Work by Cal Newport

Newport continues by saying:

“Deep Work will be increasingly rare and therefore increasingly valuable to society.” 

We should not be surprised that Deep Work activities struggle to compete against the shiny thrum of tweets, likes, Tik Tok videos, YouTube shorts, tagged photos, Instagram posts, and all the other behaviors that cause distraction.

You must cherish and prioritize Deep Work to advance and gain success.

Yes, it’s hard, but the mental suffering caused by Shallow Work is magnitudes harder.

Deep Work vs Shallow Work?

In comparison, Shallow Work is anything that can be done while distracted.

These are “non-cognitively demanding” and do not provide any new, real value to the world. They are easily replicated by machines, AI, and minimum-wage workers.

Examples of shallow work tasks:

• Responding to emails

• Zoom meetings

• Punching numbers into an excel spreadsheet

• Scrolling through Twitter for ‘Research’

What is a Time Block Planner?

The Time-Block Planning journal is a tool that will help you to achieve deep work.

It allows you to remove distractions and focus on the work that is truly important to you.

Cal Newport’s Time Block Planning Journals

Cal Newport, the best-selling author of Deep Work and A World Without Email, created this productivity journal to teach people how to achieve more each day through deep work, and find satisfaction with their work days.

Newport states:

We spend much of our day on autopilot-not giving much thought to what we're doing with our time. This is a problem.

If you want to be more efficient and effective with your work, and not get swallowed by every distraction that is thrown your way, you need to try this type of journaling.

Cal Newport is not alone in his mission to map out every minute of his day for maximum productivity. Ben Franklin, one of the founding fathers of the USA, also had his own type of Time Block Planner. Each day he would block out his waking hours, and then review these each night before bed. Seemed to work quite well for him, didn’t it. . .

Ben Franklins version of Time Block Planning

How Time Block Planners help you become more successful 

1. Time Block Journals train your ability to master difficult tasks quickly. 

2. You gain the ability to produce at an efficient and elite level with Time Block Planners.

3. They improve your work capabilities in terms of speed and quality. 

4. Improve your ability to concentrate intensely by setting frequent blocks and building a habit.

5. Limit distractions and overcome your desire for them.

If you're trying to learn a difficult new skill in a state of low concentration, your capacity for learning the new skill will greatly diminish. You are attempting to run too many circuits in your brain at the same time, and the parts of your brain you want to strengthen become confused. 

For example, trying to learn a new coding language while a Youtube Video plays in the background or you have Instagram open on your phone.

To produce at your peak level you need to work for extended periods with full concentration on a single task free from distraction.

Put another way, the type of work that optimizes your performance is deep work.

If you can’t go deep for long periods of time, you will find it extremely difficult to get your performance to its peak levels of quality and quantity.

Unless your talent and skills absolutely dwarf those of your competition, the deep workers among them will outproduce and outperform you. So, how do you learn to work deeply?

“The key to developing a deep work habit is to move beyond good intentions and add routines and rituals to your working life.”

How to use the Time Block Planner

In Deep Work, Cal Newport states how one can achieve whatever one sets their mind to. Here’s what he suggests:

It's an idea that might seem extreme at first but will soon prove indispensable in your quest to take full advantage of the value of deep work: Schedule every minute of your day.

Utilizing the Time-Block Planner is simple.

The purpose of this plan is to schedule each minute of your working day.

On a blank page of a journal, write the date at the top of the page, and then on the left-hand side of the page, you write down the hours in which you plan to work. It should look something like this:

Setting up a Time Block Planner in a blank journal

Now for the important part, once you have written down your working hours, you assign a task to each time block.

For example, you could block out 8 a.m to 10 a.m for designing a landing page for your website. To do this, draw a box that covers the lines from 8 a.m to 10 a.m, then write "landing page design" inside the box.

You write down the task you need to do and then draw a box around it. Newport suggests making a task at least 30 minutes for maximum effect.

So, for example, instead of having a small box for every unique task you have to complete today — respond to client e-mails, share posts on social media, ask Sarah about report — you can batch these things together into a generic block that lasts at least 30 minutes.

You do not need the official Time Block Planner to use this tool. Any journal with lined pages will work just fine.

You do not need to have work tasks in every block of your day. You may set blocks for breakfast, a workout, meditation, or reading like Ben Franklin did.

When you're done scheduling your day, every minute should be part of a block. Now, every minute of your workday has a job. Once you have blocked out all hours of your working day, it should look something like this:

My attempt at Time Block Planning for Deep Work

If something throws you off schedule, just revise it as soon as possible.

All you have to do now is go through your day as usual but use the time block planning schedule to guide you. Rather than reacting to whatever tasks are thrown at you.

At the end of the day, your completed daily block planner might look something like this:

Example of a Deep Work Day in my Time Block Planner

Why you should try Time Block Planning Journals

If you are trying to create anything of value in this world - a novel, a business, an eCommerce store, a blog, or a new software program - you should measure your results in one way: How much have you produced? 

If you are a writer, are you publishing books? Not wasting time on Twitter or responding to emails. 

If you are an entrepreneur are you building new businesses or testing new products? 

If you are a coder or software developer, what new tools or programs have you built? 

This is where things get tricky and resistance kicks in. 

When you are writing a book, building a business, or publishing a paper, your only measure of success is what new value you add to the world. But, you likely cannot produce this in one day. 

So, there is dissatisfaction. 

There are no completed tasks. No rush of dopamine for seeing a task out to the end and successfully completing it.

But, if we go deep, if we add value to our lives and the world every day, and define how we want to spend our time, we feel a much deeper sense of satisfaction, and compound interest kicks in.

We will be in control of ourselves, of our lives, and of our time.

Give time block planning a go and see how many hours of deep work you can do each day! Let us know in the comments section below.

I will leave you with a quote from Cal Newport:

“A deep life is a good life, any way you look at it.”