The First Week of Deep

So I just finished my first week as a “self-employed” person and I’ve already learned a ton. I put that self-employed in quotes, since currently I am not super concerned about income generation but instead restructuring my routines in a way to actually finish projects and work towards my goals. Rather than just winging it every day, I did find that making a rough schedule and (mostly) sticking to it really helped me decide what I could be working on as the hours pass by. I also felt a drastic change in my ability to focus with the absence of being constantly “plugged in” like I was at my old job. No longer did I need to be constantly monitoring email, Teams, texts, and tickets. I realize what I’m trying to build in my life is going to take a lot time, effort, and patience, and all of those little distractions are just going to exponentially drag that process along for even longer.

Today let’s get a little bit academic about this with a quick book review. This might be a stereotypical read for self-help/productivity types, but I recently finished Cal Newport’s Deep Work and thought I’d try and extract what would be most useful for me at this moment, maybe for someone out there reading this. A lot of it is through the lens of knowledge worker/business productivity but I definitely got some creative traction this week with some of the techniques inside. I took a few notes while reading (this note-taking action alone really helped make some things sink in), and thought that for this week’s post I would share the best bits for getting started. I think it can apply to a pretty wide range of creative activities, anything from writing a novel, making music, learning a new skill, or maybe even the awe-inspiring act of speedrunning Swamp Thing on the NES.

Firstly, a core formula of working deeply:

High Quality Work Produced = Time Spent x Intensity of Focus

So basically what I got out of this is that even if you just have an hour of your day that you can dedicate to something, the quality of the output will be higher if you can focus intensely. Do whatever you can to completely immerse yourself in the process, and let flow state take over. A big part of this is to eliminate as much distraction as possible. Hide the cell phone in another room, do not check any emails/messages/notifications, and get whatever coffee or working materials I might need for the next chunk of time.

Routine and ritual also prove to be important, but honestly I’m still working out the kinks there. Cal wrote, “The key to developing a deep work habit is to move beyond good intentions and add routines and rituals to your working life, designed to minimize the amount of your limited willpower necessary to transition into and maintain a state of unbroken concentration.” Things like, a specific room or workspace dedicated to focusing on this task, rules & processes for how to work, and making sure you have the support to work effectively (energy levels, exercise, your environment).

I hit a few bumps in the road in some of this, as an example I would say my primary PC is in my “studio space” where I usually stream from. This room is absolutely loaded with distractions. It’s not always easy to be working on something when thousands of rad video games are within seconds of being able to play them. Or even just the freakin’ INTERNET being a click away is often enough to set myself off course. Do you ever intend to look something up real quick, open a browser, and suddenly find yourself mindlessly meandering through feeds and completely forget what you meant to research? Anyways, I hope to improve this a bit next week and refine my environments with some general decluttering and rearranging some spaces into dedicated areas where I can dip into different tasks with as little friction as possible. Decluttering my “digital space” needs to happen as well, perhaps even setting up little roadblocks that make it more difficult to access potentially time-sucking shallow activities.

Another important aspect of working deeply comes down to execution, something I’ve often struggled with as I wrestle with over-planning and too much brainstorming without actually DOING THE THINGS.

• Focus on the wildly important (what is the #1 thing to get you closer to your goal)

• Act on lead measures (mesaure your progress/metrics)

• Keep a compelling scorecard (track your hours spent and indicate when milestones/accomplishments occur)

• Create a cadence of accountability (weekly review)

I certainly can’t claim to have mastered these disciplines yet after just a week, but so far I did make a little scorecard. It’s just an index card with the dates of this week, and I make a little tick for each hour worked on something. Currently that’s tracking my hours spent on CYBERSKULL game development, and also rebooting my YouTube channel. Just the simple act of making those marks pile up feels pretty good. And next week I hope to hit some milestones, the game jam ends this Sunday and CYBERSKULL will be unleashed in whatever messy state it ends up in, and maybe I can also bust out a finished edit and upload a new video. Maybe the video will be about CYBERSKULL!

Something else I noticed so far is that focusing deeply on something for an extended amount of time is harder to sustain than I expected. I’ve been so easily distracted and my attention pulled in multiple directions over the years, I think my brain is a bit out of shape. I’m glad I didn’t try to schedule myself 8 hours of deep work per day to start out, because I honestly struggled to hit 2 or 3. I guess I can’t expect to run a marathon without starting on a 5k. And I have read that 4 hours is a sweet spot for focused work time anyway, with diminishing returns beyond that. Something that did go fairly well in this regard was scheduling my focus time for the mornings, and then leaving the afternoons open to less intense actions (selling more games on eBay, housework, errands, reading). And evenings I generally leave totally free and open, as another important piece of advice from the book is that “the work that evening downtime replaces is usually not that important.” And even in these unstructured evenings, I still made some creative breakthroughs while playing around on random things, setting myself up nicely for actual task completions the next morning.

The rest of the book has a lot of guidance on ways to reduce distractions, increase your focus intensity, and structure your deep thinking. I’m still taking baby steps here and won’t get too much into those, but overall I can definitely suggest checking out Deep Work if you’re looking for a way to optimize something in your life, as I think the disciplines therein can really be molded and applied to all sorts of activities. And while I realize I’m only a week into my new job-free adventures, I’m optimistic about how much I have already learned about myself and my new approach to work, and really looking forward to starting to finish more stuff and share more of my creations in the weeks, months, and years to come.

I’m curious if anyone else out there has attempted absorbing these Deep Work disciplines or something similar. Is there anything that really clicked with you and helped your output? Or something about it that was an absolute struggle? I’d love to hear any tips or insights.

As always, thanks for reading and being here. If you are in need of some lovely brain rinsing, check this brand new release from Logic Moon, one of my fav ambient producers. Catch ya next time!