Life of Focus Flashcards
What is a deep-to-shallow work ratio?
The fraction of your work hours in a typical work week that you think should be dedicated to deep work instead of shallow work.
Deep Work
To focus on something cognitively demanding, for a sustained period of time, without switching your attention at all – that means, no email checks or phone glances.
It is the most powerful way to create valuable cognitive output using your brain.
What are the essential steps of a Deep Work plan?
- Identify deep-to-shallow ratio goals.
- Review and determine scheduling strategies
- Get support from boss/peers
- Create and act on rituals that transition you into a deep work mode/mindet
Shallow work
Often essential work that is not cognitively demandind. Responding to emails, updating your team, etc.
“Shallow work keeps you from getting fired, deep work gets you promoted”
Addtive approach to determining the value of work
An additive approach would take each regular task that you spend time on and ask yourself, “If I did twice as much of this, how much more valuable would my work become?” Go through each of your activities, and apply this standard, then assessing whether those tasks are deep or shallow.
Netative approach to derminig the value of work
A negative approach would ask the opposite question, “If I did half as much of this, how much would that hurt the value I create?” You’ll often find, by asking this, that many tasks you feel you could safely halve with minimal repercussions to your work, while others, if halved, would cause your value to plummet.
How do you track/count deep work?
A session of deep work must be started intentionally and last, without interuption, for at leat 45 minutes. You can tally succesfull hours, or start and stop times.
Three strategies for scheduling deep work
- Rythmic
- Timeblcoking
- Ad-hoc
Rhythmic strategy for deep work scheduling
Standard hours that you repeat regularly. Often daily (9am-11am every day) or weekly (every monday and wednesday)
Timeblocking strategy for deep work scheduling
Each morning, making a detailed plan for how you intend to use your time. So you might schedule more deep work on days with fewer meetings and other shallow work commitments.
Ad-Hoc strategy for deep work scheduling
DISCOURAGED - This involves taking advantage of moments for focus when they come up, and accepting that they may occasionally get interrupted.
Particularly important are to set very clear IF-THEN intentions in your work to decide to take advantage of chunks of focus as they arrive. One of those might be, “if I don’t have any meetings or calls for at least 30 minutes, I will start a deep work session.”
What is the “myth of multitasking”
Instead of actually doing two things at once, when we multitask, what we’re really doing is switching back and forth between two different activities. When one, or both, of those activities is highly automated, this may not cause major difficulties. However, if you even need moderate amounts of mental effort, this can cause a major decline in performance.
Attentional Residue
When you switch your attention from target A over to target B, then return to target A, that second target leaves what’s called attention residue, which reduces your cognitive performance for a while.
Working Memory
how your mind is able to hold onto different ideas simultaneously so that you can think about them. Working memory is like your RAM, while long- term memory is more like your hard-drive. Workign memory is extremely limited.
Components of working memory
- a visuospatial sketchpad
- a phonological loop
- a central executive.
Note: distrations impact your overall working memory capacity, but are particularly distructive to specifc components. Songs with lyrics with mess with processing the written word. Visuals like TV will mess with spatial thinking
