 Welcome to this webinar. We're going to talk about deep work today. How can we focus with more effectiveness? How can we be better about keeping the distractions at bay? Throughout this webinar, I'm going to invite you to think about the concepts in a way that can imply to your own life. Because, in fact, I'll give you the practice of doing deep work. Just watching this webinar is not deep work. That's shallow work. Anybody can do that. Deeper work would be watching this with softfulness about how can this idea that was just presented apply to my life today, this week, next week, this year? And so I'm going to give you multiple opportunities in this webinar to take some notes on that and to start imagining the application of this in your life and in your business. Now, I have to say I really appreciate seeing comments on the webinar in the notes in the comments section of this webinar video. So if you are open to sharing any of your own reflections, your own thoughts about how you could apply it, any aha moments as you watch this, like, oh, well, that was a great tip or that was a great tool. I would love to know. It's greatly beneficial for me. I like to know what's working for people, what's resonating with people. So if you'd like to please do comment as you watch this to say, oh, I really like this. I really like what you just said. I want to thank those of you who actually are attending live. It makes a difference for me when you watch my webinars live because it gives me more energy and makes a webinar better for everyone who's watching it. With more energy and more enthusiasm, the content tends to be better and more exciting. So thank you to Laura and Broadhurst and Yeshe and Nathan, Liz, Gail, Colin for watching live and chatting live there. Okay, so the webinar today is based on a book that I recently finished reading called Deep Work Rules for Focus Success in a Distracted World. And this is one of the better personal growth books I've read in the past few years. The book is written by a guy named Cal Newport. His previous best-selling book was called So Good, They Can't Ignore You. And Cal is amazing. He is a full-time computer science professor. He is a best-selling author and well-known speaker. He is a consistent blogger. He is a father. I don't know how many kids he has, but he is, as you can imagine, got a full plate. And yet he's able to accomplish all these things with what appears to be calm focus. And so he talks about his own methods in this book, but he also talks about the methods of a lot of successful people. So let me first begin by defining what Deep Work is and what his definition is. And I should say a lot of what I'm going to say today are quotes from the book. And so please don't quote me from this video. If you want to quote something, chances are it's from the book, or you can comment and ask, hey, this is okay to quote. This is from Cal, this is from you. I'll try to mention when I'm quoting him when I'm using my own reflections versus that. So quote, Deep Work is professional activities perform in a state of distraction-free concentration that pushes your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate, unquote. I'm sure you can find this Deep Work definition just by Googling it online with the name of the author, Cal Newport. And I'm going to give you some examples that from my industry, from my own business, and maybe relevant to yours on what Deep Work is. So I'll give you a couple of examples here. Number one, writing your website with your ideal client in mind, I think is Deep Work. Because, oh, and I should also give you another useful definition he gives, which is he's answering the question, well, how do we score the work in our lives as whether it's Deep Work or Shallow Work? Let me actually first define Shallow Work, and this is his definition as well, Cal Newport's quote. Shallow Work is non-cognitively demanding, so it's relatively easy. Logistical-style tasks often performed while distracted. These efforts tend not to create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate. Some activities clearly satisfy this definition, such as checking email, for example, or scheduling a conference call. But there are many other activities that are more ambiguous. So I'm going to actually, oh, and he also says, quote, like, if you want to score whether some work is Deep or Shallow in your business, in your profession, an interesting question to ask is how many months would it take to, so thinking about a particular task in your business, how many months would it take to train a smart, recent college graduate with no specialized training in your field to complete that task? How many months would it take to train? So if you were checking email looking for important messages, just not responding, but just checking email looking for important messages, how many months would it take to train? If you had an intern that was a smart, recent college grad, how many months would it take you to train them? Oh, here's what's important to me, here's what's not. Probably not that many months, probably just a couple weeks, right? Versus if you were writing your book on the expertise you've gained over years of experience, how many months would it take to train a college graduate to write that book? It would take years to train. So that would be deep work for you, right? So I'm going to share some examples of what deep work is to me and to many of my clients. And I invite you as I share these examples, and I'm going to pause after I share these examples as well, for you to write down any examples that come to you for what is deep work in your business, in your profession. So here we go. Writing your website with your ideal client in mind, importantly with your ideal client in mind, because any copywriter could, you know, smart, recently trained college grad could probably interview you about your business for a bit and then write your website. But nobody has the kind of deep knowledge you have about your ideal client, because you've worked with lots of them, you've studied who they are, what their problems are, what their challenges and what their goals are and what their needs and what their personalities, all those things, I'm assuming you have, it's not you should. So writing your website with your ideal client in mind. Second example is writing your email newsletter. Now, I really should clarify, not just collating things, but I should say writing fresh content for your email newsletter from your own personality and perspective, not just something transactional. Third is giving talks in your own unique style. Now, no college grad can be trained even for months or years to duplicate your style and your depth of expertise. So giving talks is, I think, deep work. Writing your book, I think I mentioned that already. Number five is writing an epic blog post about your area of expertise. Now, you don't have to be the one to have perfect grammar and perfect formatting, because that could be outsourced to somebody else, a copyright or copy editor. But you're the one who puts together the structure of the ideas to say this makes sense before that and this is important and not that. So writing an epic blog post, 1,500 words or more. Which, by the way, if you didn't know, you can Google this, by the way, what's an ideal length of a blog post? Based on research on what gets shared, the ideal length of a blog post is 1,600 words. Or more. I mean, maybe with its way too long, 3,000 plus words, it's going to be less consumed. 1,600 words, 1,500, 1,600 words. Ideal length of a blog post. Now, not that all viewers have to be, because we need to get the guru of things and sometimes we need to write something shorter to kind of get into it and sometimes we just get inspired to write something shorter, but you'll tend to notice that the ones that are 1,500 words, 1,600 words, or maybe a little bit more are useful enough that people share it forward. Interesting enough, people share it forward. Another example, making a well-scripted video. A well-scripted video. Not the type of videos that I make on a daily basis. I think that's somewhat deep work because no one can really duplicate my style. But it's sort of, if I were to sit down and say, okay, these are the three points I want to make in this particular order, saying these particular phrases in this particular way, and then I made that video, that would be truly deep work that's hard to replicate and based on my own deep expertise, et cetera. Another one example is interviewing an expert in your field while interspersing your own expertise. You're interviewing someone, an author, another author, another blogger, another teacher, another coach, and you're asking them questions to really draw forward the best nuggets that they could share with your audience. And at the same time, you also say, that's a really good point and I found what works really well with my clients is blah, blah, blah. So you're interspersing your own knowledge as well. So because like I said, remember the definition of deep work. It's hard to replicate and the college grads would take many months or years to train to do this. Well, college grads could interview any expert and ask them tough questions, and ask them questions and draw things out. But they can't interspers their deep wisdom. So that's what I recommend when you interview people to not just ask questions and go, oh, wow, that's amazing. And I need to learn this myself. But to then interspers to, oh, picking backing on that, what has worked for my clients or what has worked for me? Okay, that's another example. Another example is creating a course on your area of expertise. Not that you need to make all the formatting of the course perfect or edit it. You don't have to edit the videos. That can be done by college grads. You don't have to edit the audios. No. But you are the one who puts together, again, the structure and the logic of the course, what's important and what's not, and present it with your own personality. Okay. And I think the last example I want to give is thoughtful, focused meetings. Thoughtful, focused meetings with prospective clients. No one can duplicate the way that you talk with prospective clients if you're present. Or with clients, of course, no one can duplicate the work you do with your clients if you're present and focused. With your coach, you know, when my clients meet with me, if they're present and focused, we do amazing work together. No one can duplicate that. Your business partners, of course, creating any collaboration, deep collaboration requires you. You can't outsource that to an assistant, right? So I'm going to take a pause now in part to read the live comments that are coming in, but in part to give you a chance now to write down in your business, in your profession, in your work life, what are some deep work and what is some shallow work? Now, shallow work is work... This webinar in this book is not about eliminating all shallow work, so I have to first clarify that. Cal Newport actually says that in a typical workday, even a focused person can probably do only three to four hours of deep work a day. So that's just the limit of our human cognitive abilities. It's about three to four hours of deep work a day. Now, he's talking about focused deep work, like writing a book or like putting a talk together or, you know, things, some of the examples I mentioned. And then there's other work, you know, another three to four hours in a day where you're doing shallow work still kind of needs to be done and you haven't been able to, you don't have the budget yet to outsource. Okay, so take a minute now and write down what is deep work in your work and what is shallow work for you. Go ahead and do that now. Okay, I'm going to continue on. If you are deep in brainstorming your deep and shallow work, you can pause this video in fact and continue on there and then pause it when you're ready. So the next tip is to share with you several styles of deep work and see which one is really best for your working style and your lifestyle. And there are four types of deep work, styles of deep work that he has identified from successful creators, creative people. The first style is what he calls monastic. Monastic is where if you have the ability to take several months away from regular communication with other people per year and you kind of put yourself in a retreat type setting, a radical basically, for a couple of months. And it's not like you never check in, but you check in maybe once a week, but you just set yourself apart to write that book or to create that course or to fill in the blank, write those 10 epic blog posts or whatever it may be. So he gives a couple of examples. There's a well-known computer scientist, Donald Knuth. He does is he provides a postal address, not an email address, but a postal address that he's famous and he doesn't want to get email. So he gets postal address that he gives out on his website. And he has his administrative assistant sort through the letters and really put aside anything that she thinks is important. Anything that's really urgent, of course, she can contact him properly but everything else he really handles in one big batch every three months or so. He handles his mail every three months or so. He doesn't even provide an email address. So let that inspire you that this guy does groundbreaking work in his industry and there's a reason for that. He's able to give himself the spaciousness, that's the key, the spaciousness of not having nagging demands. No email, no text messages, no Facebook, nothing except to focus and let his deep work take over his being for three months. So that's the monastic style. Another example of fiction writer, Neil Stevenson, he wrote an essay called Why I'm a Bad Correspondent and he basically says, listen, I can either write good novels at a regular rate or I can answer a lot of email and attend conferences and produce lower quality novels at a slower rate so I have to make that trade off. So that's really a lot of food for thought. For those of us who are able to do that, some of us can't because of financial reasons or other reasons. But for those of us who can, even if it's not every year you take three months to do your deep work, but think about maybe doing one month away unplugged. But three months is what these people are doing usually. Okay, the second style is bimodal. Bimodal is basically at least one full day of deep work without anything else. So that's a lot more doable. So it's like you get one full day, maybe one full day a week, one full day a month, but it's sort of like this deep work, shallow work, deep work, shallow work, not in the same day. That's the key, not in the same day. And he says Carl Jung, Carl Jung did this bimodal type of thing. He took some weekends or weeks to his retreat to do some deep thinking and deep writing and he would come back. So he didn't spend months away, but he spent a few weeks, I think, away. And so this is considered bimodal, I guess. So the key is to give yourself enough time to reach sort of maximum cognitive intensity. So that takes, again, at least one full day, ideally more than that, ideally a week or even two weeks. He's saying that setting aside a few hours a day to work on something is not considered this philosophy. It's a later one. And maybe you're, again, different strokes for different folks. Your personality type might really value one over the other or where you are right now and your ability to work is one or the other. Another example is Adam Grant, one of my heroes. He wrote the book Give and Take. He is one of the, he is like the youngest tenured professor at Warren University, one of the best business schools in the world. He's known as one of the most generous people ever. Like he just helps so many, so many people. And so Adam Grant, what he does is he has, you know, two to four days, once or twice a month, once or twice a month or two to four days, he would be like a monastic person. He would shut his door, put it out of office, out of responder on his email and work on his research without interruption. And then outside of these two to four days a month, he is completely accessible. I mean, he's known for that. Like any student can ask him for help and he's probably going to help them and put connections, you know, give him a look at, he's a pretty amazing guy. And then there was a study at Harvard Business School by a professor where a group of management consultants, like high-level, you know, management consultants at some of the top companies, they were asked to disconnect for one full day each workweek, disconnect from email and text messages, private messages, totally not checked them. And these consultants were afraid naturally that their clients would rebel and complain. But it turned out that these clients, once they knew what that one full day was, that these clients didn't care. As these consultants discovered, people usually respect your right to become inaccessible if these periods are well-defined and well-advertised and outside these stretches, you're once again easy to find. So that's the by-model. And by the way, you can tell when I'm reading a passage if I'm spending time looking down at my notes. So that's a clue for you. The third style is rhythmic. And rhythmic is basically a few minutes to a few hours every day on some deep work project. And I tend to do this a lot. I think if I were to make a decision about what my style is, it would be rhythmic and by-model. So I do take vacations. I've been experimenting. For the last couple of months, I've been experimenting with like two vacation days per month. No client meetings, no obligations. In those two vacation days, I'm actually doing some deep work. So even though it's vacation, I find that I have that spaciousness and I get to really work on some creative new ideas. I'm now going forward. I'm going to go back to trying one whole week of vacation every six weeks of work. So no client appointments, nothing for that one week. And that's some rest as well as some deep work time, some creativity. But rhythmic is basically, and I'm going to read this passage here, Seinfeld, the famous comedian Seinfeld gave advice to someone saying that the best way to become a great comedian is to write better jokes, to create better jokes. And then he said the way to create better jokes is to write jokes every single day. Seinfeld continued by describing a specific technique he used to help maintain his discipline. He keeps a calendar on his wall and every day that he writes jokes, he crosses out the date on the calendar with a big red X. After a few days, Seinfeld said, you have a chain. You'll have a chain of Xs, right? Just keep at it and the chain will grow longer every day. You'll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job next is to not break the chain. So, you know, right? He did basically his important deep work every single day. So Seinfeld was an example of a rhythmic deep worker. He gave another example of a graduate student who was extremely prolific and wrote a lot of academic papers. And he said, this guy had made a rule that he would wake up and start working by 5.30 every morning. He would then work until 7.30, make breakfast and go to work already done with his dissertation obligations for the day, two hours of dissertation writing. And he was so pleased by his early progress that he soon pushed his wake up time to 4.30 or 4.45 to squeeze out even more morning depth. His routine was producing four to five pages of academic prose per day. And he was capable of generating draft thesis chapters at a rate of one chapter every two or three weeks. A phenomenal output for someone who also worked a nine to five job. And he said, who's to say that I can't be prolific? Why not me? He concluded. So that's inspiring, right? Who's to say that you can't be prolific and write books upon books if you just gave yourself that deep work time either every day or once a week or take three months off every year, something like that. The fourth and final style of deep work is opportunistic. And opportunistic really requires your if you are someone who is able to focus quickly, okay, then opportunistic could work for you. And what this basically a couple of examples is Walter Isaacson, who is famous for writing some major biographies, including the biography of Steve Jobs. Walter Isaacson was an opportunistic deep worker. So he says anytime he could find some free time, he would switch into a deep work mode and hammer away at his book. This is how it turns out that one can write a 900 page book on the side while spending the bulk of one day becoming one of the country's best magazine writers. And another story I didn't put into my notes is Walter Isaacson, he would spend some weekends with some friends. And his friends would notice that every now and then during the weekend he would disappear for a few hours and then come back ready to play again. A couple of hours he was writing his books. And so opportunistic. And actually the author of this book, Cal Newport, is also an opportunistic deep worker. He says, I face each week as it arrives. And I just do my best to squeeze out as much depth as possible. Remember this guy has a full-time job as a tenured professor. He also has a popular blog. He is a father. So to write this book, Deep Work, for example, I had to take advantage of free stretches of time whenever they popped up. If my kids were taking a good nap, I would grab my laptop and lock myself in the home office. If my wife wanted to visit her parents on a weekend day, I would take advantage of the extra childcare to disappear into a quiet corner of the house to write. If a meeting at work was canceled or if an afternoon was left open, I might retreat to one of my favorite libraries on campus to squeeze out a few hundred more words and so on. So what I noticed from this is that he was opportunistic. But the key is that whenever he saw the opportunity, he would then create the environment. He would create the environment where he could get into deep work. And I want to take a moment to talk about this. Actually, I don't think this was in the book, but you have a particular environment that works well for you to do deep work. Do you know what that is? So for example, I've noticed that I actually work well when I am in a not in a totally bright room, but you know, a well-lit room but not totally bright and what's in front of me is not bright. Like I've tried doing deep work while facing a bright window and the light from the bright window just keeps distracting me from doing deep work. So I have to be facing a dim surface. But the dim surface, ideally, it's not right next to me. I'm not facing a wall like just a few feet from me. Ideally, the dim surface is like several feet from me. So I have some distance to look up and look at a wall and look at something on the wall for a few seconds. And it's got to be quiet for me. Now, this is versus a client of mine just recently discovered her perfect deep work environment and she was surprised. She says, I wish I found this 10 years ago. I would have written books by this point. And she says her deep work environment is actually going to a busy cafe or a busy, like she basically was in a grocery store where they had a juice bar. And she saw this guy with a huge pile of papers like working away while the juicing machine was running and then there were people walking around. And she's like, wow, that guy's getting a lot of work done. And she asked me, yeah, I work amazing in this environment. And she realized that as an extrovert, so she's an extrovert. She loves being around people. She gets a lot of energy from people. That's perfect for her too. She was able to sit down and do some amazing deep work in that busy environment. I couldn't do that. I would be so distracted. I tried. So there are two totally different personality types and two different deep work environments as a result. So not everyone is meant for the cloister cubicle. So I would say there's probably at least three types. One is a cubicle type of environment where you're all around you. There's walls all around you and there's nothing else. And you work really well that way. I need some spaciousness physically. That's the second type is sort of spaciousness but quiet still. The third type is cafe, busy cafe. And maybe a fourth type, I would say, is some people work really well with music, some kind of music on. I can't deal with music. If I listen to music, I'll be following the melody and I'll be distracted all the time or following the lyrics or whatever. Even if it's instrumental, it's not ideal for me. So, oh, and there's another type which I actually work really well in is co-working. Co-working is where you get together with a couple of other people. Ideally, you know, one person's fine but ideally two or three people at least where it's usually a structured environment where it's like, okay, we're going to work for 25 minutes, non-stop, and there's a timer that's being shown and go. So let's turn off all distractions and go. I actually facilitate virtual co-working sessions with my clients. And actually I have a mastermind program called TLC, you can check it out, georgecow.com slash TLC where it's right now 111 a month and we do two virtual co-working deep work sessions per week and people get tremendous amounts of things done there. So that's another environment that works well. So I'm going to take a pause now and invite you to write down what is your perfect deep work environment based on what you know of yourself probably and what is your perfect deep work style? Is it opportunistic? Is it rhythmic? So a couple minutes to a couple hours a day, is it bimodal, like one full day or several days a month, or is it monastic? You have been doing several months in a year to really do that deep work. So take a minute now and write that down. So the next idea that's important to realize is that your willpower is not something that you can muster up any moment of the whole day. You can just like, I just need more willpower. I just need to be stronger right now. What studies have shown in the past few years is that willpower for human being is a muscle that tires throughout the day. By the way, some people have more willpower at night. Those are called night owls. Some people have more willpower in the early morning. Those are called early birds. Some people have more willpower in the afternoon. For me, I have willpower after every nap, I've noticed. So I take three naps a day right now. I take a nap after breakfast. My naps are between 12 to 20 minutes, usually, and just on my couch. After breakfast, after lunch, and after my afternoon snack, I take three naps. And for some reason I really need to do work at night. I'll take a nap after dinner as well, so four naps. After my naps, I'm like a new person and I have willpower and I have focus ability. I'm able to do deep work. So what about you? When in the day do you have willpower? And the thing about willpower is that it's like a muscle, right? So you keep using it. It gets tired out that day, and you'll need to refresh yourself before you have more willpower for the next day. So you have to realize that. Now, what's really also important about this idea is that being distracted by text messages and emails and the desire to check Facebook and giving away to that, giving away to that, those are willpower sappers, willpower drains. Any interruptions is, in fact, a willpower drain. So if you work in a distracted environment and if you are not built for that, like I mentioned before, it's built for that, but if you're not built for that, it's a constant willpower drain and you won't be able to focus and do deep work. And so that's really important to understand. So then that brings us to the next idea, which is to create on schedule. Once you observe yourself and when your willpower is strongest during the day or night, then it is highly advisable that you schedule and block out time and block out the environment. It can't just be time. It has to be where. Remember when I shared earlier, Cal, the author's own processes. He's opportunistic. He takes whatever free time, but then he doesn't just work wherever he is. He goes to the environment that works for him. So create on schedule. The most well-known authors, movie writers, artists, they don't tend to just create random times when inspiration strikes them. They almost always practice on a regular basis creating on schedule. And that's what I do as well. Right now I have a commitment to do two of my business tip videos, personal development videos, two videos every week. So that's my schedule. And so if I haven't done two for the week, I'm going to do one on the weekend, like I create on schedule. And my perfect environment for me to create those videos is on my daily dog walk. And so I know what the environment is. I know when I do it, because it's during my daily dog walk, it's at the park. And so what is your schedule for creating? And I recommend that you take a moment to write that down. When is your willpower the strongest? And what is the environment that is ideal for you and therefore schedule into your calendar the recurring appointment with yourself at your willpower strength time at that place that you thrive in deep work and do that. Okay. And here's a passage from the book. Your work habit requires that you treat your time with respect. A good first step toward this respectful handling is this advice. Decide in advance what you're going to do with every minute of your work day. It's natural at first to resist this idea as it's undoubtedly easier to continue to allow the twin forces of internal whim and external requests to drive your schedule. But you must overcome this distrust of structure if you want to approach your true potential as someone who creates things that matter. Now, a common complaint is, well, George, I go well by inspiration. I go well by intuition. What if an idea and inspiration strikes me in a moment and I've scheduled out the rest of my day and doing different projects? Do I go with the inspiration or do I follow my structure perfectly? There's different schools of thought on that. Personally, I believe it's my experience that I tend to, I think structuring every minute is, that's a little extreme. I structure every half hour, though. I literally, my entire day and even my evening is structured out with half hours. The only days when I'm less structured is Saturday and Sundays. I give myself a kind of calendar break on Saturday and Sundays. But Monday through Friday, look at my schedule. It's completely, you know, from waking to sleeping. It's like everything is all laid out. Now, I really do my best to follow that. If I have some inspiration strike to me, I will write it down quickly. It's like, okay, what's the idea? What's the basic idea that I want to follow up on at some point? Like, oh, this is exciting. Yeah, I want to create this new project, this new program. I write it down, write it down, write it down. And then I just follow my schedule. I just keep going. Now, if I am in a role on writing down something, then I will take another half hour. I'll just take another half hour. I'll reschedule my next thing for later, or for cancel or whatever. And just take another half hour to do this project. But then I'll stop. And then I'll follow the rest of my schedule. Because I've noticed that this is one of my mantras. Distance creates perspective. What that means is even though I have amazing ideas right now, when I look at it a week from now, I'm going to have better perspective about it. I'm going to be like, absolutely not. This is such a good idea. In the moment, I've seen amazing, but it's OK. Distance creates perspective. Or a week from now, I'll go, yeah, that was a good idea. And really, it should be framed this way. And so I really like to always speak on ideas of how I do it. But Cal Newport, the author, what he does, see he actually, when he has an idea striking that he really wants to work on, he will pretty much restructure the rest of the day. He'll say, OK, I'm just going to keep going on this. I'm going to make sure I have no appointments coming up, right? OK, my next appointment is 5 p.m., fine. I was going to work on my taxes and my emails and my blah, blah, blah from 2 to 5. But I'm just going to postpone those. I'm going to work on this new idea that's come to me. I'm really inspired until my next appointment. And he does that as inspiration strikes. So he kind of has a flexible thing going. Now, he says he basically reschedules his day as many times during the day as he needs it. So he says the key is to not don't follow a schedule because that's the mistake. The mistake people say, well, George, you're saying that inspiration is good to follow. Then I just don't follow a schedule. Then I just have inspiration all the time. That is the mistake. That will get you very little value. You'll produce very little deep work in the world. You need to schedule your day. But then if you want to follow Cal Newport's idea, when inspiration strikes, you reschedule your day so that you're making a conscious choice. Don't run away from the things that you've scheduled. Don't run away. Have courage and say, ah, taxes. I will do my taxes. I will do that next Tuesday at this time. And of course, you have deadlines. You've got to do it. You've got to do it. For me, again, I only go about half an hour or more. But for Cal, he could spend a couple of hours. So the key is to reschedule yourself as many times in a day as possible so that you're conscious about such choices. So I'm going to just take a pause now. I'm going to read some comments and let you think about how you're going to handle your daily schedule. Another tip that the book gives us is what's called overflow conditional blocks. So basically, if you don't know how long a project's going to take, you block off the expected time. You're like, oh, I think I'm going to take one hour to work on this project. But then you're not sure. So you can block off another half hour to say, if I am on a roll, I'm going to do another half hour. But if I am done, then I can use that half hour for something else. So I have a split purpose for that additional block of half hours. So that might be a really nice tip to try if you're not very good at calculating how long some things take for you. OK, all right. So how much deep work should we expect ourselves to do every day? The book recommends that, again, three to four hours of deep work a day, like every day, is probably the maximum that most human beings can do. So if you're doing deep work on a daily basis, it's probably three to four hours a day. And the rest of the time, you still need to do some shallow work unless you have a full staff, which probably very few of us watching this have. So it's fine to do shallow work. Remember that. It's just that you need to make sure the shallow work is not taking over the three. Try to aim for three hours of deep work a day. Because if you do three hours of deep work a day, you should be quite proud of yourself. You're probably doing more deep work than most of your peers each day. The next idea is quite interesting, which is meaningful downtime, meaningful leisure time. He talks about an author who wrote this idea back in the early 1900s. And he says, people work eight hours a day to earn money, which leaves them 16 hours for the rest of the day and night where they are essentially a free person. It's an interesting idea. Think about your 16 hours of not working every day as if you have a trust fund and you are being supported. And you're a free man, free woman, during those 16 hours. Of course, you have to sleep during some of those 16 hours. But that's the idea. Even if you have four hours of downtime, really, not counting sleeping and hygiene and meals, if you have four hours of downtime a day not working, you ought to carefully consider what to do in those four free hours when you're not needing to earn income. And by the way, I know entrepreneurs, we think we should be working every waking hour to earn income. I really don't recommend it. Even if you're at the start and you don't have enough money yet, you should not be working 20 hours a day, 16 hours a day. You should have some downtime every day to switch gears because our minds need to switch gears in order to rest. There's another interesting idea in the book is that when you're working for those eight hours, you're using your conscious mind to do, and especially when you're doing deep work, you're using your conscious mind to do your deep work. But actually, when you switch gears and when you do some downtime activities, you then switch your work from conscious to unconscious. And I'll tell you, your conscious mind is like this in its capability. Your unconscious mind is like this in its capability. So like this versus this. I mean, it's probably filled the size of the room. It's really that kind of perspective. Again, I read elsewhere that your conscious mind, as it runs 100 miles an hour with your conscious mind, your subconscious unconscious mind, the ability to process ideas, runs at 100,000 miles an hour. So it's that kind of proportion. So if you're always using your conscious mind to work on your business, you are not letting the other side of your brain, the other side of your being do its work. So the downtime is extremely needed. Switching activities to something different is extremely useful for getting better ideas, more creative ideas, more effective ideas. And so it's suggested that you really think about not doing really kind of hyper-distracting activities during downtime like surfing Facebook, reading BuzzFeed or Huffington Post or Business Insider or Reddit or things that are like programmed. Basically, many popular websites are programmed to distract you continually. And that continual distraction, it's basically training your ability to be distracted. It's sort of unpredictable when new content comes out. It's constant new content. And it's always copyright the headlines to make it really interesting. So you're finished reading an article and then there's another amazing headline with a picture that makes you want to click on it. So those are not the ideal meaningful downtime. In the meaningful downtime, you can still be working your brain, but working your brain ideally in a different way. So think about a different way to work your brain. So for example, maybe you play music, not play the music on the radio, but play the musical instrument or do some art where you're using a different side of your brain so you're giving your normal logical brain a rest or maybe do a lot of writing. So give that a rest and switch to a different side of the brain and so your unconscious mind can be working on your writing or working on your business issues. So think about some kind of art. Actually spending time with friends and family like not in front of the TV, that's not necessarily meaningful time, but talking about something, going for a walk together. Nature is amazing for meaningful downtime. So or reading a different kind of book that's not related to your business, not related to your area of expertise, a fiction book or something like poetry, things like that. So really think about using your downtime especially starting today. In fact, I'll give you a minute to think about brainstorming some activities that would be meaningful downtime activities for you. Now, he has a concept in the book what he calls productive meditation. It's a nice fancy phrase, but basically he's working out specific problems in his work while he's doing mindless chores or commuting or waiting. So instead of distracting himself with podcasts or when he was waiting in line instead of like checking Facebook, checking email or before checking, playing a game, he would sometimes be working on problems. And in fact, he says a lot of the book ideas came from productive meditation. So he says basically walking, jogging, driving, showering are really ideal times for productive meditation. And you could be working on outlining your book, outlining a talk, outlining an article, working out some particular business problem you have. And so he says that the structures he uses for productive meditation is that first he, let's say he's taking a walk somewhere. You're first on that walk, you're first to think about what are all the different variables for the problem that I'm trying to tackle. So if he's writing this book, okay, what are the different ideas I have for what could be book chapters? Okay, well I could talk about productive meditation or I could talk about work styles. I could talk about this, I could talk about that. Okay, so those are the different, okay, I have like five different ideas here. And then the next question is, let's see, then the next step is to define the specific next question you need to answer using these variables. So if he's gotten these ideas for the book chapters in his head, then he says, okay, well the next question I need to answer is, well which one comes first? Which one should open the book and which one should close the book? Okay, well out of these five ideas, this idea is really best for opening the book and this idea is really best for closing the book. And then he gives a suggestion that your brain will have a couple of challenges that keeps presenting to you. Just like in regular mindfulness meditation. And one challenge will be that your brain will want to think about other things like, oh, the conversation I just had or oh, I gotta write this email to someone or I gotta do this errand or run that errand or do this task. And in productive meditation, just like in mindfulness meditation, your job is to bring yourself back to the task at hand, which is working out that problem you have in your head. Bring yourself back to the task at hand. And so it's like, oh, I'm wanting to think about this other project. No, no, no. Come back. Just like come back to the breath. Come back to this problem of which chapter should go to first or the last. And then the other challenge that you'll face in productive meditation is looping. You'll often find yourself keep repeating the same idea over and over. But oh, catch yourself doing that. Well, what's the next question that I need to answer? I've already answered that one. What's the next question? So he says, you know, you might want to try that. Now, it's kind of ironic that he suggests productive meditation because he also suggests the importance of downtime for your brain and not working on your work. So I think Cal Newport is an extremely busy person. So he has to be doing his book writing in his head from walking from his full-time job back to his home where he has to take care of his kids, right? That's why productive meditation is really important for him. For those of us who don't live this busy of a life, you should be very grateful that you can, when you're walking from work, take downtime. Now, just don't think about your work and maybe think about something else in your life. Do some productive meditation. Think about something else, right? A totally different area of life. Okay, so this is important to bring forward. The book actually recommends that we think about taking a sabbatical from social media tools because of how much social media trains our distraction and therefore erodes our ability to do deep work. Now, I'm a marketing coach and social media strategist for my clients, so I can't give up social media. But what I do, though, is I'm focused on five activities I do on social media. I don't surf Facebook throughout the day, like maybe, I don't know if some people might do that. I don't surf social media. I actually, I do social media probably less than most of you do because when I go on social media, I'm very focused on one of these five things. I'm either there to post something I've written or secondly, I'm there to do what I call social media caring, which is what I do during lunch. I do about 15 minutes of social media caring, which is basically looking at the Facebook timelines of my clients for tomorrow, or wherever they're active on social media. Actually, I pretty much just stick with Facebook. But whichever clients I'm talking to tomorrow, I'll look at their timeline and I'll like their stuff. So I almost never look at the newsfeed. That's just distracting. So that's the second thing I do is social media caring, either during lunch or at the beginning of the day when I'm prepared for my clients. The third thing I do is once a week or less, I click on the notification on Facebook and on Google Plus and on Twitter and on LinkedIn to check if I need to respond to any comments. I just scroll through all the people liking my stuff. That's great. I really appreciate it. But then I kind of look for, oh, someone wrote a comment. Okay. I don't need to respond to that. So that once a week or less, nowadays is more like every two weeks, I check my notifications. It's usually on the weekend too. The fourth thing I do is I attend to my private client group because I use Google Plus at this time in the past Facebook to have a private online client group. So of course, at the end of the day, I go check that group to make sure I need to respond to anything from clients. And the fifth reason I use social media is to contact somebody through private messaging. Those are the only five reasons. Once in a while on a weekend, I might, if I'm bored and if I'm not, if I've forgotten about meaningful leisure time, I'll open up Facebook and surf the newsfeed. But that's not, yeah. So you need to think about what your meaningful use of social media is rather than stop surfing the newsfeed. Now, I know I'm probably shooting myself in the foot because you probably see my stuff. And if I tell you to stop doing that, then you probably won't see my stuff anymore. But again, it's good for you to do that. And so think about what is the meaningful use of your social media. Okay, I'm going to close off with just a couple more ideas. I'll go a bit more quickly now. It's important to realize that boredom is not a bad thing. Boredom is not a bad thing. We've been trained in our society to think that boredom, like we should never be bored. We should always be engaged and entertained. And so when we're like waiting in line at the post office, ah, great time to check out our email or check out Facebook. But he says in this book, actually, I think he has some Buddhist or mindfulness meditation influences from the book. He never says that. But he says boredom is needed to train your mind to sharpen your concentration. So don't be afraid to be bored. You need that. So that the next time you do deep work, you'll be able to do it better. So when you're bored, either do some productive meditation and work on something meaningful, or just, he doesn't say this, but I can focus on your breath. Waiting in line and post office, don't take out your phone, okay? Don't go into different random ideas that you have if you're not doing productive meditation. Focus on mindfulness meditation. Focus on your breath. Be bored. It sharpens your concentration. Okay? In other words, you're not giving way. You're strengthening your ability to resist distraction. That's what staying in boredom does for you. So this powerful idea, powerful idea. Okay. The next idea is to schedule times when you're offline. Now, I don't really need to do that because I've been pretty disciplined about not checking Facebook and checking email and things. But you may need to schedule, before you get to a state of discipline like this, you need to schedule offline times. So during deep work, if you don't need the internet or actually, offline might be too drastic of a word. Schedule times off of certain websites or certain things like email, Facebook, social media, some interesting news site you check all the time. Schedule times off of that. And definitely during deep work times. But even just throughout the day, you could say, okay, for the next 15 minutes, for the next half hour, for the next hour, I'm not going to check my email. Like you need to be conscious of that. Try it. Try it. Okay? Try it today to be conscious. Like for the next 15 minutes, start with that. For the next five minutes even, if you are really, really super distractible. For the next five minutes, I'm going to check my email. I'm not going to check fill in the blank. And if you want a tool to time yourself, well, you can use a timer on your phone or you can use a timer online. I love using Egg Timer, which is e.ggtimer.com. The letter E and then dot ggtimer.com. That's the website. You can use spray to use. So, an interesting idea is that if you've scheduled an off, another one is internet research. That's dangerous. You say, oh, I have this idea of research. Oh, I'm going to research what quotes I put on my website. And then now you've spent an hour like checking all these different things. So Google is another thing to schedule time off of internet research. So let's just say you've scheduled another half hour where you're not going to check, do some internet research. You're not going to check social media. You're not going to check email. You're not going to check your text messages. You're not going to check anything except work on your deep work project. And then five minutes into it, you're like, I need to research this thing. I really, really need to research this thing before I can continue this half hour. If that's the case, then he suggests then restructure your offline time to just the next five minutes. So at least you're giving yourself five minutes of practice, not giving in to distraction. That in itself is useful. And then after five minutes, you can go do your internet research and get pulled into all these different things. Okay, let's see. I think there's pretty much shared all the ideas I wanted with you. Okay, so one more idea as a... Okay, two more quick ideas. One is to officially complete your day. I think I mentioned this a little bit earlier, right? And interesting that Cal has the same practice, which I have too. We kind of came to the same conclusion differently. He makes sure that he completes his work every day so that he can be with his family and not think about work and think about other projects and think about other things in life. So at the end of his work day, he'll make sure that everything that's an open loop, everything that's incomplete, has some time in his calendar that he'll complete it. Like maybe a to-do item, he'll schedule it for due for another day. Or if he has an idea, then at least he writes it down and schedules it for another day. And then he says at the very end, so he has some kind of ritual he does, like, okay, finish doing this, finish doing that, finish doing this, okay, finish checking my email, blah, blah, blah. And then at the end, he says, shut down complete. It's kind of nerdy, but that's what he says. He's a computer science professor. So he says, shut down complete. And for me, I have the same thing. I have what I call an end of day review, where I'm clearing my to-do list, clearing my email. Yeah, just things like that. Logging which clients that I meet with today. Make sure I log that I met with them so that I know how many sessions are left, that kind of thing. And then the last thing in my daily review, my end of day review says, declare the day complete. So I said, done, I'm done. So I don't have to think about work again until the next day. So this kind of shutdown, official shutdown, allows your mind to then switch gears so you can think about other things in life and allow your subconscious to be working on your work and not take up your energy for your personal activities. The last thing I want to share is a very interesting study called the attention restoration theory, basically resting your brain with nature. I know I mentioned this earlier, but I'll read this passage from the book. A frequently cited 2008 paper appearing in the journal Psychological Science describes a simple experiment. Subjects were split into two groups. One group was asked to take a walk on a wooded path in an arboretum near Ann Arbor, Michigan, where the study was conducted. And by the way, this wasn't a warm sunny day. This was like a frigid cold day. So it wasn't pleasant outside. It was just outside. Okay, so they were asked to take a walk and the other group was sent on a walk through the bustling center of the city. Both groups were then given a concentration task afterwards. The core finding of the study is that the nature group performed 20% better on the task. The nature advantage still held the next week when the researchers brought back the same people and they switched the location. It wasn't the people who determined the performance but whether or not they got the chance to prepare by walking through the woods. Basically, it wasn't the people. It was the environment that they were in before they did their deep work. The study, turns out, is one of many that validates what's called the attention restoration theory or ART, attention restoration theory, which claims that spending time in nature improves your ability to concentrate. Okay, because basically walking through busy city streets requires you to use directed attention. You've got to make sure you're not being run over. Make sure you're not walking into people, maneuver the streets and things like that. Whereas walking in nature, it's much more relaxed but it still provides enough stimulation. Nature has kind of gentle stimulation to kind of keep your brain engaged but relaxed. It's kind of an interesting dynamic. One last thing I want to share with you is it's actually not in this book but I think it's interesting to say. There was another study where there were three groups of people who were going to do some deep, basically deep work. Now we call it that. One group just basically did their deep work in a quiet environment, it turns out, for those people. The second group did their deep work while they also had to contend with occasional text messages and emails and phone calls, so three things. Text messages, emails and phone calls. The second group doing deep work, a ring, ring, pick up the phone. Text messages came through and I responded to that. That's the second group. The third group did that work while they were under the influence of marijuana. Guess the order of the groups that got the best results on the deep work was able to concentrate the best and had actually tested out with a higher IQ. Well, as you can imagine, the one with the highest IQ and did the best results were the people who didn't have to contend with the distracting text messages and phone calls and emails and who wore it on pot. That was the best group. The second group was the one on pot. They did better in their IQ and concentration than the other group which had to respond to text messages and emails and phone calls. So let me ask you, do you have a landline that rings randomly? Do you have a phone that rings randomly, that pings you randomly? Do you have visual notifications on your computer when you're trying to work? Oh, email came in. Why do you have that? Turn the stuff off. Research how to turn all everything off. I have nothing. No pings on my computer. No visual email notifications. Nothing. When I do my work, there's nothing pinging at me. There's nothing that comes forward as a distraction. My landline is completely turned off. My phone ringer is completely turned off. You can do that by... I taught a client how to do this. A lot of us have the same phone, actually. Panasonic. This Panasonic phone was very popular at Radio Shack for a couple of years. You press the ringer down button. You hold it down. Keep holding it down until you hear boop boop at the end. She didn't know how to do that. No, I can't do it. You hold it down. Keep holding it until it gives you that two beeps and then the ringer's off. Change the ringers. Turn it off. I don't have ringer on on my phone, my cell phone because I mean, I'll check my messages occasionally, like maybe twice an hour to see if rarely is there... almost never, like once in a month there might be an emergency. So why am I checking five times an hour? Right? So that's another tip that I find extremely helpful. So with that, I want to thank you for being here. It's been great to... it's been great to be with you and I so appreciate all the folks who were in the live chat. I'm really hoping that the live chat can be kept, but I'm just going to make a copy right now of it in case after... I think after I stop this broadcast, the live chat gets deleted, which is not really unfortunate, but I just made a copy of it up to now. So thank you again. I wish you deep work going forward. You might want to review this video again and apply another idea. And I really look forward to hearing how it goes for you. So please do let me know. Come back to the video comments and after you try something, let me know or if you have any questions, you can let me know as well. Have a great day. Have a great week and until the next video, I wish you joyful, calm, balanced diligence.