Time Management

I have an unhealthy relationship with productivity and efficiency. I find myself obsessed with output and optimum performance and at a loss when I don't surround myself in an environment where I can let these feelings flourish. This passion for eudaemonia has its fair share of positives and negatives. On the plus side I have developed a skill for maintaining concentration on one task for an extended period of time, and find that I am happiest in life when I am working hard. On the down side in the past I have let my love for productivity control my recreation to the extent of dreading holidays and always feeling subtly guilty that whilst socialising that I'm not at home bettering my skills and self. 

To gain a better understanding of healthy working and to hopefully incorporate some lessons into my own practise I decided to read Deep Work by Cal Newport. The book taught me that the way that the majority of people work is inefficient, harmful and backwards to their larger goals. I will now summarise what I learnt from this book, how I incorporated it into my own life and how it affected my ability to work.

‘Deep Work’ is the practise of performing professional activities 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. Newport explains in the book that as a society, this skill is becoming increasingly valuable whilst simultaneously becoming increasingly rare. Due to the tyranny of email, instant messaging within companies, open plan offices and ubiquitous meetings, the vast majority of companies create an environment where deep work is extremely challenging to achieve. Instead these attributes of the modern office promote a different type of work that Newport calls ‘Shallow Work’. This practise contains non-cognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted. These efforts tend to not create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate with an example being constantly sending and receiving emails like human routers with frequent breaks for quick hits of distraction.

Learning that performing Deep Work increases your ability in your given practise ('career capital' as he likes to call it) and is also a far more efficient way to work inspired me to try my best to implement it as one of the main pillars of my life. One of Newports pieces of advice I adopted was scheduling every minute of my day. Before reading deep work my bullet journal was only used to record what tasks I needed to do for the day (Below), now it is used to schedule my working day in an effort to extend the capabilities of my productivity whilst also increasing my chances of sticking to it and achieving my daily goals.

(Below) You can see an example of my schedule, each line represents half an hour and I block my time accordingly to that scale, writing what my goals are for that block of deep work to the right of it. By using this method of scheduling I am able to stick to my routine better and also see exactly how much time I am spending on one task, which I can then use to evaluate whether or not I need to increase the intensity of my focus to speed up my output.

Another method I use to increase the intensity of focus in a deep work session is to stop working by 5pm. Newport explains that by having a set cut off time for work, you allow the mind to feel safe in downtime, which means it can recharge the energy needed to work deeply. This is called ‘Attention Restoration Theory’. The human mind can only manage 4 hours of true deep work a day before results diminish. If you schedule this into a workday then you will finish your work at around 5pm. It is important to stop at that point to allow your brain to restore the energy required to perform deep work the next day. Evidence for this comes from a 2008 paper by Stephen Kaplan, published in the journal Psychological Science where an experiment was conducted: subjects were split into 2 groups. One group was asked to take a walk down a wooded path and the other was asked to walk through the bustling centre of Michigan. After their walk both groups were then given a concentration sapping task. The core finding of this study was that the nature group performed up to 20% better on the task due to the fact that walking on the streets requires you to to use directed attention for navigating complicated tasks like when to cross a street or when to manoeuvre around a slow group of tourists. On the contrary, walking through nature exposes you to inherently fascinating stimuli (such as sunsets, horticulture and wildlife) which allows your focused attention mechanisms a chance to replenish as you are freed from having to direct your attention as there are few challenges to navigate. Therefore by implementing this tactic in my work ethic, I am able to wake up the next day feeling replenished, cognitively fresh and ready to start my new deep work day.

Implementing these lessons learned from Deep Work has been hugely advantageous not only to my productivity but also my mental health. Having the 5pm cut off allows me to leave feelings of guilt at my desk and feel fulfilled whilst relaxing in the evenings. I have found that scheduling every minute of work allows me to visualise my mental discipline which maintains my focus on a given task for longer, therefore increasing my efficiency. I will continue to use these working skills in the future to continue growing my skillset whilst also keeping myself sane at the same time.