Omar Usman – Deep Work Cal Newport 3 Things I Learned
AI: Summary ©
The benefits of deep work include reducing distraction, improving productivity, and creating new insights. It is crucial to master hard things and maximizing all of one's time for efficiency. The speaker emphasizes the importance of practicing deliberate practice, embracing boredom, and a "brane work" approach to productivity. deep work is necessary for our personal and professional life, and the need for personal and professional development is emphasized. The speaker provides advice on how to start a workday, emphasizes the importance of signaling to our mind that our work is done even at a low level, and provides advice on how to start a workday.
AI: Summary ©
In this video, I'm sharing 3 things I
learned from the book Deep Work by Cal
Newport. Now this is not a productivity book.
This is really a book about understanding
how your mind works, particularly
in the age of social media and in
an age where most of us are involved
in knowledge work and in this information economy.
And to understand deep work, it's important that
we understand maybe by defining the opposite first.
Shallow work
is, by definition,
the work that is not cognitively heavy. It's
the work that tends to really fill our
days. Things like emails, things like responding to
instant messages,
a lot of the, you know, repetitive meetings
that we have throughout the day. It's fragmented
work. Oftentimes, it's work that, you know, sometimes
doesn't need your full attention. A lot of
times, we will,
you know, be on our phone doing one
thing while responding to an email, or sometimes
we'll have a TV show on in the
background while we're working. And that's because it's
that shallow work that doesn't require full attention.
The important thing to understand about shallow work
is that shallow work is the default.
Meaning, unless you've intentionally
set aside time to do deep work or
it's part of your routine and your habit,
it's not going to happen. What will happen
without any effort is shallow work. It will
fill your time
unless you actively fight against it. Now the
first lesson that I learned from Deep Work
is, well, the value of Deep Work. And
when we understand
this idea, particularly, again, as I said, in
a knowledge in a knowledge job, in an
information economy,
the idea of someone
taking a problem, taking an issue,
just taking something
and focusing on it for hours and hours,
uninterrupted,
not fragmented attention,
but really letting their mind
tackle this problem, grapple with it, uncover,
you know, layers of complexity and get to
the root of the issue.
That type of thinking
is valuable
because that type of thinking, well, one, is
often not replicated. Right? Because most
people are involved in shallow work. Most people,
they haven't trained their mind to be able
to do deep work. Right? It's it's difficult.
A lot of us, we can't focus even
if we've got,
you know, a few minutes here and there.
We're checking our phone. We're checking our email.
So the idea of going deep on a
subject,
thinking about it,
pondering over it, reflecting on it, giving your
mind the space to
make new connections,
Connect that thing to other ideas. Maybe find
different ways of looking at it. Right? We
always talk about thinking outside the box. Well,
thinking outside the box really requires a lot
of deliberate effort looking at a problem
and going deep, connecting it to other ideas,
developing
insights
that other people might not be able to.
That's how you create your own values that
I'm able to take something, I can spend
more time on it than anyone else and
because of my ability to focus and to
go deep,
I'm able to think about this in ways
and develop insights
about this issue that other people are not
able to and that skill is rare and
because it's rare, that's what makes it more
and more valuable.
One thing that Newport mentions in the book,
he says, thriving in the new economy requires
the ability to master hard things and the
ability
to produce at an elite level in terms
of both quality and speed.
One way of doing that is with what
he terms deliberate practice.
Taking a skill that you wanna develop
and, you know, quite literally practicing it, but
practicing it with full attention,
getting feedback, iterating on it, and just, you
know, actually developing that skill.
One thing that he says is that shallow
work is something that prevents deliberate
practice
because the more that you try to spend
time focusing on a skill and developing it,
the more easily distracted you are, the harder
it's going to be. So the deliberate practice
that you need to develop new skills and
further grow yourself,
that requires deep work.
The second thing I learned was the idea
of embracing boredom.
Now if you if you ever read, like,
productivity books or heard productivity lectures, they always
talk about maximizing all of your time, making
the most efficient use of your time. You
know, I remember hearing one phrase that stuck
with me for a long time which was,
you know, make your car a university.
Meaning that when you're commuting, when you're driving,
don't waste that time. Listen to an audiobook
or listen to a podcast, listen to a
lecture, something to
benefit you you and grow you and so
on.
Now that we're inundated with information
all of the time,
it it becomes that much more important to
embrace boredom. See, when we especially with social
media and all of these things,
being at a red light sometimes we take
out our phone to check our email. Waiting
in line at the grocery store, we take
out our phone and we're
engaging in shallow work. Right? We're texting. We're
consuming content. We're reading things and so on
and so forth.
The net effect of all of that is
that our mind doesn't get time to rest.
The same way after a workout, your muscles
need time to rest,
the mind also needs time to rest and
to recharge. You know, one thing that's interesting
is you think about the idea of shower
thoughts that when people are taking a shower,
all of a sudden these amazing ideas come
to them. Well, part of the reason for
that is because we're giving our mind a
break. We're not actively on our phone. We're
not actively doing something else. The mind needs
time
to process all the information that you've been
giving it so that it can develop connections
and develop insights. And so to, you know,
counterintuitively,
to train ourselves to be able to do
deep work
means getting comfortable with the idea of being
bored, of going and taking a walk without
your headphones, without your phone, just
actively sitting and and doing nothing. If you've
seen that movie Office Space that, you know,
came out in the late 19 100,
you know, there's that famous line where the
guy says I did absolutely nothing and it
was everything I dreamed of.
So
in order to be productive, in order to
be able to do this deep, focused, valuable
work, you have to train yourself and almost
practice
being able to do nothing
and being okay with being bored. The third
thing I learned from deep work is, and
this is probably my favorite thing in the
book, is the idea of a shutdown routine,
which for me is much more important
than your morning routine.
See, what happens is after a day of
work, we we log out. Right? We log
out. We get away from our computer,
but work's not really done. We still check
our work emails on our phone. We're still
check you know, looking at our calendar.
We're replaying, you know, conversations in our head.
We're reliving meetings that we had during the
day. And even though, you know, you're doing
other things, maybe you're cooking dinner, maybe you've
gone out for a walk, you're you're doing
other things in the evening, but work is
still occupying real estate in your head. It's
still occupying brain space.
And,
occupying real estate in your head. It's still
occupying brain space. And one thing that he
says is that the more that that work
is, you know, that those unfinished tasks make
it hard for you to turn off work.
And so you engage in that shallow work
even at, like, maybe a very low level,
but you're engaged in shallow work and you're
not able to turn it off. In order
to turn it off, you need to somehow
signal to your mind that the workday is
done. One good way of doing this is
just having a routine
to end your workday. So it might mean
going back to your inbox,
clearing out your emails. Maybe you're organizing them.
Hey. Here's something I need to follow-up on
tomorrow, putting them maybe in a separate folder
so that your inbox is clean when you
come in in the morning. Maybe it's looking
at your calendar,
you know, before you log out, making sure
you've got the rest of the day set
up. It's taking stock of all the things
that you didn't get done and maybe you
make your to do list for the next
morning
before you log out from work. So that
way you you instill confidence within yourself
that
when I log in in the morning,
I'm not going to be worried about all
of these different things. I'm already going to
have a game plan for what I need
to do. That level of confidence,
that's what you need to signal to your
mind my day is done. I've shut down,
and now I no longer have to think
about work. One thing that Newport says in
the book, he says, you know what? Go
over the top. Maybe you close your laptop
and you just say out loud,
I am done working for the day. Right?
Have some type of a routine
that signals the day is done, and now
I'm going to stop thinking about work and
free my mind up for something else.
That's 3 things I learned from the book
Deep Work. If you enjoyed the video, please
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I'll see you in the next episode.