Deep work: professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration
that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit.
These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.
This is the definition of deep work given by Cal Newport in his book with the same name.
It provides a clear-cut pathway to improve your academic or professional efforts by shifting
your mindset while you are working.
Deep work is valuable because it helps you learn hard things more quickly and allows
you to produce at an "elite" level in terms of quality and speed.
However, due to the media and also the way firms and companies are being structured,
shallow work seems to be preferred over deep work.
That means that those who are able to create opportunities to work deeply will thrive.
Since we will be covering some of the concepts found in the book it is highly recommended
that you delve into the concepts yourself.
If you want to listen to Deep Work , you should stay tuned to the end of this episode because
I'll show you how you can do that for free
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Deep work can be contrasted with shallow work, which comprises of 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.
But what is deep work all about?
Deep work requires you to maintain a high degree of concentration while working on hard
tasks.
Instead of relying on the notion of being busy, deep work is more focused on your ability
to be mindfully productive and tackle high quality work that has a clear-cut purpose
in your goals.
In a certain way, deep work applies concepts of minimalism and essentialism and translated
that into an activity that allows your attention to focus on a specific skill while always
remembering to receive feedback to correct your attention and delve even deeper into
your work.
Adam Grant uses a formula that basically states that High-Quality Work Produced equals time
spent multiplied by the intensity of focus.
With this in mind, by maximising the intensity of how you work, you are maximising the results
produced per unit of time spent.
But even if we just concluded that deep work is valuable, we also know that getting into
that state of mind can be incredibly hard.
That's why it's so important to transform our good intentions into habits and routines
that actually allow us to practice deep work.
[with phone] The barriers of deep work can be, at one hand, the so-called **culture of
connectivity** that requires you to be constantly connected.
This will distract you from your current tasks at work because there's a part of your mind
that's always expecting an e-mail, a message or other type of attention-seeking trigger.
This unables you to focus thoroughly in your work.
Furthermore, easier tasks will always be the tasks that we want to do.
They usually provide us with automatic rewards and our human brain is much more prone to
seek behaviours that result in quick rewards than seek behaviours that carry long-term
rewards, even if those are much better and more valuable.
The thing here to try to fight is the notion that by being busy you are being productive.
Busyness and productiveness are two terms that do not necessarily overlap.
Being busy is doing lots of stuff in a visible manner - small tasks that you can check off
your to-do list.
However, most of the times these tasks don't add up to a deeply rewarding conclusion or
allow you to progress in your work.
A good way to add more deep work into your life is to ritualize it or create a routine,
like doing some deep work at certain times of the day or week.
In doing this you should decide where you'll be working and for how long, how you'll work
and how you'll support your work.
Another thing that's really important is to reduce time spent in social media.
The focus here on social media is due to the draining power it has on your abillity to
focus and devote your available time for working.
Some strategies for this are silencing your phone, putting it on other room, uninstalling
apps, quiting one social media platform at a time, etc.
The key is to treat your phone as a powerful and useful tool to help you delve into a deep
work routine while also preventing it from dominating your life.
If you are interested in these concepts, you can actually listen to the entirety of Deep
Work for free in Audible, which is the sponsor of today's episode and is basically better
than ever: besides getting one free audiobook per month, which can be Deep Work or any other
book we've discussed in a past video like Essentialism or Atomic Habits (as well as
the many other best seller books they have in their catalogue), your subscription will
also give you access to 2 Audible Originals that you can't hear anything else, as well
as more than a hundred audio-guided fitness and meditation programs as newspapers like
the New York Times, Wall Street Journal or Washington Post, all delivered daily for free
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Basically Audible allows you to develop so many areas of your life by listening
Also, if you start reading Deep Work in your car, at the gym, or while commuting and decide
you hate it, you can also exchange your audiobook for other audiobook of your choice with no
hassles involved.
So you can start listening to Deep Work with your 30-day Audible so your first audiobook
plus two Audible Originals are free.
Visit [http://audible.com/mariana](http://audible.com/mariana) or text **(SMS Code)** to 500-500 to start
reading now.
If you are interested in these topics, I do a lot of videos on productivity, motivation
and organization so for all the latest content you can join our community and start your
learning journey here by subscribing to the channel.
I hope you've enjoyed today's episode and I will see you next week.
Bye guys!