Deep Work Essentials: How to Fight Boredom and Improve Focus

In this second blog post based on Cal Newport’s book Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, we will discuss strategies to combat boredom, train your brain to focus, and reduce shallow, time-consuming activities.

You can find the first article on this topic here.

How to Overcome Boredom

When you feel like there’s “nothing to do” or you just don’t want to keep working, resist the urge to rush to Instagram or YouTube. Instead, think of an alternative activity that will benefit you in the long run.

We rarely regret working out, eating healthy, or reading a book. However, it’s common to regret spending the day surfing the web or watching movies on Netflix, especially when we realize the extra calories we consumed due to mindless eating or how we didn’t accomplish anything important that day.

So what do you like to do? Find something that enriches your life. It will spark your creativity and improve your well-being.

The ability to concentrate intensely is a skill that must be trained. Getting the most out of your deep work sessions requires training, and this training must address two goals: improving your ability to concentrate intensely and overcoming your desire for distraction.

Disconnect From Technology

To succeed with deep work, you must rewire your brain to resist distracting stimuli.

Avoid the Internet During Focus Hours

Avoid using the Internet during your deep work sessions. Use an app and website blocker that restricts access to all websites except those that are essential to your work.

An app and website blocker can significantly reduce your exposure to addictive and unwanted content such as social media, YouTube, Netflix, adult sites, and more.

Schedule Offline Blocks

Designate specific times during the day to be offline and train yourself not to surf the web during these periods. Turn off your devices and rest, read a book, spend time with your family, play with your dog or enjoy nature.

Tool Selection

Choosing the right tools to support your efforts to achieve deep work can significantly increase your productivity and well-being. The appropriate tools help you focus and succeed in both your professional and personal life. However, some tools can be distracting or inefficient.

Here is a strategic approach to evaluating and selecting the technology and networking tools that align with your goals:

• Identify key factors: Determine what drives success and happiness in your professional and personal life.
• Evaluate impact: Choose a tool only if its positive impact on these factors substantially outweighs its negative impact.
• Align with goals: Keep your professional and personal goals in mind when selecting the type of technology you will use regularly.
• Enhance efficiency: Select the networking tools and technologies that will make your life easier and help you complete your projects faster.
• Assess each tool: For each tool, assess whether it has a significant positive, negative, or minimal impact on your key activities.
• Make a decision: Continue using a tool only if its positive impacts outweigh the negative ones.

By carefully assessing the impact of each tool, you can make informed decisions that support your journey to deep, meaningful work.

Reduce the Use of Social Media

Cal Newport recommends quitting social media and outlines the pros and cons of using it. However, for many, this may be a difficult step to take. You might need to use social media daily to promote your product. Nowadays, even doctors use these platforms to promote their clinics or services.

While social media is great for keeping in touch with friends or reconnecting with childhood buddies, the risk of becoming addicted to it, and damaging your mental health through the unrealistic beauty standards or cyberbullying, is too high. If you can’t quit social media for personal or professional reasons, at least try to limit the time you spend on it. There are blockers you can use to help you do this, like 1Focus, Parental Control, or Screen Time on Mac.

Social media and some online tools fragment our time and reduce our ability to focus. Since willpower is limited, the more distractions you have pulling your attention, the harder it will be to focus and concentrate on what is important.

To master the art of deep work, you must take back control of your time and attention from the many diversions that attempt to steal them.

I only allow myself 10 minutes a day to use social media. I use Family Link on my phone and 1Focus on my Mac. I also have an accountability partner who has the password needed to increase the daily allowance if I need to post or respond to something.

Since adopting this approach, I have realized that using social media does not add significant value to my personal or professional life. This realization has made it easier for me to continue using the blocker.

When you spend time on low-impact activities, you are using up time that could be better spent on high-impact activities. Because your time will return substantially more reward when invested in high-impact activities, the more time you allocate to low-impact activities, the lower your overall benefit or productivity will be.

Use the 80/20 Rule

The 80/20 rule states that 80% of a given effect is due to only 20% of the possible causes. In other words, 20% of our actions produce most of the benefits we receive.

Our time is limited. Everything you do, regardless of its importance, consumes your limited supply of time and attention. So why not give your full attention to only those things that will unquestionably move you closer to your goal?

Plan in Advance

Social media and similar online tools are designed to be compelling and addictive, making them especially harmful. They provide a cognitive crutch to eliminate any chance of boredom, weakening your mind’s general ability to resist distraction and making deep work difficult when you really want and need to concentrate.

A way to reduce internet usage is to think of more beneficial ways to use your free time. Plan in advance what you will do in your leisure time. Since the internet is particularly appealing after work when you are tired and hungry, dedicate some advance thinking to how you want to spend your day.

It’s crucial to figure out in advance what you are going to do with your evenings and weekends before they begin (read, exercise, work on a new hobby or personal project, spend time with family and friends, play with your dog, etc.).

If you give your mind something meaningful to do throughout all your waking hours, you will end the day more fulfilled and begin the next one more relaxed than if you allow your mind to bathe for hours in semiconscious and unstructured web surfing.

If you want to eliminate the addictive pull of entertainment sites on your time and attention, give your brain a quality alternative. Not only will this preserve your ability to resist distraction and concentrate, but you might even fulfill the goal of experiencing what it means to live and not just exist.

Train Your Brain to Produce Deep Work

• Select a difficult task from your priority list.
• Estimate how long it would normally take you to complete this task.
• Give yourself a hard deadline that drastically reduces this time.
• Tell a colleague or friend to keep you accountable or use a countdown app.
• There should be only one possible way to get the deep task done in time: working with great intensity without distractions.
• Try this experiment no more than once a week at first to give your brain and stress levels time to rest in between.
• Once you feel confident in your ability to trade concentration for completion time, increase the frequency of these dashes.

Train Your Memory

• Use the Memory Palace technique to train your memory.
• Do puzzles.
• Learn to finish a Rubik’s cube.

Read more in our article: How to Improve Your Memory: Techniques for Cognitive Boost

Deepen Your Focus Through Teamwork

Working side-by-side with someone on a problem can push you both into deeper levels of concentration, resulting in more valuable output than working alone. Consider collaboration when appropriate, as it can take your results to a new level.

Drain the Shallows

Shallow work consists of non-cognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks often performed while distracted. These efforts typically do not create much new value and are easy to replicate.

Examples of shallow work include answering emails, attending meetings, and administrative tasks.

Spending too much time in a frenetic state of shallowness can permanently reduce your ability to do deep work. To succeed, you need to do the absolute best work you are capable of doing – work that requires depth.

Treat shallow work with suspicion because its damage is often vastly underestimated and its importance vastly overestimated. While this type of work is inevitable, you must confine it to a point where it doesn’t impede your ability to fully engage in deeper efforts that ultimately determine your impact.

Deep work is exhausting because it pushes you to the limit of your abilities. For someone new to this practice, an hour a day is a reasonable limit. For someone trained, the limit can expand to around four hours.

Schedule Every Minute of Your Day

• Use time blocking.
• Plan your day using a digital tool like Google Calendar or write it down on paper.
• Divide the hours of your day into blocks and assign activities to each block.
• Each minute of your day should be part of a block. When you are done scheduling, you have effectively given every minute of your day a task.
• As you go through your day, use this schedule as a guide.
• Experiment and adjust as needed.

The motivation behind this strategy is to understand that focusing deeply on your work means valuing your time. A good first step toward respecting your time is to plan ahead and clearly outline what you intend to accomplish each day.

Quantify the Depth of Every Planned Activity

Once you have scheduled your day and have an idea of everything you need to do, you should classify all the activities into deep and shallow work. To help you do this, remember the concept of shallow work presented above.

Schedule deep work sessions for no more than four hours a day to avoid mental fatigue and burnout. One to four hours a day of deep work is sufficient, as it is very exhausting and requires a high level of cognitive attention.

Create a Fixed Work Schedule and Stick to It

If you work from home or have flexible hours, create a daily schedule and stick to it. If you work in an office or a place with set hours, make an effort to actually work during the official time. Plan your activities and responsibilities so that you can accomplish your goals for the day and get home on time.

There are always exceptions, of course. If you’re a surgeon, dentist, or work in a hospital, you can’t just leave in the middle of a surgery because “it’s 5 p.m.” Some types of work cannot be left unfinished. But as much as you can, plan your workday in advance, work only 8 hours a day, and go home without working extra hours. Otherwise, you will be exhausted, and it will take you longer to produce quality work.

Go home, rest, reset, and continue the next day. One way to do this is to reduce superficial work and focus on the big and important projects for your company.

Learn to Say No Without Apologizing

Don’t jump in to help every colleague in need or answer every email and phone call as they come. Reduce superficial activities during the day, as every 5-minute interruption adds up at the end of the day, not to mention the cognitive cost of lost concentration.

Become Hard to Reach

In his book, Cal Newport describes several strategies for dealing with emails. Here, I will expand a little and apply these strategies to any type of communication:

• Don’t just respond to every email, WhatsApp, social media message, text, or phone call the moment it arrives.
• People will usually respect your right to be inaccessible if those periods are well-defined and well-advertised, and you are easy to find outside of those periods.
• You don’t always have to reply. “It’s the sender’s responsibility to convince the receiver that a reply is worthwhile.”
• Sort through which messages require a response and which do not.
• People are quick to adjust their expectations to the specifics of your communication habits.
• When you do respond, try to be specific so the communication is clear. Before answering, take a few minutes to think through a process that gets you from the current state to a desired outcome with a minimum of messages required. Write a reply that clearly describes this process and where you stand.
• Depending on the subject, a call might even be more productive and better than an “email battle”.
• If it is work-related, sometimes even a face-to-face meeting can bring faster and more effective clarification because it is simply easier to understand the other person, and there is less potential for misunderstandings.

Conclusion

By implementing strategies to combat boredom, disconnect from technology, reduce social media use, and schedule your day effectively, you can train your brain to produce high-quality work. Remember, the ability to concentrate intensely is a skill that must be cultivated. With consistent practice and dedication, you can significantly enhance your productivity and achieve your professional and personal goals.

Further Reading

You may also like: Deep Work: Mastering Focus and Time Management.

The recommendations in this article are based on the book “Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World” by Cal Newport, and have been adapted by the author of this article from her personal experience and opinions. This article is not sponsored and no compensation was received for its creation.