If only your office were quieter, if your colleagues would quit asking questions, if the phone would stop ringing. If you could shut out all distractions, surely you could do your best work. But then, there are all the times that something randomly gave you a great idea, the time you accidentally found something important in the mess and made something brilliant
Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World
Block out distraction and work on only one task without anything else in your mind
- Work deeply: set aside time to work on projects without distractions
- Embrace boredom: stop checking your phone all the time
- Quit social media
- Only keep tools that bring the most value
- Drain the shallows: scratch the least important work
- Reduce commitments that don’t bring as much results, to focus on the things that do help achieve your goals
Do the most valuable work
You need to do your very best work, keep learning throughout your life, and push yourself to try new things. If you can’t learn, you cannot thrive.
- Push yourself to keep learning. Push yourself away from the simpler tasks that can be automated away and focus on the hardest tasks that cannot.
Make Your Workspace Your Own
The best workplaces aren’t sterile, but they’re not creative by command, either
- They’re the places where you can put stuff where you want and have control over your own work
- You can choose to focus and shut out distractions, or you can switch to a different task when you’re stuck
Messy
Tim Harford’s Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives takes you to concert halls and highways, Olympic proving grounds, and landmark monuments.
- The author talks with Brian Eno, peeks at David Bowie’s magic, and explains what made Martin Luther King, Jr.’s best speeches great
- Even London commuters were forced to find alternate routes to work during a strike, and found improvements in their commute.
Set Quality Goals-Don’t Just do Busywork
Deadlines and goals you’re held accountable for can be the creative constraints that force you to do focused work-and sometimes can make you do amazing stuff.
- Make sure those goals are about the most important things
- Figure out what matters, and do that
- Break up your routines and try new things
Doing Deep Work, Messy Style
The world is increasingly distracting, often from our own doing, and that’s not going to help you do more creative Messy or Deep work.
