Deep work in practice: reimagining my workflow for radically less distraction

whew! you're nailing it, good thing you're not taking silly breaks like going on hacker news and posting comments instead of working!

It's a nice sentiment, but the products/sites/apps that aim to suck our attention are designed to exploit human weaknesses via dopamine release, variable reward etc. (see the book Hooked), making it exceedingly difficult and potentially expending your finite store of willpower on things you could much more easily avoid altogether.

Personally, cultivating the self-control to avoid checking facebook.com is less interesting to me than editing my hosts files to block it, and using my willpower for more rewarding tasks (exercise, learning piano etc.)

With that, I'm turning my block back on HN :)

(Disclosure: I have ADHD, I've been using pretty much all the ideas in this article, and some others, for ages to supplement my meds.)

Perhaps you're of the minority who has discipline and self-control to resist all the modern world has to offer. Chasing dopamine hits, from net and phone distractions, is habit forming. As it has become a habit most people aren't realising how often they're doing it.

It's easier for me. I know I don't have self-control or sense of time. I set myself up to manage accordingly. I see it as setting up for success. Do you think the many who use headphones and music in office are self-restricting and should use some self-control too?

When I was working on fitness I had a personal trainer. I could have done it alone, but the extra accountability meant I tried harder and didn't skip sessions. I think everyone gets the same benefit.

Pomodoro just constrains the time. You only have to do 25 minutes of thing before you get a break. Taking breaks improves focus. Every 2 I stretch, walk away from the desk maybe grab a drink.

"I think self-control should be valued higher than self-restriction."

Well, I wish it could be that way. But it's not. Or, at least, it's not even an issuing of valuing one more than the other. Using self-restriction strategies is based on understanding and acknowledging that our self-control is not as strong as we want it to be, our level of self-control varies over time and may not be as strong in the future as it is right now, and our level of self-control is not wholly within our power.

What you call "self-restriction" strategies involve changing things so we don't need to assert self-control (will power) as much, but still get the benefits. Yes, this conflicts to some extent with (an old-fashioned, inaccurate, unjustified) view that ties lack of self-discipline to lack of personal responsbility. But the emphasis on self-restriction is actually an enlightened way of being _more_ responsible. You can (1) forego self-restriction and rely entirely on self-control and self-discipline as distractions come up, or (2) you can acknowledge, sadly, that self-control is limited and use self-restriction methods to reduce the need to rely on self-control as much. Which of those two is more responsible?

The author of the article ends it by suggesting that, although he hasn't found it, "there may be magical fix". That's wishful thinking. Yes, the "internet era" has made this stuff harder, but it has never been easy.

It's a form of procrastination, especially frequent when you are tired, unsure of how to tackle what you're doing, or just don't like what you're supposed to be doing. The worst is when you run a compiler or something and it takes 5 seconds. You obviously can't just stare at empty space for that long so you go spend 5 minutes on the internet.

The slower your tools, the viciouser the cycle.

Opening the internet on encountering any sort of difficulty or setback in your task is a particularly vicious reflex. Sometimes I'm on my phone or checkinn slack or whatever before I even consciously realize whay I'm doing.

Pomodore helps bring a modicum of structure to that behavior by keeping me off the internet for 25min and then letting the flood gates loose for 5min. It fails in the face of slow tools of course.

> Do people really have a problem just riding the flow and not heading off to hackernews mid-task (honest question)?

I find myself seeking distraction everytime I hit the compile shortcut and have to wait 10-20 seconds to test my code. The later in the day, the harder it is for me to resist the urge.

I think I need a faster machine or to compile less often.

    Do people really have a
    problem just riding the
    flow and not heading off 
    to hackernews mid-task 
    (honest question)?

Yes, lots of people have problems staying focused.

I have on more than one occasion even caught myself thinking "now I'm really in the zone, maybe I should check reddit"... But why would that help anything?

To me both the valuing of self-restriction rather than self-control and Pomodoro have similar reasoning behind them.

Self-control requires you to continuously spend willpower to resist, while self-restriction removes that continuous drain on willpower (a finite resource). Similarly Pomodoro tells you when to take a break and when to concentrate, no decisions required.

I'm not sure how valid this model of willpower is but it seems to have truth behind it. I personally find pomodoro breaks to be way too frequent, although I did do it for a while and found that it was amazing training for being better at focusing and falling back into flow after a break.

Self-control is hard, and at the end of the day, most people don't care whether they've made themselves into a stronger person in the course of doing their work. They just care that they did their work.

If you have goals in life, you’re probably going to need some sort of organization. Even if it’s an organization of just you, it’s still helpful to think of it as a kind of machine. You don’t need to do every part of the process yourself — you just need to set up the machine so that the right outcomes happen.

For example, let’s say you want to build a treehouse in the backyard. You’re great at sawing and hammering, but architecture is not your forte. You build and build, but the treehouses keep falling down. Sure, you can try to get better at architecture, develop a better design, but you can also step back, look at the machine as a whole, and decide to fire yourself as the architect. Instead, you find a friend who loves that sort of thing to design the treehouse for you and you stick to actually building it. After all, your goal was to build a treehouse whose design you like — does it really matter whether you’re the one who actually designed it?

Or let’s say you really want to get in shape, but never remember to exercise. You can keep beating yourself up for your forgetfulness, or you can put a system in place. Maybe you have your roommate check to see that you exercise before you leave your house in the morning or you set a regular time to consistently go to the gym together. Life isn’t a high school exam; you don’t have to solve your problems on your own.

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/nummi

This. I tried StayFocused [1] and Forest [2] (both excellent btw) but self-restriction is no substitute for self control.

I'd be restricted, but still unable to focus. And when I could focus, those restrictions were distracting.

Interesting you mention Bach. My background music as we speak... [3]

--

[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stayfocusd/laankej...

[2] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/forest-stay-focuse...

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqhR37qSUMA

Hmm.. I know self control has been shown to be something like a muscle that requires work and is fatigue-able. That work in itself is distracting. It's like part of you is being detoured already for your internal battle. Maybe a better strategy would be to learn how to trick yourself into really WANTING to do the work your aiming at. We're good at convincing ourselves to view things in whatever way is beneficial, and once you do that, you can focus your whole self on the task. Doing something you want to do is much more productive than doing something your trying hard to control yourself to do.

But this comes down to choosing between magnifying your talents or working on your weaknesses. We are evolutionary programmed to be very susceptible to interruptions. They were important once upon a time. We can spend effort trying to reprogram ourselves I guess. But I'd rather spend that effort elsewhere.

Also, when you're changing tasks, it's important to reclaim your attention from the previous task, so it can be fully reallocated.

More than just crossing off a task and taking a break, I take a moment to really notice my progress---what I accomplished, learned, implications, etc---and then write it down.

This little bit of reflection feels good (a small win!) and helps me close the task out from my attention. So then, I'm refreshed and ready for the next thing (after a glass of water, play with the puppies, etc).

The long term result is that I can look back at any day and see what I actually accomplished. Which is pretty sweet.

The way I do it is with a technique from Buddhist meditation. I watch the urge to switch to something, and intercept it by making note of it.

I sometimes use the "pomodoro" technique as a trigger, a way to beat procrastination. Often I have trouble starting to work on a problem if I'm unsure about what to do, I think it's similar to writer's block. That technique forces me to start working and once I'm started I can usually continue normally without need to use the timer.

As I get older, I find more value in choosing the most energy-efficient (mentally speaking) solution. Sure, I can simply use willpower to avoid distraction, but if I put the phone out of reach, then I get to use that willpower on other things instead.

This is the blog post that (I believe) coined the term:

http://calnewport.com/blog/2012/11/21/knowledge-workers-are-...

I was new to it as well when a commenter on my YouTube channel recommended the Deep Work book. Listened to the audio book and really, really appreciated it. Deep work is now something I aspire to get better at because I'd been feeling it was something I was missing for a while now.

I think of it like getting in the zone with coding where you get deeply valuable work done without distractions.

I feel like the hype around deep learning is slowly spreading to all "deep [Noun Phrase]" phrases.

I think it's a new term for something very old.

People who needed to do serious work went to monasteries or lived in caves.

The biggest distraction for many people is other people. Solitude is the way to get real work done.

There's a lot of interesting stuff here: http://www.hermitary.com/articles/

Looks good! I built a similar free app for iOS: http://longdayapp.com

Absolutely. I try and address this in the post when discussing the Pomodoro Technique, which is probably the most frequently cited "band-aid fix". But – these band aid fixes are a decent way of starting to train yourself to resist distraction, so aren't to be immediately dismissed.

I think this applies to escapism in general. Escapism is bad, but stopping it won't solve why you're escaping.

Stopping the escapism is still important.