Cultivate the Skill of Undivided Attention, or “Deep Work” (2019)

From a macro perspective though I've gradually come to the view that the average amount of work a man can get done if he's really trying is more or less the same. You might see someone else able to work non stop but that might be because he's doing mindless repetitive tasks. For things requiring more brainpower it's impossible to run 100%. You also get to a point where physical quirks might be the limiting factor. I've had a few times times where I've forced myself to push on with something, pulling all nigjters and what not, and suffered physical and mental burnout consequently which averages out the "productive" period before. Consequently I've taken on a more zen approach to pushing myself, try my best but don't overdo it cause sometimes it might backfire.

A bit like telling someone stuck in a wheelchair after an accident to "just stand up", isn't it?

But after a longer period of regular, hard exercise, they just might.

Retraining your brain might take just as long. No "snap out of it" solution is going to work. Write down small goals, improve gradually, persist, feel good when you make progress.

The feeling is almost a communication sign to get care from others in order to diffuse the fear. The minute you exchanged with someone caring enough for you, distress goes down 50%.

When you're in deep depression, this system is distorded and you can't exit the pit with simple talk. But the truth is, ignoring your emotions at this time proves helpful. It's almost insane and puts your intellect through a lot. But I think that's the basis of "don't feel sad". You have to believe that the rainy day will fade, harder than the distress signal running in your mind right now

my 2 cents.

If you're just starting out running, you shouldn't say "ok I'm gonna run a marathon". That might be your end goal, but the actual achievable goal in the meantime is to make incremental progress.

Schedule (yes, actually put on your calendar) time to engage in focused work. Start with 5 minutes a day. You won't get any actual deep work done at first, but that's fine. It's about building the muscle. Add 5 minutes a day, or every other day if you're struggling. It quickly adds up - you'll be at an hour within 2 weeks if you make steady progress.

If you fail to achieve your goal, note it and try again tomorrow. If you repeatedly fail, subtract 5 minutes and keep at that level until you're comfortable with adding more time.

Much like exercising, this small incremental progress is also something you may have to fall back on when you lose track of it for awhile.

Another approach I’ve seen on here is to use a VPN that adds multi-second lag to addictive websites to make them less addictive.

1. Be honest with yourself

If I can't even say "I need to lose weight" or "I should quit smoking" then there is no place to start.

This is a very, very easy step and require such minimal effort that I truly believe everyone in every state can do this step.

You can stop reading right now, pick something you have an issue with, and say it to yourself. (mine: "If I focus intently on work for even a short time, I know I will be better off long term.")

2. Repeat #1 forever... so be careful what truth you say to yourself.

With work focus, any time I got distracted (and I recognized that I was) I would repeat to myself that I would be better off being focused.

Again, I think anyone in any state of mind can do this step as well.

3. Remind yourself of past success.

If you have had no success in life at all, tell yourself others have done it. If you have, just say in your mind "I've done this before, I can do it again".

Remember, so far this is all internal mental dialogue. So I feel everyone can do these.

4. Do it once.

This is where it starts to get harder, but if you've done 1-3 for say _months_ one day #4 will be easier than it was in the past. It sounds stupid, but it's worth trying once, right?

So I "buckled down" and tried really, really hard to focus on my work. And I did for a few minutes... :P

5. Keep doing 1-3 even if you fail repeatedly at #4.

So, I focused once at working. I got into a groove and then I failed. Time goes by, I keep going back to it, trying again and again. Failing repeatedly. Sometimes I did a little more, many times doing poorly. Keep in mind I have had years where I worked like a dog, and was very focused, but I lost that drive, and I want it back. In some ways this is harder than starting from nothing. (my experience)

6. If you could do it once, tell yourself you can do it again.

Again, internal dialogue. I believe everyone can do this.

I had to do this step for months on some of my problems before I could face them again.

6. Pay attention to exactly what is causing you fail at #4.

This is one of the hardest problems to face (not the hardest though). I found that if I ate lunch at my desk, I would watch a youtube video, because I couldn't work while I ate. But after I was done eating, I found my motivation to work was just slightly diminished. Not much, but some.

7. Tell yourself the truth about what caused you to fail.

This is a little hard, but not really. Internal dialogue again, it costs you nothing to be honest with yourself, and you have everything to gain.

The truth for me was that if I ate at a table away from my desk, I interacted with people (I _thought_ this was distracting before) and when I went back to my desk I wasn't _motivated_ to work, but also I was _demotivated_.

This was the needle in the haystack for me.

If I hadn't gone through all the processes before, I would not have discovered this tiny difference.

The truth was, I didn't _want_ to eat at the table, I liked watching youtube videos about machining during lunch, but it made me relax into my chair and forget about the technical issue I was working on myself in my code.

Where when I was eating lunch at a table, all I could think about was the coding I had done before, and what I was going to do when I got back. Even if I talked with people and got distracted, at least I didn't have to fight the urge to turn off a video and refocus my entire mental state back towards work.

8. Make a change

This is the beginning of the hardest part. The change I needed to make was permanently not sitting at my desk while eating lunch. A forever change.

A. I had told myself what the truth is, I want to focus at work...

B. I had gotten myself once to try and focus, and I succeeded once.

C. I told myself that I could do it again, repeatedly until I did it a second time, then a third, but failed for a long time.

D. While failing, I could clearly now see what caused the failure. Without failing I could not see what was wrong.

E. I told myself what was wrong. (videos demotivated/distracted me from my previously focused state)

F. I trusted myself _at least once_ to try something else (again, only once was needed) and found that eating lunch in a different location did not rob me of motivation in the same way.

G. Something should happen.... (right?)

9. Remind yourself of everything you've proved true. Especially, _especially_ when you don't want to.

SPECIAL NOTE: No major struggles existed throughout this process. None. 95% of this process is internal dialogue. Don't lie to yourself.

10. NEVER give yourself a way out with internal dialogue.

If you give yourself an out you will take it. Fail honestly. You can say "I know what the truth is, I just can't handle doing it today, I know I am failing" is just fine to day.

Do NOT say "Maybe I can't do this" or "This is just to hard, maybe I can try once in a while." Or anything that supports quitting of any kind. Why? Because this process is all about internal dialogue, and I believe this is the one place where "fake it till you make it" doesn't exist at all. True honesty with yourself isn't fake. And true honesty with yourself costs you nothing and takes an instant in time.

So, if you are having a bad day just be honest, say "I failed". You don't have to tell anyone, so I believe everyone can do this. I have failed thousands of times on some things I have worked at changing.

11. Share and remember your successes

Maybe you don't want to tell other people when you've had success, but you say it to yourself. The more successes you have, the easier it will be keep on track. And the easier it will be to tackle the next problem.

Failure is just fine. Why? Because you are failing right now, and you are 100% better off by trying and failing than not trying at all. So dive in and do terrible a 100 times.

What I learned from this was to be happy with other people failing while trying. I could see a spark of change that if encouraged could blossom into something complete new and better for them (or both of us) if they continued.

So, you may find through this process that things outside yourself may change in unexpected ways as well.

Conclusion: Be honest with yourself, 100% pure brutal honesty (it's in your own head, you can do this right now). Failure is expected and is totally ok! The only requirement is honestly acknowledging to yourself that you failed. Look for the cause of failure honestly, even if you can't deal with it. Tell yourself your cause of failure. Do something different once. Just once. (everyone can do something once) Tell yourself the truth about what was different. Don't give yourself an out of any kind. You don't need one from just being honest.

First time I started running, I ran in pajamas and crocs. I just did it. It was lame and silly, but I did it once. With work focus, I found _multiple_ things that were distracting me, not just eating at my desk. I have changed how I talk with people, developed more patience, lost weight, stopped swearing (almost entirely, eesh), and many other changes with this simple process.

I realize you may not believe this will work, but it's literally possible for everyone to try step 1 and takes nearly _zero_ seconds to do, so why not try it out?

(Sorry this got wordy and long, but you've brought up an issue close to me, and I've had too many hard times in the past with the "just stop doing X" or worse "X is your problem" (derp, derp) advice without a real method to consider to overcome my heart and mind issues with even getting started)

Over the past year, through a combination of actually getting ADHD treatment, writing, and a course on Rapid Software Testing, I've learned a decent about this. So progress is possible, but it takes hard thought.

I highly recommend https://rapid-software-testing.com/ by the way. Honestly transformative for my mental health.

It's called "wiggle your pinky". If you're on the couch and cannot get up, just try to wiggle your pinky. If you have enough willpower for that, move your arm. Then move your legs, put your feet on the floor, and you're already halfway through getting up.

The same with a difficoult (programming) task. Just open the file in the text editor, without having the intention to actually do something. Then scroll a bit through the code. Something might catch your interest. After a minute, you're already in the middle of the task.

Summarized: Just do the tiniest step into the direction of your goal, without the intention of actually doing anything to reach that goal.

Sometimes this awareness is enough to change bad mental habits. But there are other things that you continue to do even if you understand that you don't want it. These are "imprints" NLP terminology.

To change these imprints my friend does really long Vipassana sessions for more than 10 hours. She claims to change at least one strong imprint that was "panic when staying at home alone". Which is related to an event happened when she was less than a year old.

I have not tried so long Vipassana sessions and to change my imprints I do Connirae Andreas "Core Transformation" technique. It's easier to have other person do it to you, however with enough determination you can train to do it by yourselves. Unfortunately it's still a lot of efforts to learn it. Anyway may be that helps.

Still learning how to do that effectively, though. In work context, talking to people and bringing every one on same page seems to help. Approaching the task a complete novice is an interesting way to look at it.

There can be a lot more involved than I (consciously) noticed.

There can be a lot less... just the scary chance of it being much worse.

Now I find it much harder to get going because it's so easy to fall down the 'what if' and 'what else' and 'is this going to be good enough?'.

If I start 'playing' it typically works out... typically!

I have this gut feeling it's pretty high, at least in the tech industry. I don't believe this is problematic but it feels like a taboo topic. If use is common we should be better about talking openly about it.

Solution? Throw away your iPhone.

  Fish gotta swim, Bird gotta fly
  Man gotta ask himself Why why why

If you want to know if someone has learned the material from a course, have them take a test. The test result is a lagging indicator that shows what has happened.

If you want to know if someone will learn the material, compare their study habits with the study habits of proven good students. Their study habits are a leading indicator that shows what is likely to happen.

1) ask your manager what the team's responsibilities are.

2) hear why the company exists at every quarterly meeting.

"should"

There are all kinds of religiously inspired meditation practices, which are, again, probably fine if they're your thing.

Main point of any meditation that I know of, is cultivating awareness. You can do that in formal meditation classes, or you could do that while going fishing. It comes down to preference and perseverance.

In my desk diary I have a target of x number of pomodoro's for the week so that adds a goal to it, which I know helps motivate some people.