Introduction

This week’s book report it’s on a book called Deep Work by Cal Newport. I love sharing these books with you, it’s my favorite video of the month to be honest! If you aren’t a reader, here’s a tip… I listen to a lot of books on a platform called Audible. Check it out!

What is Deep Work?

This idea behind Deep Work is that when we’re scatterbrained, when we’re all over the place, we can’t really get into what we are doing. I want you to think about on-boarding and off-boarding or maybe on-ramping and off-ramping onto a freeway. The on-ramp is designed to be long enough to get your car up to speed before you merge into traffic. Imagine if your on-ramp was incredibly short…you would go into 70 mph traffic so suddenly that you would get rear-ended. Same thing with off-ramping, you have to slow down a little bit to get into a lane, otherwise the cars behind you are going to rear-end you before you get off.

It’s been proven that when we’re trying to do deep work like tackle projects or problems that we need to solve, it takes us about 20-25 minutes to get into our zone. Then it takes us about another 20-25 minutes to transition to another project. If we’re only doing a few minutes of work here and there, we never actually get into what we are doing.

Deep Work is about how to structure your life, your job, and your calendar so you can really get into your projects, I never work on a block of time for less than an hour. Occasionally, I do 30-minute blocks but that’s more for meaningless tasks like data entry. If I’m thinking on a project, I try to block out three or even four hours so I can really get into that work and not have any distractions. Sometimes I leave the office or sometimes I make sure that nobody is in my home office so I’m not distracted.

There’s a lot of techniques in this book and I don’t want to give you all the details because I want you to read it. If you find that you’re unable to solve big problems or you keep starting projects and not finishing them, chances are it’s because you’re just constantly dabbling in them and not really in it.

I really love this book (Deep Work by Cal Newport) and if you get interested in this field there’s five or six other great books, programs online, theories and courses that you can take. I’ve been through a lot of them and can tell you that they’ve helped me go from a little bit of success to a lot of success. The biggest change came when I learned how to master my calendar and get into this idea of deep work.

I hope you enjoyed this book report and I look forward to bringing you another video just like this next week.