How to be productive: staying focussed
How can you be productive if you can’t stay focussed?
The ability to keep our attention on the task at hand is the first and most important step to maximising your productivity. And yet, it's the step that many of us struggle with the most. Why is it so hard to concentrate?
The truth is that too often, we don’t even give ourselves the chance to focus. We allow distractions and interruptions to control our attention, instead of deciding where our focus is needed. To remedy this, we need to identify our most demanding tasks and ensure we won’t be interrupted when we tackle them.
Deep Work vs Shallow Work
Every task you do at work can be put into one of two categories - deep work or shallow work. Knowing which is which lets you schedule tasks for optimal performance:
Shallow Work
All of the short, repetitive, or ad hoc tasks you do fall into the shallow work category. These tasks have to be done – in fact most shallow work tasks, like replying to emails, are crucial to your job. But that doesn’t mean that they are engaging or challenge your creativity. Spend a day doing shallow work and you’ll feel busy, exhausted, and unfulfilled.
Instead of engaging your mind, shallow work can be boring, stressful, and unrewarding. That means we have to be careful about what type of work we prioritise, and when we do it. Since these tasks don’t need all of your attention, it’s a waste to spend your best hours on shallow work.
Deep Work
This is the really important one.
Deep work is the stuff you probably like most about work. It requires concentration and full attention for a sustained period. Deep work means spending at least an hour on a demanding task without any interruption or distraction.
Most people can only handle a few hours of deep concentration per day before their performance drops. But few of us even put aside the time to do that. When we do, the payoff is huge. Prioritising deep work will boost your productivity and the quality of your output.
Besides letting you get more done in a shorter work day, there is also a clear psychological benefit to deep work. Cal Newport, the author and computer scientist who coined the term, writes:
Deep work is also an activity that generates a sense of meaning and fulfilment in your professional life. Few come home energized after an afternoon of frenetic e-mail replies, but the same time spent tackling a hard problem in a quiet location can be immensely satisfying.
Attention is a limited resource
You need to start thinking of your daily attention as a limited resource. Every day the world is competing with you over that resource, and you’re not valuing it highly enough.
Picture this:
You’re in the middle of an important deep work task. An email notification from a client pops up. It only takes a minute or two to read it, so you click it. The email is asking for a response that will only take a few more minutes, so you do that too. Now you can just carry on with your deep work, right?
Wrong.
Switching between tasks has a lasting effect on your concentration. Cal Newport calls this cognitive residue. Once you’ve invested mental resources in a task, it takes an average of 23 minutes to get those resources back.
That ‘quick’ email really cost you half an hour of working with full focus. Let’s say you plan for 3 hours of deep work a day. You just lost almost 17% of your daily deep work productivity with one short disruption. Trivial interruptions like this cost us 60 work days a year on average.
Now remember the basic fact about deep concentration: we can only concentrate on a hard task for so long before our attention starts to wane. For most people, the limit is 4 hours a day at most for deep work.
If you valued your attention properly, you’d protect it at all costs. Putting aside 3-4 hours for deep work will maximise the amount you get done in a day and improve the quality of your work. But perhaps more importantly, you’ll suddenly find more time in your day now you aren’t working at half-capacity for hours on end.
Protect your attention at all costs
Protecting your attention starts with making deep work part of your routine schedule. The easiest way to do that is to set aside time on your calendar every day for deep work. If you can, put this in the morning. Make that information public so that others can’t schedule meetings when you want to concentrate.
Managers and executives might feel like a four-hour period each day is too much so be strategic, is one hour a day viable? What about one morning a week?
Now that you’ve protected yourself from scheduling conflicts, you need to convey your priorities to those around you. If your colleagues recognise your deep work time, you will avoid costly interruptions. You can use apps like ClockWise to help with this, it’ll automatically update your status in Slack based on what’s in your calendar.
Otherwise, make use of the Silent and Do Not Disturb features on your phone and messaging apps, and use other social signals, like a closed door, and physical hourglass, or noise cancelling headphones, to show you can’t be interrupted.
Know when to do shallow work
Now, we’ve already mentioned that you can only do a few hours of deep work a day. Don’t waste your time and energy trying to maintain focus beyond that limit.
This is the perfect time to get your shallow work in order. Instead of viewing small tasks as something to get out of the way before work begins, save this less taxing work for when you’ve already spent your most productive hours on deep work. This is the type of work you want to do last, knowing the hard work is behind you.
Just don’t forget about cognitive residue. While you are now working on smaller tasks, you still need to avoid constant task switching. Group your shallow work into related tasks, such as handling all of your emails and messages in one block. This will help you get into the zone of methodically clearing these repetitive tasks.
Conclusion
Think about how much more time you would have if you tackled every major task with 100% of your mental resources. Taking control of your productivity doesn’t just improve your performance, it means more free time and less stress from long, unproductive work days.