How to Get into the Deep Work state
The work you have all been doing all this time is wrong, and here is why.
Before all of you come bashing at me, let me explain these are the reasons that most of you are doing the work incorrectly.
All those work sessions that you did, which included your studies, office work, or working on your business, well, the intention might be right but the approach is wrong because when you are committing yourself to a work session, then the goal is to suck as much work as possible from that work session because why not and if you do not want to have the best possible work sessions, then why the hell are you working anyway?
The key is to work as focused as possible because doing the least amount of work to achieve the most amount of results in the most focused state of mind, which is where you want to be while working. It’s funny how today people see others doing their work with monstrous focus and call it some kind of hack that they are using to achieve more than the average, the sheer amount of stupidity a person can have. However, the goal here is to inform you that you can do more work in a shorter time.
First of all, I’m not a con artist here to sell you some cheap scheme or a magic potion that will make you a prodigy all of a sudden Improvement in anything requires time and hard work, so buckle yourself up for some hard work. Generally, when you sit down to do some work like your college assignment or your office work, you usually take a lot of time to do work that requires a lot less time because certain things are not right in your working system, and they might be the reason for your non-focused, lazy work sessions.
- You have a lot of distractions planted by yourself.
The number of distractions you have around you is ginormous to observe. Here is what I want you to do. Have a third-person perspective of yourself at the place you work and observe very carefully the things that distract you like the is beeping at you every couple of seconds with all the social media notifications and your “pro at procrastinating” buddy calling you to come over. We’ll have some “fun” and eagerly wait for that like, comment notification from these social media apps, that TV show you want to binge is roaming in the back of your head. By observing these things, you will understand that the number of distractions you are surrounded by is bizarre.
2. Your work environment is not ideal for you.
This thing’s importance increased drastically after the COVID pandemic thing started and the working from home thing became the new norm. The impact was that people were not achieving their 9–5 work even by the whole day. One of the most important reasons for that was the workspace or the work environment they were working at because people started treating work from home like a back-to-school thing where they could slake off and no one was there to answer to. The same thing goes for students and business owners. You get the point.
3. You do not have a systematic work structure or system.
Ok, so you sat down to start the work you’ve wanted to do, but after a few minutes, you realize that you are clueless about where to start, what the goal/target of this session is, and at what time I’ll achieve the target that I started for. This leads to you cluelessly sitting doing something that even you wouldn’t call “work”, resulting in you sticking to your phone or dropping your work in the middle of nowhere.
So, if these are the problems you are facing, then here are some practical and actionable steps that will help you to achieve the most out of your work time.
- The first and foremost step is to put your phone away from you so that it cannot distract you with calls and notifications. Just put it somewhere you can’t see it. Trust me, nobody’s gossip call is that urgent. You can call them back later.
- Try to create the best work environment for you to get the work done. It can be as simple as keeping a bottle of water with you so that when you are in the state of focus you won’t have to leave your table for just some water. This is one of the few examples, but you get the point. By having a good environment to work in, you get all the push you need to keep working. You’ll have all the things you need by your side, so you won’t get distracted by little things I know that these are very little things, but little things like these make a big impact.
- Start with a work plan because the people who set goals might not achieve them, but those who make the plan to achieve them get to them. You will have mental clarity about what you are sitting for if you make a proper priority list of what needs to be done first and what is not necessary.
- Don’t forget to take breaks. They are very important as they recharge your ability to do focused work for a long, long period, but don’t let the small timeframe of the break turn into hours of slacking.
These things will help you to stay in that zone of deep focus, which leads to the most amount of work done in the least amount of time.
