This Book Made Me Dangerously Productive

I feel like so many of us are experiencing this right now. You've been working since you got up at 7 a.m., emails checking on your phone the minute you wake up, and a school run in between if you got kids, and then it's back-to-back work calls, messages ping on Microsoft Teams, a client thing that ran over, a quick scroll on your phone that turned to 40 minutes, and then it was 9 p.m. and you realize you hadn't done the one thing that actually mattered, the thing that was going to move your dream forward. And that makes you think, why do I work so hard yet I feel that I can't get anything done? Why does it feel like I never have enough time? I've been there. I'm an average person like everyone else. I'm not someone with a 4 a.m. morning routine jumping to an ice bath and then telling you to do more. I have a daughter who is the love of my life. My husband and I, we both run separate businesses. And I did that for a while alongside also a full-time job, but parents were getting older and they need my care. So my life is full of ups and downs just like yours probably is. And I watched every year go by feeling like I was behind on everything that actually matters to me. So I want the answers, not being busy for busy sake, but how to actually do work that matters to me and living my life well. And here's the one book that changed how I think about all of this, Deep Work by Cal Newport. So in this video, I want to show you what you need to know from Cal's research on how to do deep work well and why your brain makes focus so hard and how to change that. And the solution is actually much simpler than you think. And I also give you a four-step system called the Deep Work Blueprint that you can start using this week based on my own experience. But first I need to show you what's actually going on inside your brain when you try to focus. And it was really fascinating for me. So here's some of the things that some of you have said to me when you're trying to focus and do your best work. There is just so many Chrome tabs you can open than doing the actual work itself. I've definitely been there. I'm a tab hoarder myself. I can't stay focused for more than a few minutes before I automatically reach my phone and get sidetracked. I've definitely been there as well. And I can't sit still while reading books. I just can't get my brain to focus on what I'm reading. So what is actually happening to our brain? First is that a lot of us tend to do our work surrounded by devices, mainly our phones. And here's what happens when you're trying to work near them. So researchers found that when we're near our devices, we get pulled off the things we're actually doing on average every 40 seconds. So just 40 seconds. And here's what makes that even worse. Every single time your attention switches, even for a moment, part of your brain stays on the old task that you were trying to do earlier. And this is called the attention residue, which is basically the leftover thoughts from your distractions that reduces the focus on the things that you're trying to work on. And Cal Newport puts all of this into an equation, an actual equation of what makes high quality work work. So it equals time spent multiplied by intensity of focus. And the reason most of us feel like we're working constantly, but getting nowhere is that we're actually optimizing for the wrong thing. Time. We're just trying to add more hours, but we're not touching the intensity part. So in fact, we are actually destroying it. But even just sitting next to our notifications ping at us every few seconds. And this is the reason why when I worked 60 plus hours weeks during my job, I felt like I got nothing done. I thought if I just carve out more time, it'll get better. But it didn't. Because the problem was never time. It was depth. And it was something Cal calls deep work. So why is deep work so hard to reach for some people? Why do some people slip into this beautiful flow while they're working almost effortlessly and others feel like they're at war with their own brain? That's what I want to find out. And I tried it out myself and I was really surprised. So when I first looked into this, a lot of productivity advice online, it suggests discipline. That lack of discipline can be the root cause for everything. But I believe discipline alone is not enough. What's interesting is that your brain has been rewired. And I mean that literally, not as a metaphor, because our brain are constantly reshaping themselves based on what we repeatedly do every single day. And that is called neuroplasticity. And we love talking about neuroplasticity because when it applies to learning something new, how we can always pick up a new skill, form a new habit, for example. That's all great. But here's the part nobody talks about enough. Neuroplasticity works on your bad habits too. So every time you switch between different apps, you check notifications, scroll for the next video, besides being distracted, you're actually training your brain to expect constant novelty and stimulation. So you're building what is similar to a shortcut in your mind. And then over time, those shortcuts, they become the easiest route for your brain. So when you sit down to do your deep work, to actually think hard about one thing for 90 minutes, your brain will resist it because your brain was so used to constant stimulation from scrolling. And this is because there is this slower, deeper pathways have not been used in a long time. It's like trying to run a marathon when you've never even gone for a run. Not impossible, but definitely a lot harder. So most of us are trying to do deep work without ever even having trained for it. We just expect to sit down and concentrate at full capacity in an environment designed to fragment our attention span with a brain that is spent months being rewired towards craving distraction. And that's the reason why it feels like a battle all the time. And I definitely felt that way. So what do people do that can get them into flow or in the zone to actually do deep work? It turns out that the brain that built those distraction shortcuts can actually rebuild deep work pathways in the brain. And it turns out that some simple adjustment you can do starting today. So here's how to make neuroplasticity work for you instead of against you. And it's not something that you either have or you don't. So here I want to reference another great book in a companion read to deep work here. And that is a book called Flow from the author Mihaly. He spent decades studying what he called flow, that state where you're completely absorbed in what you're doing. Think about the last time this happened to you, like times seem to stop and you feel this deep sense of purpose and meaning in the work itself. And what he found is that flow is not random. It happens when difficulty, the task, it matches your skill level and there are no competing things in your attention. So how long can an average person go into deep work mode? And a researcher called Andrew Erickson, the psychologist who spent his career studying elite performances, even high performers like people like concert musicians, chess grandmasters, and world-class athletes, they typically stop around four hours of real deep work day. And then beyond that, the quality significantly drops. The brain needs recovery from doing intensive thinking, but Cal recommends starting with just 30 minutes and then one hour and then 90 minutes and build your deep work muscle really slowly. So most of us are trying to do eight, nine, 10 hours of work, but almost none of it is deep. We're just grinding twice as long and getting half the results. So when I understood this, I tried a very small experiment. For two whole weeks, I treated my first 90 minutes of the day as completely untouchable. I blocked out chatting emails, no slack, no phone in the room. And the first week it just felt really tough. I had this sense of unease and restlessness. I really struggled with it. But in week two, it stopped to feel like a battle with my brain. And I started to focus longer for up to 60 minutes. By probably day 10, my brain was already shifting to a different gear as soon as I sat down to work. And I know that it's actually focused deep work time. So I thought, well, I'll document this. And I wrote down everything that worked for me since reading this whole book and really experimenting it based on my own work and life in the last few years. And here's exact four steps that you can try to. Step one is to audit your deep work ratio. So before you change anything, you need to see clearly what is actually happening in your days. And Cal, he gives this really simple test for each task you do regularly. Ask yourself, how long would it take to train a smart, motivated person to do this? If the answer is weeks or months, then that is deep work. But the answer is day or two, then it's probably shallow work. And most people, when they do this audit, honestly, they're just genuinely shocked because the majority of their time is going to work that barely requires their brain at all. So answering messages, sitting in meetings, reorganizing notes, updating spreadsheets, it just all feels very busy, but it's not moving anything forward. And nowadays, honestly, you can get AI to help you so you can actually focus on the deep work side instead. So I did this audit on my week on my typical schedule, and I thought maybe 30 or 40% of my time was shallow. It was close to 70%. And that was uncomfortable to see, but seeing it clearly is the first step to really help me change it myself. And step two is design your deep work schedule. So Cal lays out four different approaches. The first one is complete seclusion, being completely off any distractions, and then occasional deep work days. The third one's daily block. And the last one is ad hoc sessions. I have to be honest, unless you're an academic or someone who's working for yourself, complete seclusion from being completely off the grid and distractions, it probably isn't possible. For most people with real lives, you got a full-time job, a family, a business, or maybe all three, which was me too back then. The daily block is probably the most realistic and the most powerful. The idea is very simple. You pick a window, maybe one hour, if you really struggle to carve it out, you protect it, and you treat it like a meeting with your most important client. For me, it's the first two or three hours of my morning after dropping off my daughter at school. And that is my window of deep work. But yours can be completely different. And no one has the same lives. It's more about trial and error on what works best for you and your current situation. But you need to make that commitment to carve those time out for yourself. And remember that deep work is a muscle. You want to really build it slowly over time and add it from there. Step three is to build your environment for deep work. This one sounds really simple and basic, but everyone underestimate it. And Cal is very clear about this, is that managing your distractions is not the same as removing your distraction. Because studies show that having your phone on your desk, even face down, even on silent mode, it still affects your working memory in your brain. So your brain is spending energy managing the temptation of having the phone there and forcing yourself not to even look at it. So the environment for deep work is not about sitting near your phone with better willpower. It's actually about removing the source in the first place. Just put your phone in another room in the drawer and set your notification to off. And have a specific location where you only ever do deep work. Could be your home office, a library, maybe a choir corner in a cafe near you. Your brain starts to associate the location, the time, with working deeply. And the environment does some of the work for you so you get to operate on autopilot. So step four is embrace boredom to train your deep work muscle. And I would say definitely don't skip this part because this is the one that determines whether this is something you do for two weeks or something that actually sticks with you in the long term. And Cal, he makes this point about boredom that I think is one of the most important ideas in the book. So every time you're reaching for your device during a boring moment, maybe waiting for your coffee in the coffee shop, waiting the queue at the checkout, you're training your brain to resist stillness. You're telling it that a still moment like this is a problem that can be solved with stimulation. And then you sit down for your deep work session and wonder why your brain keeps looking for that hit of stimulation again and again. So remember to deliberately let yourself be bored in those small moments. It will definitely feel very uncomfortable at first, probably a bit fidgety, but that's fine. See how long you can last and try to do it longer each time. And then Cal has one more piece that I love. Set a clear metric for each deep work session. It's not a vague intention to work on this project. I'm a recovering procrastinator. And one thing that usually puts me off is this massive goal, like working on a massive project without breaking it down to mini sprints and deadlines. So when your brain has something concrete to aim for, the session becomes a game you can try to win. And deep work's time limit of 60 to 90 minutes, it really helps to make that scarcity of time more motivating to get to the finish line. And winning, even in small ways, can help you build that habit faster than any amount of motivation. And ultimately, as Cal said, a deep life is a good life. When you're fully absorbed in something that pushes you to your limit, when you're genuinely in that flow state, you experience something that scrolling and meetings and email simply cannot give you. It's this sense of meaning in the work itself. And it's time well spent of being fully present for your own life. And when I look back at the days when I felt most alive, when I felt like I was actually building something I love, they were not the days I replied to the most emails or showed up to the most calls. They were the days I sat down and I went deep on something that really mattered to me. There will always be busy days in the day-to-day life that we all have. But on the days where I can do deep work, it mattered to me because I had to work on something that I really think deeply about. We live in this busy, distracted world that is structurally designed to pull us towards the shallow end. So open offices, WhatsApp messages, social media videos, AI chatbots, back-to-back meetings, right? All of it is optimized for removing our best ability to think deeply. So choosing to go deep is almost an act of resistance to embrace what is uniquely our own human potential. It's deciding that the work that matters to you, get your best hours, not your leftover ones. And ultimately, I think this book is much more bigger than just a book about productivity. It was about what it feels like to show fully for the work that you actually care about. And I think that is worth protecting. I'm Lori. Thank you so much for being here. I'll see you in the next video.