Exploring Deep Habits (Work Edition)
Sharing some lessons learned from Cal Newport.
Hello there!
I’m back after a few months of delaying this article. My goal today is to share with you some of the advice given by Cal Newport about cultivating deep habits in an increasingly distracting world.
In today’s edition, I will go through a set of suggestions that aim to make your life at work more meaningful, both for yourself and for others.
If this topic seems like something interesting to you, stick around until the end.
Let’s begin!
Deep Habits at Work ⚒
As we all know, professional environments can be extremely overwhelming sometimes.
It is not necessarily because the core of your work is extremely hard or unenjoyable that you can start feeling stressed at some point. More often than not, everything else revolving around the main areas of your work is what affects you the most.
Excessive meetings, context switching, and emails can be extremely disruptive if you want to cultivate a deep work culture and perform at your best.
Here are a few tips to improve your working experience. Feel free to experiment with these, and adjust to your needs accordingly.
The 20-Minute Rule ⏳
If you are a professional in the modern world you probably have to deal with multiple meetings to coordinate work and share results. When you are finished with a meeting it is extremely hard for your brain to get right into another task.
Context switching is very difficult and exhausting and, in the long run, it prevents you from being as productive as you can be.
So, the 20-minute rule states that for every meeting that you have to attend, book an extra 20 minutes at the end.
What you will do in these 20 minutes is to try to offset as much as possible the attention residue that will disturb you as you get into a different task.
This is the time when quick things get done:
Send an email.
Book a follow-up meeting.
Share some documents with the attendees.
This is also the time to take notes about the follow-up tasks resulting from the meeting. Tasks that are too big to do at the moment and might need more time or coordination.
Write as much as possible about them so that you can declutter your brain in the moment and still create a startup point for when you are finally ready to tackle some of these tasks.
Work Quotas 🚫
If you are in the position of being requested with specific types of tasks during a certain period, you might as well want to give it a try at having work quotas.
This concept states that for every type of task that you do or service that you provide, you should have a quota. This means a limited amount of these types of tasks that you do in some time.
An example that illustrates this principle very clearly is being a professor at a University. Usually, apart from your teaching endeavors you also need to keep up with doing research. Part of doing research is doing peer reviews on papers that your department wants to publish.
Well, you could say something like that you only take a maximum of 5 papers per semester, for example. This would even allow you to plan for the topics of the peer reviews that you accept.
If a topic doesn’t seem interesting enough or is just out of your comfort zone, then suddenly the excuse of "I only have room for one more review in the semester and I’m waiting for some topic that is more of my interest" becomes a very solid one.
Coordination Mondays / Summer Fridays 📅
This principle is more related to how you start and end your working week. It tries to keep your week as productive as possible while also ensuring that you get a smooth transition into the weekend.
This is how it goes:
Coordination Mondays
Make Mondays your default day for meetings in which you coordinate future work. This will ensure two things:
You will have the rest of the week to just focus on the work.
You don’t have to think about scheduling meetings. Just tell people to choose a free time next Monday.
It helps if you use a tool where people can see the available slots you have each Monday so that the whole process of booking the meeting is on their end. This even helps you to plan for some upcoming meetings without thinking about them like they are in the way of doing real work.
Meetings for coordinating work are necessary, I don’t think we can get rid of them. But we can integrate them better into our weekly workflow.
By having a default day for meetings you can structure your working week in a 1-day planning session plus a 4-day working session. This approach gets much more work done than scattering meetings here and there in between work bouts.
Summer Fridays
Wrap up earlier on Fridays and get out of work a few hours before 5 pm. This should be very possible to do in the modern work world.
The idea behind this habit is to help you transition into the weekend with less overload from the previous five days in which you have worked hard. It will help you focus better on the things you usually do on Saturdays and Sundays without being distracted by thoughts about work.
Working Memory Text File 📝
This tip is mostly applicable if you happen to work in front of a computer, and it states that you should always have a working_memory.txt file open on your computer’s desktop.
What goes into this file? Everything.
Why a text file? Because you can type so fast and you don’t need any formatting.
The sole purpose of this file is to help you remember your future tasks so that you don’t have to keep everything in your brain.
Write notes from your previous meeting, notes for an upcoming meeting, the email of a person you have to contact to plan some work, guidelines on how to solve a particular problem you are working on, and so on…
Remember, no particular structure. Just the minimum necessary to get you back on track as soon as you read an entry on this file. When a task is done, remove it from the file. Easy.
I think it is an absolute game-changer because you can free your brain from keeping all that information and save it for hard work, thinking, and the problem-solving parts of your job.
I have been doing this for a long time with my Slack private chat. I write bullet points with small sentences about things I need to get done and I go and review that list first thing in the morning and as soon as I finish the task that I’m currently working on.
Now, I have already migrated all my previous Slack notes to this simple text file and the process is even smoother than before.
Blessed lack of structure!
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Have a great day! ☀️
Alberto
I wish 20 mins after a meeting rule could be easy, in some cases there are these dreadful back-to-back which mess up with your context and focus a lot.