In the summer of 2007, American software company 37signals (now called basecamp) did an experiment: day five was shortened to four days. Although the working day is one day shorter, the employees have completed the same workload.
Why is this?
It turns out that because of the reduction of working days, each employee has less time to complete tasks, so everyone will focus on the tasks they need to complete and try to avoid or ignore distractions such as lengthy meetings, browsing the web and chatting.
The experiment of 37 signals illustrates a very important reality: more and more superficial work that takes up knowledge workers' time and attention is often not as important as it seems.
Then the author puts forward a view that we are not absolutely opposed to superficial work, but we should know its harm and limit it in order to achieve the most efficient and in-depth work.
The author plans every minute of the day, quantitatively analyzes the depth of each activity, applies to the boss for the budget of snorkeling work, and it becomes difficult to contact the work before 5: 30, and specially explains to us how to give up snorkeling.
How many hours do you actually work every day?
How much time do you spend playing mobile phone and brushing videos every day?
How long do you actually sleep every day?
Now there are basically all kinds of monitoring software on the mobile phone, so you can make your own statistics.
The answer is scary! ! ! ! !
Nowadays, many people, especially young people, spend their weekends according to the following photo.
We spend most of the day in a daze and don't think too much about how to arrange our time.
This led us to spend all our spare time playing mobile phones and brushing videos, and the brushing time passed unconsciously.
So it's time to adjust the relationship between deep work and surface work decisively. Planning every minute of the day will help to live a full and meaningful life.
I suggest you find a special notebook, write down the daily schedule, one page a day, and adjust it at any time according to the actual situation. Once you get into the habit of deciding what you want to do every minute of every day, you will find that you have more time in a day and have time to do more things that interest you.
Now there are many practical and beautiful manuals that can help you arrange your time more reasonably. You might as well buy one of your own and start planning your life now.
The biggest advantage of planning a day's work in advance is that it allows us to judge how much time has been spent on snorkeling.
But in practice, it is a bit tricky to implement this strategy in the schedule, because it is difficult to judge whether a given task is superficial or not.
How to judge whether a job is superficial, please consider the following tasks:
Example 1: Work with your partner to edit the draft academic articles that will be submitted to the magazine in the near future.
Example 2: Make a PPT about this quarter's sales.
Example 3: Attend a meeting to discuss the progress of an important project and reach an agreement on the next step.
Through thinking experiments, the author calculates how long it takes a newly graduated college student to complete these tasks, which can be used as a depth meter to help us objectively score the depth of various jobs.
The author draws the conclusion that:
The task of 1 takes priority as the work with the best use time.
The tasks of Examples 2 and 3 belong to activities that should reduce time investment. Before the author's analysis, you may think that these two tasks are very meaningful, but in fact the actual return is very small.
How much of your time should be spent on superficial work?
This is a question worth thinking about, whether you are a boss or an employee.
Because this involves a superficial work budget problem, people's time in a day is limited. If you spend a lot of time on superficial work, you certainly don't have time to do deep work.
For a professional with advanced professional training, it is an incredible waste to answer a large number of transactional emails and attend 30 hours of meetings every week.
This is also the reason why many companies recruit interns in large numbers. Interns are superficial work budgets. Interns entering the workplace need opportunities to learn and exercise. It is a win-win strategy for the company to let interns do some superficial work to save costs and improve work efficiency.
If your job needs more depth than superficiality, you can ask your boss for a superficial budget.
The author mentioned that he insisted on finishing the work before 5: 30, which was really difficult for us who worked in 996.
Although the author has always insisted on finishing the work before 5: 30, his academic achievements are amazing. How did he do it?
First, the author insists on the method of fixed schedule productivity and focuses on it when making choices.
Secondly, the author thinks that time is limited, so he will consider personal organizational habits more carefully, which makes his output value higher than that of people who use long but chaotic schedules.
When I read this part, what I like best is the way the author mentioned that he refused to do superficial work.
That is to explicitly refuse, but the reasons for refusal should be dealt with vaguely. The key to this is to avoid giving the requester a chance to deny your specific reasons for refusal.
For me who won't refuse others, I really learned.
Sometimes some superficial work does take up your time, but you have no suitable reason to refuse. The final result is to seriously affect your deep working hours and reduce your output.
Therefore, in the face of superficial work, it is best to simply refuse.
It has become such a deep-rooted professional habit that we forget that we have the right to decide its position in our lives.
The author taught us to be inaccessible.
The author gives three suggestions to help us use email better.
Tip 1: Ask the person who sent you the email to do more work.
The author invented the method of "sender filtering" himself. Through some specific questions, people who try to contact the author filter themselves first. In this way, the author blocked many emails that didn't take much time to write, but it took him a lot of energy to reply.
Tip 2: Do more work when sending and receiving emails.
The author uses the "process-oriented email method" to deal with the emails he receives, which can reduce the number of emails received and the confusion caused by it.
Tip 3: Don't reply.
When discussing how to solve the massive e-mail, people often use two expressions. One view is that e-mail will bring more mail, while the other view is that dealing with ambiguous or irrelevant mail is the main source of inbox stress.
According to the three methods provided by the author, I hope it will be helpful for you to deal with the large number of emails you receive every day.
That's the whole content of rule 4. Give up snorkeling. Plan every minute of the day, quantitatively analyze the depth of each activity, apply for a snorkeling budget from the boss, and finish the work before 5: 30, which makes it difficult to contact.
The author, when he was a graduate student, learned and began to pay attention to the skills of using deep work for the first time, so that he didn't have to work overtime on weekdays and weekends (which is rare among his classmates), and he could write two peer-reviewed high-quality papers every year (which is great for a student).
During my postdoctoral studies at MIT, I signed a writing contract for my fourth book, Too Good to Ignore.
After becoming a professor of computer science at Georgetown University, although there are many tasks, the number of published papers has increased to an average of four per year.
……
These are the results of the author's practice and in-depth work for more than ten years.
The author unswervingly adheres to the following three points in practice and in-depth work:
Of course, deep life is not suitable for everyone. Because you need to work hard to fundamentally change your habits, the process of getting out of your comfort zone is bound to be painful.
But as the author quoted at the beginning of the book, "I will live a focused life because it is the best choice."
I believe that people who want to change and start to act will live a wonderful life!
I have talked so much about the contents of the book Deep Work and my personal feelings. In fact, what I want to say most is that no matter what industry you are engaged in, I think you need in-depth work. When you need deep work, I hope you can stay away from mobile phones and all kinds of distractions and concentrate on your work. In the long run, I believe you will have unexpected gains.
There are many very good self-management and time management apps and books that can help us manage our time, but I think the most important thing is to stick to it. A teacher once told me that there are two words between wanting and getting, that is, doing. I remember it until now, hoping to encourage you.
After reading Carl Newport's in-depth works, I began to practice my own in-depth works. What about you?
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I'm Xiaomi, and she is a quick reader. I like reading, writing and recording every bit of my life with a camera. The above is what I read from Carl Newport's book Deep Work, and I want to share it with you. If you have seen something and want to share something, please leave a message in the message area and we will sit down and have a good talk.