Get Everything Done

Mark H suggested that I might want to post this separately from the originating thread, so I'm posting it again in response to the question of how to organize around needing to do some deep thinking.

For deep work, Mark Forster's general recommendations have been pretty consistent throughout his books and his work on long lists, which is generally that some work that requires deep, intense concentration over a period of time, such as writing a book, is often done best by scheduling specific time each day to work on it, and then spending that time working on it. Others have successfully used long list methods to incrementally work on things like writing books. The rule to "work as long as you like on a task" can be used effectively to do deep work without fear provided that you are confident in your ability to spend significant enough amounts of time on that work without being distracted, and also not getting lost in that work.

You can also see the "Current Initiative" concept that Mark has included in some of his books, as well as the idea of sufficient, regular, focused attention that he talks about in SoPP.

I think most people tend to converge on their recommendations for deep work, with almost everyone doing something like time blocking. Those that don't tend to advocate some sort of "Eat the Frog" methodology. Both of these could be thought of categorically as more or less the same idea, implemented somewhat differently, which is to isolate and protect some specific time towards the deep work.

For some people, the benefit of the time blocking method over something like Eat the Frog is that you can pick a time throughout the day that works for you. You can find this concept in the Time Management section of Peter Drucker's "The Effective Executive" as well as in the works by Cal Newport, Brendon Burchard, and many others. The danger here, of course, is that if you can't follow such a schedule, and you can't commit to actually letting yourself do nothing else but that work during that scheduled block, then you are in real danger of not getting any work done in the day.

On the other hand, an Eat the Frog method has the advantage that you anchor the deep work into an ordering, so that you don't let yourself get to anything else until you've done something sufficiently satisfying to you on your deep work first. Many writers have worked this way, such as Hemingway and Donand Knuth. Hemingway, I think, said that he worked first thing in the morning and then when he was done, he'd go and let himself do everything else. Don Knuth has said that he tends to try to find the most difficult and ugly thing first and then work on that so that everything else is more pleasant as the day goes on. I think Stephen King has said that he works a bit like this to a specific word count.

The problem with Eat the Frog is making sure that you chunk your work into something that can be realistically accomplished in a day. Writers tend to do that through word counts or hours working (which amounts of a type of time blocking). Others will work to break down their tasks until there is an almost certainty that they can get that one task done in a day.

Both of them effectively serve as some way to allow you to spend sufficient, regular attention on a given thing. I find that something like Eat the Frog works better for me because I am very bad at working to a schedule based on blocks of time, but I'm much better at working towards the completion of specific tasks.

Either method is compatible with long lists. And even people who *love* their lists, such as David Allen, in talking about GTD, will talk about the importance of time blocking to create space for certain kinds of deep work. You might still have a list contextualized around that deep work time, but the real secret to making it all work is the idea of scheduling it somehow.

Long list methods like FV are a form of ordered selection for working on things, and if you combine that with a task like, "Work for 90minutes on Book", then maybe that's a way of combining a long list with a time block, even though that may or may not be the right way to go about it. The danger with something like that is that the commitment to 90minutes might increase resistance, while just doing a little bit of it might not.

For me, because my deep work is almost always the most important and immediate thing that I need to do, and also because it is the most important, it ends up being most likely to cause resistance. This generally means that I can't strictly rely on a long list and standing out to really get me working on the task often enough for my liking. I'm simply too immature in my mental conscientiousness for that. Instead, it's much easier for me to make a commitment the day before that I'm not going to do anything else before I get X done. That doesn't always work, but it's more likely to work for me than other things.

I find that the most effective strategy for getting to work on deep work is probably something like the 90 Heroic Minutes protocol:

1. Pick the important thing you want to work on and write up why it matters to you and what you want to achieve.
2. Completely clear the environment of any and all potential distractions, digital and physical.
3. Set a timer for 90 minutes.
4. Do anything you want, as long as it is either nothing at all or your most important task.

That distraction-free freedom to do nothing is the big game changer for me. It's like a meditative period of bringing your whole person into the work, and then you find that the work just starts getting done. But that only works if your mind can't jump ship to something else.