📕 Rule #1: Work Deeply
by Aidan · 21 things on Twos
- The 4DX Framework
- Focus on the wildly important. This means a small number of extremely essential goals.
- Act on lead measures. As the saying goes, "what gets measure get managed." Two metrics are used: lag and lead measures. For deep work, the lead measure is the time spent in the state of deep work dedicated toward the wildly important goal. Lag measures describe the output.
- Keep a compelling scoreboard. This means a visible tracking system to keep yourself honest about how much time you've spent.
- Create a cadence of accountability. Keep yourself moving forward, you have to review your progress regularly. That could mean weekly review, monthly review, and quarterly review to see how much you've accomplished and make a plan for the upcoming weeks.
- Add routines and rituals to your working life
- "You have a finite amount of willpower that becomes depleted as you use it" Roy Baumeister
- Ritualize
- Where you'll work and for how long
- How you'll work once you start to work
- How you'll support your work
- Make grand gestures
- A radical change in your environment,coupled perhaps with a significant investment of effort and money, increases the perceived importance of the task.
- Don't work alone
- Expose yourself to others for insights and ideas on a regular basis, but maintain sessions to focus deeply on what you encounter
- Be Lazy
- Kreider: Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice, it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disgusting as rickets..it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done
- Downtime aids insights
- Downtime helps recharge the energy needed to work deeply
- The work that evening downtime replaces is usually not that important
- "When you work, work hard. When you're done, be done"