“Es irrt der Mensch, solang er strebt.“
“Man errs as long as he strives.“
I was reading a book called “deep work” by carl newport last month, which I haven’t quite finished(time to start reading it again), and it changed the way I look at productivity.
he talks about how the intensity at which you work at really defines how productive you are. he believes that the focus with which you perform a particular task is equally important as the amount of time you do it, if not more. you may try doing a task for 12 hours with a low level of focus and get the task done somehow, whereas a person with intense focus could get the same task done in 3 hours of deep focus block (arbitrary example). One major flaw with the first approach is that it makes the person believe that this task actually required 12 hours and meanwhile this stark number of 12 hour of work also makes the person feel motivated to continue doing this habit.
trust me when i say this, “it is very easy to devote long hours to things which have a net positive impact on your life once you get these things in your life, but the true optimum(or rather maximum) is achieved when this act is used in its most robust form” The list follows.
- Social Media Detox
- A passion
- motivation (* from the passion, not instant motivation -> that would take you at max weeks or some months not more than that)
- and lastly “order”
I want to emphasize what I meant by “order” in the above list. Order can be thought of as in contrast to “pure chaos”, where you have no control of what is happening in your life, misery, no direction, no motivation, et cetra. For our purpose order could be thought of as organization and how you conduct yourself though this journey.
Coming back to the initial point, carl newport also provides use with a equation to quantify (again, intuition) our high quality deep working hours, which could be understood by the image attached below.
book recommendations:
- deep work
- digital minimalism
- *A note: the above mentioned list is not something which the author came up with from ground up, but referred from his learning of the books and the resources that he reads which stayed in his subconscious.