Tell me how familiar this sounds to you. You've got some work to do, so you pack up your backpack.
You find the perfect study space, perfect amount of sunlight, plenty of space to work in, a little bit of nature thrown in, a fatherly picture of Nick Offerman staring down at you. You brew yourself a fresh cup of coffee.
On go the noise-canceling headphones, and you find yourself an excellently tailored study playlist to accompany your impending deep dive into the practical uses of l'hopital's rule rule for Monday's calc assignment. Everything is set up perfectly for you to start doing some good old-fashioned deep work, and then. . .
Oh, hey, Tom, productivity guru, is that, uh, is that the IKEA cabinet planner? No uh, it's for research.
You're disgusting. Now, I know what you're thinking.
It's too real Roy, it's too real! It's the same thing that I think all the time, how can I make sure that when I sit down to do my work, I actually do my work instead of falling into a distracted rut?
After all, just sitting down at my desk isn't gonna result in really anything getting done. One of my favorite lines in Cal Newport's book Deep Work is his productivity equation.
Time times intensity of focus equals quality of work produced. One of his case studies in the book, Peter Roosevelt, though at this time a freshman at Harvard University, knew this rule really really well.
His biographer Edmund Morris wrote that every single day Roosevelt would look at his schedule between the hours of 8:30 and 4:30 and block off everything that was already scheduled. Things like classes, recitations, lunch, and his athletic training.
Anything leftover was time spent for studying. And Morris noted that these fragments didn't usually add up to a large number of total hours but he would get the most out of them by working only on schoolwork during these periods and doing so with a blistering intensity.
