Track Your (Deep Work) Hours
In his great book Deep Work, Cal Newport
talked about two types of work: the
shallow work and the Deep Work.
The
shallow work is busywork like processing emails, and other related tasks,
that
make us look productive, but which isn’t necessarily the case.
On
the other hand, there is the most important work that moves your career (and
even
your life) forward. It’s the type of work, when practiced on a regular
basis, that gives
you the competitive advantage of mastering something and
rising above the average
performers. In essence, that’s what Deep Work is
all about.
To understand how you spend your days and how much Deep Work
there is in it,
you
have to ask these two important questions:
How did you spend
your day?
How many hours of which task did you focus on during the work
day?
How many hours of your work were focused on the Deep Work?
If
you don’t know the answers to those three questions, your workday becomes like
a
big black hole, where every task just disappears.
To fix this, you
should have some sort of tracking in place to see how you spent your
work
days. This can be done in a form of a Deep Work log. This log is nothing but
a
simple spreadsheet, where you write down some basic information of the
things you
did:
Today’s date
How many hours total you had
available for Deep Work
How much Deep Work you did
The actual
tasks you worked on
Weekly Insights (once per week)
Total number of Deep Work hours in a week
When you look at your Deep Work log, the results can be pretty
eye-opening.
For starters, if you are really honest about your time usage
(and you really should,
because otherwise there is no point of logging
these things), you’ll start to see how
your days were spent.
Once
you know how much time you spent on important work during the day, you can
start
improving your conditions, especially if this figure is low. There are two
ways to
do this.
First, take a look at your daily log entry and try
to understand which conditions lead
to this particular number of hours of
Deep Work.
For instance, perhaps there were plenty of interruptions, so
you weren’t able to
handle your work as usual. In this case, find out if
there are any ways you could
prevent these interruptions happening in the
future.
Also take note of those days when you got plenty of Deep Work
done. Perhaps you
could replicate the settings for this kind of a day
again tomorrow?
Second, take a look at all the entries at the end of the
week and gain some insights on
what you should continue doing and what
you should stop doing the next week. Then
write these findings to your
Weekly Insights column.
For instance, I noticed that I become
super-productive when I work while commuting
(I go to work by bus),
so this is definitely something I’ll continue doing in the future,
too.
The enemy of the Deep Work is the shallow work. Unfortunately we just can’t
erase
it completely, so we should try to minimize it as much as possible.
This could happen
by scheduling your email checking times and keep to
that boundary, or by working
remotely from home, if possible.
The
more time you spend on doing the Deep Work, more likely you’ll start seeing
satisfactory
results, either in your career, in your personal life, or both. And to
spend
more time on Deep Work, you should know first know how you spend
your days.
That’s why the daily tracking is so important.
Action
Steps:
Create a simple spreadsheet to track your Deep Work hours.
Update the spreadsheet every day to see how much Deep Work you did during
the
day.
In the spreadsheet, include things like the date, how many hours
you worked,
how many total hours you had available for Deep Work and what
tasks you
did.
Analyze the log entries every day and at the end of
the week to see how you
can improve your work next week.
