One short announcement: to help me stay focused (and slightly less stressed), I've decided to make my newsletter biweekly rather than weekly. Also, Happy Halloween!

Now back to your regularly scheduled programming ... I've discovered the working deeply and challenging my brain regularly not only yields interesting and valuable insights, but is the catalyst for a level of production I've never reached before. I've been rather preoccupied with the topic of deep work for some time because I see it as a means of training myself to so solve extremely complex social problems. It's like a mental bootcamp regime for social change. For the next 5 blog posts, I want to explain exactly how I get to deeper and deeper levels of work so that, perhaps, you can also apply this methodology to think critically about how you are solving forward toward a better world. Let's start with none other than Level 1: Consistency.

LEVEL 1: CONSISTENCY

With this first stage, I wanted to stress the importance of training my brain to concentrate for set periodsof time (1-2 hours to start) and building up a habit to reduce its depletion on my finite store of willpower.

ACTION / INPUTS

I established a disciplined approach to work by consciously tracking the hours I spent doing work-related things (email, meetings, working on a problem or explaining an idea) to non-work related things (video games, lunch, and even sleeping). I wanted to see where I could trim some the activities that didn't directly support the acquisition of rare and valuable skills. With the 4-hour per day physical limit on deep work described in the book in mind, I only needed to reduce the least important activities like surfing the internet or checking email every 20 minutes. Just as vital to this exercise was a set of contingency plans for when I wasn't able to stick to the time limits or plans I had made to concentrate at certain times. Sometimes when a colleague called or an unexpected meeting is scheduled, I had to immediately stop the concentrated activity. To facilitate my refocusing after the task was done, I started doing a short meditation with my fingers that helped me reduce my annoyance and continue what I was doing.

OUTPUT

This disciplined routine was exercised through engaging in activities that produced something of value; these were my outputs. From daily spurts of highly focused attention, I could start and finish a 30-day writing challenge (here's a summary post linking to everything I wrote and what I learned from the experience!), review business and revenue models as case studies, and diagnose challenges and recommend solutions for online communities. These were actions I could do that used my existing expertise to produce value.

METRICS

One can't really know how well they performed with anecdotal evidence, so I created a set of metrics that could help me collect quantitative (and sometimes qualitative) data. The success of the Consistency stage should be judged on ... well ... consistency! For me, that means:

• Estimating the the amount of time I spend on each deep work and non-deep work activity and comparing that to the expectation in hour tracking. This will yield a percentage value which describes my adherence to my proposed schedule. At the end of the week, I can dissect why I didn't meet certain goals and make recommendations for improvement in my deep work habits and routines.
• Calculating the percentage of successful enactment of disruption contingency plans on a weekly basis. This could be tracked with a simple note card with tallies for disruptions in one column and tallies for contingency plans in the other.
• Calculating the percentage of time I stick to a documented process to prepare for deep work. This means identifying my habits and routines for deep work and following them every time I want to concentrate. Like the above metric, it could easily be tracked with a small note card during work hours.
• Tracking the number of new or revised documentations of deep work preparation. In order to measure the above, deep work habits need to be written down in order to be tracked against. By tracking on the number (or percentage) of times I create or revise a deep work preparation technique, I can quantify efforts to constantly improve my overall consistency metrics.

Before you can do the really mentally strenuous work, you have train your brain to pay attention for extended periods of time. Evaluation of progress with consistency metrics is just as important as executing successful bouts of intense concentration. Your brain has to be battle-tested before you can hope to get to the very limits of your (and your field's understanding). Boromir sums it up nicely:

Make sure you don't miss levels 2-5 by signing up for mailing list to receive weekly roundups. I'll also be modifying the chart as I test with others to make it more universally adaptable (which you'll get first ... if you're on my mailing list that is!)