Ask HN: Increasing Deep Work Tolerance | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Increasing Deep Work Tolerance

17 pointsmakersmasher12 comments

Is there a commonly accepted framework to help increase daily focused work? I'd like to get a bit more intentional with how I am working and learning. I tend to chunk things into: "actual work", "things to learn" and "interruptions". Where actual work is the doing (programming, writing, building), things to learn is consumption (reading, thinking, studying, watching), and interruptions is everything else.

When I am tasked with doing something I don't know how to do, I tend to get stuck in consumption mode; on things that I do know how to do ie programming I feel I am not getting as much output as I'd like.

I am remote, make my own schedule up, any suggestions on how to put a framework/daily schedule together to get better?

PS- assume that sleep, exercise, diet, etc is in order.

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1. Schedule and discipline are of utmost importance. Only immature people depend on motivation to drive home long-term undertakings.

2. Accepting that no more than 4-5 hours of deep focused work of higher strata is possible. One should not aim for more.

3. Having a clear work-play/family boundary is very important.

4. Social media blockades are important. Either do the work or stare at the wall. Do not bring up your phone outside of your slot allocated for social media- even if you are waiting in a queue or riding Uber. Just stare out of the window.

5. I have personally found meditation and exercise to be very highly effective.

Books that helped:

1. Deep Work by Cal Newport

2. Pragmatic Thinking and Learning by Andy Hunt

3. Atomic Habits by James Clear

How do you separate social media from the news (hacker news, research, bloomberg, wikipedia)

How do you separate staring out the window with staring at tiktok, youtube.

What’s wrong with media consumption outside the 4-5 hrs of focus ?

Not that I am disagreeing with you. I aim for 1-2 hrs of deep focus. I have recently tried to do more, but I don’t think I can. Maybe 3-4 hrs of moderate focus, and maybe total of 8 hrs of minimal focus (including about deep and moderate focus).

Anything that has an element of "New! Fun!" is "social media". This is a personal nomenclature, and loose.

Even arXiv is social media.

I have 45 minutes set for using HN and everythinh that comes out of it.

YouTube and TikTok have algorithms that have the goal to grab my attention. The garden/road outside my home does not have an algorithm. It is safe to look that way.

Outside of the focus hours, I stay away from social media, but I do read books, play Factorio, discover new music, watch documentaries, and rarely movies/series. So there is nothing wrong with media consumption.

But social media makes our brain secrete stuff and that gives our brain a false sense of achievement.

That false sense of achievement, too much scrolling, getting distracted, and the anticipation of the unknown fun for long times- these are what I fear.

Does social media rewire our brain in some way? (Take the word "rewire" lightly, not technically)

I was never known to be weak-minded person. I never had any kind of addiction although I drink alcohol and never had an eating disorder although I love to eat and so on.

So, nothing is wrong with me. Maybe the problem does lie with them?

Social media addiction made me feel weak. I hate that.

I only started doing this after I read Cal Newport's Deep Work [0].

I don't pull up my phone even when waiting for a friend or commutibg in subway.

I do not know why, but this has been extremely effective for my peace of mind and productivity while working.

I aim for 1/2 hours of deep focus (like learning new math for the first time), and 3/4 hours of moderate focus (working on a challenging problem).

[0]: https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0349411905/

There are lots (lots!) of approaches, ones that work/don't work for different people. It's a journey, yours alone! Enjoy the fact that you're going to get to know yourself, and accept surprises and celebrate both wins and disappointments.

What comes to mind from reading your description that I don't see suggested in comments are two points:

* very (very) often people, especially younger, have very academic/theoretical mental models of themselves that don't align with their behavior and make change and action hard. The categories you describe make me think of this. This may be you forcing a framework on your behavior that simply doesn't work. Think- is this categorization model the most important thing? What do I really want?

* for most people, what they want is behavior change. To have behaved more in a way more of the time, less of another way more of the time. That framing can still be too abstract and intellectual. Behavior is very literal. Very present. To make use of your intellectual ability, try breaking down the more abstract goals to more concrete actions. Keep generating/enumerating slices of smaller and smaller behaviors that seem to get you to your goal. Do so in writing, because writing is a way of communicating with yourself that can be suggestive, and motivating. Maybe you will find yourself starting to take some of those small actions, to be doing the small things that to you make up deep work. Good if so- that's a start.

Best wishes, good luck!

This is very good advice.

I just want to reply to really stress the first point. As I grow older (late 20s now) more and more “failures” that still upset me can be traced back to your first point.

Coming to terms and changing my behavior based on what works for me has been hard but so much more effective. When there are no external motivators (work), it’s not doable for me to wake up on time and get started early. Trying to force myself into this ideal caused me to fail, have the day feel wasted at 13:00 and then get stuck and not get anything done. Which, you guessed it, leads to a great spiral of being upset with yourself.

Accepting this has been the biggest change in both happiness and productivity (these are very correlated for me).

So again, try and frame things in a way that works for you. Don’t be afraid to abandon an idealistic view when in the back of your mind somewhere you think “This doesn’t fit me”. Then again, I think the only way to learn this is through failure and time.

I aim for 3 hours of focused work per day — time to work on my top thing without a single distraction. This is usually split half and half into daytime and nighttime work.

I’ll write down what I want to do and why it’s important (often the previous night to make it easier to start the day), then for fun and focus track how long it took to complete.

Works for me. I don’t count things like bookkeeping or email into this, as that‘s more like a chore. I don’t count planning into it, because I want to make sure I’m actually doing things and not only thinking about them.

As long as I get the minimum focused hours, I can then relax guilt-free.

One idea for getting stuck in consumption mode - Set a timer for 5 minutes when you go to do a search.

I'm have been using RescueTime[1] to rebuild my deep focus. I think it can help for two reasons:

1. It blocks websites, which might help with the consumption mode 2. It automatically tracks deep work, so I can see daily and week over week improvement.

[1] https://rescuetime.com

I use checkboxes with things I hope to accomplish today. I start that list before I go to sleep the night prior and continue to fill it out in the am if there’s any updates. Then I try to check each of them off. I’m bad at keeping to a schedule but it gives me a huge dopamine rush to check off each box as I complete items.

My suggestion is a mindset, instead of a framework. Learn to identify when you feel the pull of distraction and resist it. This especially happens when you’re faced with doing something difficult or boring.

Music works well for me sometimes. If I get into the zone with code or writing then a stream of instrumental music (no lyrics or I get distracted) can turn minutes into hours and the whole day flies by.

I prefer music with lyrics, I don't pay attention to the lyrics (and so I'm not distracted) but it would be too boring otherwise.

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