Name: Change Your Life In 6 Months (My Deep Work Routine)
Uploaded: 2024-08-22T23:01:46.000Z
Duration: 16 min 25 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

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If you currently feel overworked, exhausted, and the list of things you need to do feels never-ending for your life, your career, your business, your family, you're drowning in emails and text messages and calls that need to be returned.

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You have all these big dreams, projects, and goals, but yet they seem so out of reach and you just never have enough time to either start or finish them.

I'm the average person like everyone else.

I have a four-year-old daughter who's the love of my life and my husband and I, we both run separate businesses of our own.

I have parents who are getting old and need care.

I'm not someone with a 4 a.m. morning routine, jumping to an ice bath, drinking a green juice, while doing press-ups with one finger and telling you that you need to do more.

And my frustration of seeing every year pass by and feeling like a failure made me realize that it's time for me to think about the way that I work and there must be a better way where I can work smarter but not harder.

And there's one thing that I realized that changed all of this, and that is you're underestimating your potential.

The potential that you have to get the work done that actually moves you forward.

It has nothing to do with the tools you're using, what productivity apps on your phone, or what habit boxes are you off right now.

The problem is actually much more simpler than you think.

Since I tried this method of working and focus, I'd be able to cut down the time I needed to learn digital marketing in half, which meant that I was able to go from unemployed to working at Google, and deliver some of my best marketing trainings for my students in my own company.

And ultimately, creating some of the best keynote talks that lets you more paid speaking opportunities.

And this is not another productivity video to tell you that you need to fit more in less time.

Because one of the biggest issues we're facing in modern society is not by doing more work, but actually not having enough time.

We are living in one of the biggest social experiments ever, by all these distractions and devices that are pinging off around us constantly.

That's why in order for you to become the top 1%, the ability to focus and do this kind of work is going to get you there.

And finally, you can work less and get more done, but not the other way around.

I made this video to make it easy for you to understand how we can all live as fully as we work.

Let's build you into the top 1% to become limitless in reaching your dreams and achieving some of your biggest goals.

When you were studying or entering your first job, you were probably conditioned to get the most of every hour.

And when you are walking down the street, you see someone you know, maybe in the office, when you ask them, Hey, how are you, most likely the response you will get is I'm good, just been busy.

So we all wear business like a badge of honor, but not really knowing if this busyness can lead us anywhere.

So Cal Newport first introduced this concept of deep work to me.

And it was the start that changed the way I work forever.

So a lot of day to day tasks, which you're probably familiar with, like checking emails, responding to messages, are the kind of things are called shallow work, because it doesn't require much of your brain power to do so.

But if you spend most of your day doing the shallow work, you'll eventually be replaced by technology and AI in the current revolution that we're in right now, because these skills are mostly easily replaceable.

So deep work is the ability to do work with distraction free concentration at your peak brain power, which means that you're able to produce something that's uniquely yours in your own zone of genius.

Cal wrote that he was able to double his output of research papers, while being a full time professor, raising his family and writing his book all at the same time by using this method.

And it really resonated with this because I'm ambitious, just like you, if you click on this video, and you're watching it now, that means that you realize there's something that you need to change your current work environment, that'll make you a lot more productive than you were previously.

So I think it's really good idea to take a pen and paper out and write this down.

And ask yourself this, if you were to deep work what major life or professional goals do you want to achieve?

For me, that's growing my personal brand and business online, reaching and impacting more people with my digital products and services.

I want to have enough time to spend with my family and to travel to live a life full of experiences.

I don't want to be chained to a desk and just looking at a screen all day.

And what I also found fascinating is that according to research done in 2012, deep work can also train your brain to increase your focus and also your cognitive functions like a muscle.

Before I used to find it hard to get through a whole page in a book, but I can scroll on Instagram for an hour.

Whereas now I can easily sit down for 90 minutes of deep work at a time and coming out feeling completely fulfilled and accomplished because I did something with that time.

I think one of the state that you tend to get into during deep work is the state of flow, which has been documented in this psychologist Mihaly's book, Flow, where you reach this point of standstill of time and you're filled with content and purpose in what you're doing.

So before we get into the nitty gritty of how to do better deep work, I think it's really important to set up the first things first, which is your environment.

So if you have the means to do so, except a separate area in your home, like a study or a separate room where you use it purely for deep working and where you definitely won't be disturbed.

If you're in the office environment, think about using an empty conference room, maybe that you can use it as a purely a place to get away from that open plan noisiness.

And if you don't have the spaces, as we are living in smaller and smaller places these days in the modern world, I found local libraries and also local quieter cafes to be really great for this because you have a separate space allocated to this.

It makes you even more concentrated on your sessions as well.

And what I like about the current world of mixing remote working with being in the office is that the days that you are at home remote working, you can use some of those days for the much more important strategic deep thinking tasks that you can use during these deep work sessions.

And this brings me to the distractions in our lives right now.

And that is if it's possible to put all the distraction related devices in a separate room, because I find that if it's not close to you, you probably won't be looking at it.

And if you currently are going on the internet, and you might get distracted by going on social media websites, for example, there is Chrome extensions like Forrest or self-control that you can use on your browser to block off those sites while you're working so you don't get tempted.

So your level of self discretion is probably your own take.

And if you want absolutely zero noise, if that's what helps you use a pair of noise cancelling headphones.

So my ones from Sony, I'll link it to a description below.

I found this one to be really helpful because it's light on my head.

And when working for let's say an hour and a half the time, it doesn't actually weigh on my head to make it hurt.

So it's just something I found in my own experience.

But feel free to find one that works for you.

And what I found to be another benefit is that if I wear these headphones in public spaces, like co working spaces, I'm less likely to be disturbed because I look like I'm in a working mode.

And that visual effect usually helps for you to have that sanctuary that time to yourself if you needed to.

So if you got kids like I do, I tend to do my deep work sessions around the time when she's at school.

My personal ethos is that I want to be fully present when she's around and not working around her all the time.

I actually work a lot less now now that I had kids.

And why I found that because I have less time and there's a lot more constraints on that, I tend to be a lot more focused and results driven.

So everything I choose to work on has the highest priority, either in my business or for my clients the moment.

And that seemed to move me forward a lot more further than before I had kids.

So there you go, a little plus point there.

And my biggest motivation is that the more efficient I can be doing something, the more time that I'll have to spend with the quality time for my family.

So that's almost a benefit to me to work towards whenever I'm being stuck or don't want to do something.

I find that this will motivate me to keep pushing forward.

And this really brings me to the point of prioritizing your tasks.

One thing I realized is that if I don't prioritize my task, then also everything on my list really needs my attention.

But one question I found to be really helpful and feel free to write this one down that helped me on a daily basis is whenever I prepare my to-dos for the day, I ask myself, if there's three things I need to get done today, what would those be in order to move my biggest goals and dreams forward?

And when you put it in that context, all of a sudden, those tasks become a lot more clearer in terms of which one is most important to get done that day to move yourself forward one more step at a time.

And once you prioritize your tasks, which brings me to the next point, which is really about putting in very intense deadlines into what you do.

And by that, I mean, estimating how long it would take to do something and then cut that down drastically.

And by human nature, we know that we work best with deadlines.

Because if you reflect on this, when I was in school, I remember when I had a looming deadline for a paper in college, somehow that paper after procrastinating on it for weeks, the day before it gets due, it will actually get done the night before.

So it's just things like this, where if you put those deadlines for yourself, that's actually estimated to be a lot more strict and also intense than it should be.

You will actually find yourself getting it done a lot more quicker than you think.

And that also forces you to be in the state of deep work more often because it allows you to use those intense periods to really get those things done.

Like for example, now I need to go out and get my daughter in two hours.

That means that I need to get my deep work sessions in.

And that two hours all of a sudden becomes so much more efficient because I know that that's all I got for the day.

And what can I actually fit in that's the most important, but also can get done the quickest.

So based on what we talked about earlier, write this one down as well.

How can you create an environment around you that helps you succeed with this deep work?

And how can you maintain this deep work on a regular basis?

So now that we've gone through the environment and the different things you should have in place before you start deep working, how do you not make sure that your deep work sessions are more effective than most people?

And Cal mentioned this in this book where I thought it's a really great equation to share with you guys is that the high quality of work produced equals time spent times intensity on this particular task.

So everything we're talking about in this section really goes back to this equation is how can you maximize the amount of time spent and also the intensity spent on this during that period in order to create the highest quality work possible.

So here are three strategies I recommend you try for yourself during these deep work sessions.

And number one is you might not think about this very obviously, but scheduling distraction periods.

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Change Your Life In 6 Months (My Deep Work Routine)

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