Be mindful with attention. Long stretches of uninterrupted focus time over switching between tasks.

The Law of Productivity:
High-Quality Work Produced = (Time Spent) x (Intensity of Focus)

Flow

• It takes approximately 25 minutes of focus without distraction to reach a state of flow
• Remove ability to do other things, kill apps etc
• Distraction log, write down that's distracting me
• Reward for focusing (chains?)

Boredom

Much unhappiness, Newport contends, comes from frantically switching between shallow tasks, something that is all too often the lot of today’s knowledge workers. When you instead turn your mind to focus intensely on something that stretches your mind, you experience the opposite: deep satisfaction.

=> Practice being bored. Instead of whipping out your phone every time you have to wait a few minutes, try observing your surroundings, focusing on your breathing, or talking to one of the people around you. Boredom won’t kill you.

Multitasking

“People who multitask all the time can’t filter out irrelevancy. They can’t manage a working memory. They’re chronically distracted. They initiate much larger parts of their brain that are irrelevant to the task at hand… they’re pretty much mental wrecks” (157).
study

=> Focus instead to avoid context switching penalty

Shallow time

• Slack
• Email
• Reviews

Sources

• Embrace boredom, do hard things blog post
• 5 Methods for Focusing and Concentrating Effectively video
• Kanban combined with little pair programming. Little interference blog post
• 📖 Book review blog post

Next

• Deliberate practice

#published