by Brian Solis
I was challenged to push my creative boundaries. I learned powerful new skills, like online design. My point of view broadened and I was constantly inspired. I benefited from so many happy accidents.
If you develop the discipline to dive into deep work within these open work environments, you won't be distracted by all of the activity; you'll be rejuvenated and re-energized for a next deep dive.
©Emma Matthews
Ruthlessly Prioritize
To make time for deep work, you've got to implement a process of extremely strict prioritization of what you will work on, stripping out most, if not all, nonessential obligations and time-sucks.
To make time for deep work, you've got to implement a process of extremely strict prioritization of what you will work on, stripping out most, if not all, nonessential obligations and time-sucks. In researching how highly productive creative people do this, I came upon the story of Fidji Simo, vice president of product at Facebook. Her rapid ascension within the ranks of such a highly competitive company is widely admired within the tech circles. In a profile in First Round Review,5 she shares lessons she had learned about creative productivity when she was facing what threatened to be a long stretch of downtime.
She manages a team of 400 product managers and engineers developing some of the most successful products that we all, for better or for worse, use on a regular basis. Just a couple of years ago, however, she was ordered to bedrest for five months during a complicated pregnancy. At the time, she was in the midst of a number of critical projects, and she decided that she would not take a leave of absence. Instead, she would work from home. She recalled in the article that, “It required immense focus. I actually felt so much more productive than when I was in the office.” The article explained:
Working remotely meant she was forced to say “no” to anything that wasn't critical, which created the time and space—physically and mentally—to put 100% of her effort toward the most pressing and important projects. By cutting out anything nonessential she was able to focus on the most strategic priorities, not only for the product team, but for herself. When she returned, she brought this commitment to focused work with her—eager to share it with her team
We can all benefit from adopting her practices.
She schedules every aspect of her work, including time for handling unforeseen interruptions. All too often, urgent meetings, calls, and emails sneak their way on to your calendar, hogging up critical deep work time. Acknowledge this reality by scheduling some time for intrusions. “My calendar is my most powerful tool for enforcing my prioritization,” Simo says. She plans for two hours of “buffer time” each week for unscheduled interruptions, and then she allocates it with strict prioritization, postponing any requests for her time that she can schedule for later. Of course, no one wants to hear that their request, need or time is not important to you. Communicating well here is key. Simo suggests the following ways to respond: What to say when something can wait: “I'm focused 100 percent on x this week, so if this isn't an urgent issue, let's re-evaluate next week.”
What to say when you need a little time: “I'm fully focused on x right now, so I can't meet about that this week. But if you send me an email, I will get back to you with an answer by y.”
What to say when someone else can handle it: “This week, I need to focus all my time on x, but if you need an urgent answer, you can reach out to my team lead, z, who is focused on that issue.”
©Martin Shreder
She concentrates her deep work time entirely on the most important project on her agenda.
She schedules “clarity” check-ins for herself, between 30 to 60 minutes each, to review her prioritization of tasks and assess if she's on course with her goals and prioritizing right for her team. Simo's drill for this is: List the broader team or organization's top priorities.
Check that your personal priorities for the week still align with those priorities.
Check for any new information or data that requires a shift in priorities.
Check priorities against your time allocation, meetings, and commitments that week.
Make any adjustments to your calendar to better reflect your priorities.
Note any priority adjustments that impact or need to be communicated to your team.
You can adapt her process in any way that's best for your work.
For meetings, which we all know can be such unproductive time thieves, she advises: Have a clear agenda for what you want to achieve or what needs to be achieved in every meeting. Also, maintain a checklist of objectives that you want to leave each meeting with.
Simo has also, vitally, made time for her personal creative expression. She shared that she is a painter, but she hadn't made time for it in years. She missed the happiness she felt when making her art, and by being so rigorous with her work schedule, she was able to create time for it again. She explained,
I decided to do one art project a week. You would think finding the time to stick to it was the harder part, but it wasn't. What was hard was realizing that being creative was one of my core goals—it was being honest with myself about my priorities first and then enforcing them going forward.6
Diving into Flow
Building your ability to focus creatively is like holding your breath. The more you practice it, the more you increase your ability to hold longer and deeper breaths.
By rigorously carving out time for deep work, you will create the condition for experiencing regular episodes of flow, which can become deeper and richer the more you dive in. Recall that the state of flow is characterized by:
Removal of interference of the thinking mind.
Complete involvement in what we are doing.
A sense of ecstasy—of being outside everyday reality.
Great inner clarity—knowing what needs to be done, and how well we are doing.
The confidence that the activity is doable, that one's skills are adequate to the task.
A total lack of self-consciousness. There's a sense of serenity—no worries about oneself, and a feeling of growing beyond the boundaries of the ego.
Timelessness—one is so thoroughly focused on the present that hours seem to pass by in minutes.
Intrinsic motivation—whatever produces flow becomes its own reward.
©Sasha Stories
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi says7 flow is “a state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience is so enjoyable that people will continue to do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.” That's the ecstasy of it, and the marvelous thing is that we can achieve deeper and deeper experiences of that ecstasy. We can become flow free divers.
Free divers swim to extreme depths underwater (the current record is 214 m) without any breathing apparatus. Champions can hold their breath for extraordinary amounts of time—the record for women is 9 minutes, 11 for men.8
Have you ever wondered what pushes the insane progress in adventure sports? I think back to my teens and early 20s growing up in Southern California and surfing Point Dume and Zuma. I think the biggest wave I rode then was a massive wall with a face of four feet. (Hey, that was big for me!) And at the time, I think about the pros who were conquering massive 25-foot waves around the world (especially in Northern California at Mavericks). Nowadays, surfers are pushing more than three times that. In November 2017, Brazilian surfer Rodrigo Koxa broke the Guinness World9 record by riding an 80-foot wave. This beat the previous record10 held by American surfer Garrett McNamara (78 feet). These types of incredible leaps forward have been achieved in many sports.
How do these super humans perform these otherwise unimaginable feats? According to Steven Kotler,11 author of The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance, the secret lies in the ability to engage in the state of flow.12 He highlights that when people are in flow, their “. . . mental and physical ability go through the roof, and the brain takes in more information per sec
ond, processing it more deeply.”
Our nervous system is incapable of processing more than about 110 bits of information per second. And in order to hear me and understand what I'm saying, you need to process about 60 bits per second.
That's why when we're in flow, we are totally unaware of distractions. Csikszentmihalyi explains the science of this.13 “It sounds like a kind of romantic exaggeration,” he says. “But actually, our nervous system is incapable of processing more than about 110 bits of information per second. And in order to hear me and understand what I'm saying, you need to process about 60 bits per second.” He continued, “That's why you can't hear more than two people. You can't understand more than two people talking to you.”
When your mind is so focused on the processing it's doing for your creative deep work, it simply has no frequency left over for anything else.
When your mind is so focused on the processing it's doing for your creative deep work, it simply has no frequency left over for anything else. Even for noticing while you're in flow that you're in flow.
Whenever I think about this aspect of flow, I can't help but think of a wonderful scene in the movie Finding Nemo. Nemo's father, Marlin, is trying to find the East Australian Current, so he can get to Sydney super fast to look for his son. The current is the River Rea, by the way. It's a river within the ocean that's 100 km wide and 1.5 km deep, and though it moves more slowly than is depicted in the film, it courses at an impressive speed of 7 km per hour.
In the scene, Marlin calls out to a turtle racing by near him, “I need to get to the East Australian Current,” and the turtle replies, “You're ridin' it dude!”
The best moments usually occur when a person's body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.
We can think of the state of flow as what the founder of the field of Positive Psychology, Martin Seligman, calls optimal experience, a kind of perfection. He writes, “The best moments usually occur when a person's body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile,” and that,14 “Consciousness and emotion are there to correct your trajectory; when what you are doing is seamlessly perfect, you don't need them.”15
While our creative output will never actually be perfect, we can have a perfect experience while we are making it. And we can even strive to be in flow more often and for longer periods. We can even become what Csikszentmihalyi calls an “autotelic” person,16 which he describes as being “never bored, seldom anxious, involved with what goes on and in flow most of the time.” He further explains,
Autotelic17 is used to describe people who are internally driven, and as such may exhibit a sense of purpose and curiosity. This determination is an exclusive difference from being externally driven, where things such as comfort, money, power, or fame are the motivating force.
We can achieve this state of being by constantly challenging ourselves, strengthening and gaining new skills, opening ourselves up to feedback so that we're aware of how we're performing, and having well-defined success metrics to evaluate our progress.
Keep Score to Keep Improving
Your Performance
Cal Newport likens working deeply to the process of business governance. Businesses seek to carefully allocate their investments, of resources and their people's time, in order to maximize their return on those investments (ROI). In order to provide yourself with the feedback you need to evaluate your progress in developing your creative productivity, you've got to devise a way of measuring your return on your time and mental, spiritual resources. I advise creating a creativity scorecard. This tracks daily and weekly measures of achievement of your goals.
In order to provide yourself with the feedback you need to evaluate your progress in developing your creative productivity, you've got to devise a way of measuring your return on your time and mental, spiritual resources.
This may sound intimidating, but it can be a very simple tracking of where you are versus where you need, or want, to be. Here is an example of the scorecard I used to track my progress in writing this book:
You can't imagine how motivating this simple tracking of word count was to me.
I developed this concept based on the work of Chris McChesney, Sean Covey, and Jim Huling, the authors of the influence book The 4 Disciplines of Execution. The book is designed to help business people execute on plans “in the midst of the whirlwind of distractions.”18 Their key tips for scorecards are that they should:
Be simple
Be visible
Show clear indicators of your performance
Tell you immediately if you are on or off track
Be regularly updated, ideally either daily or weekly
This simple personal accountability device will allow you to see exactly when you're falling short and that helps pinpoint why. It also lights a fire of creative determination.
To show you how eye-opening this tracking can be, I'll share a very embarrassing earlier version, from when I was struggling to make any progress on the book project I had thought would be my next one. This graphic representation of how far off the mark I was of the goals I had set for myself for the hours needed to generate targeted word counts helped me realize that I had to take a serious look at what was going wrong with my creative process.
The scorecard shows the words I wrote versus my goal and how much time I spent measured against the time I estimated I would need to write that amount. You can see there are glaring gaps between my goals and actual output. What this scorecard doesn't represent is the number of times I stopped my Pomodoro timer in the middle of a deep work block to chase digital distractions.
The wake-up call I got from this helped me to see all of the other self-defeating consequences of my distractions. It helped me to appreciate just how much less time I could spend with my family—all those extra hours over the time I had estimated—and that helped me to take the hard look I needed at all of the negative effects on my life, and that of my family, from failing to nurture my creative energy.
On the flip side, once I had begun applying the insights I gained from researching this book, when I set out to go ahead and write it, you can see the steady progress I made. What that scorecard taught me was that there's a great sense of accomplishment in gaining control over your creative productivity, even from the smallest strides toward achieving your goals.
It's important to be diligent about measuring and charting your progress as you go. Measuring your progress not only helps inspire you, it allows you to calibrate the goals you've set for yourself better with your current skills, and that helps you to get into flow.
We get better and better at taking on new challenges, understanding that we've got to apply ourselves to developing skills that will allow us to carefully balance the difficulty of our creative mission with our ability to achieve it.
“It is not enough to be happy, to have an excellent life,” Csikszentmihalyi states. “The point is to be happy while doing things that stretch our skills, that help us grow and fulfill our potential.” I couldn't describe the goal of lifescaling any better.
“It is not enough to be happy, to have an excellent life. The point is to be happy while doing things that stretch our skills, that help us grow and fulfill our potential.”
-Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Notes
1https://productivephysician.com/deep-work/#Deep-Work-The-Rules
2http://vedanta.org/become-a-monastic/
3http://philosophicaldisquisitions.blogspot.com/2016/01/the-value-of-deep-work-and-how-to.html
4https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GjLan582Lgk
5http://firstround.com/review/how-facebooks-vp-of-product-finds-focus-and-creates-conditions-for-intentional-work/
6Ibid.
7Cskikszentmihalyi, Flow, 1990, p.4
8http://theconversation.com/free-divers-have-long-defied-science-and-we-still-dont-really-understand-how-they-go-so-dee
p-92690
9http://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/news/2018/5/a-timeline-of-the-biggest-waves-surfed-as-rodrigo-koxa-sets-new-record-523752
10https://www.independent.co.uk/sport/general/rodrigo-koxa-video-surf-biggest-wave-world-record-surfing-watch-nazare-beach-portugal-a8329466.html
11https://www.fastcompany.com/3031052/how-to-hack-into-your-flow-state-and-quintuple-your-productivity
12https://www.fastcompany.com/3031052/how-to-hack-into-your-flow-state-and-quintuple-your-productivity
13https://www.ted.com/talks/mihaly_csikszentmihalyi_on_flow/transcript?language=en#t-332434
14Csikszentmihalyi, 2002, p. 116
15Csikszentmihalyi, 1990, p.3
16https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/autotelic
17Cskikszentmihalyi, 1990, p.67
18https://www.amazon.com/Disciplines-Execution-Achieving-Wildly-Important/dp/145162705X
Conclusion
The Art of Lifescaling is Learning How to Live, Learn and Love
“Above all, you keep your clarity. You keep your focus. You keep your sense of love. And, you keep your sense of purpose. . . . A lot of people define success differently. You can have everything. You can have all the money in the world. But, if it's not enjoyable, if it's not sustainable, if you can't be a person of integrity, having all these things, what does it matter? What does it mean? The value is internal. Your value is internal.”