What is the problem?

I always thought that I need to work really hard as everyone repeats on social media because working hard is the key to success. I spent last year building Zencal, simultaneously working at my regular (full-time) job. In short term, it may look like I’m very hard-working but in long term, I realized that I’m just less efficient.

It’s again a reason that I think a big part of social media content is harmful. If you watch YouTube videos or the Instagram of people who work hard every day, you can feel that you need to. Today I know I don’t need to. I can but only when it is a specific, important (for me) reason to do that, e.g. I promised my clients something that I deliver.

Otherwise, I prefer to spend time resting or doing something very pleasant to charge my battery for another session of work.

How I work now?

I tried deep work and I need to admit it's something brilliant. I know there is a lot of stuff on the Internet about deep work, but if you don’t try it, you wouldn’t love it. When you try it, and you will see the first results, it will be groundbreaking for your business life.

Long story short, here is my X points that I recommend you to try if you want to see how deep work can improve your results:

1. Set your goals - remember to choose only these goals that you really want to achieve, otherwise you will lose motivation, and you’ll procrastinate over and over.
2. Put your goals to the task manager - I recommend Notion, yes Notion.so. Many people use Trello or ToDoIst, but Notion will help you stay focused. You can have many things in one app.
3. Set a time deadline for every task - you need to feel that you have limited time to finish the task, otherwise, a subconscious thought will appear in your head that you have unlimited time, so you never finish it.
4. Block a time in your calendar - Set a maximum of 4h block of time for deep work. On the Internet, you will find many resources that say you can’t stay in deep work for more than 4 hours.
5. Split this huge block of time into smaller blocks and assign them to individual tasks.
6. Make it fun - if you have a problem with motivation, you can make tasks more fun by giving yourself the challenge to finish the task faster than you planned to.

Use the rest of the time differently

If you try using the above method, you probably save more time to … exactly to do whatever you want. You can sit down in the chair and think about what you want to achieve next. You can rethink your failures and what you can improve in your process.

Finally, you will find this lost time that you spend on shadow hard work. Treat this time as your biggest reward for the deep work session.