if you don't focus, you'll fail, 7 rules for deep work that actually works

Summary

almost 15 years into entrepreneurship I can tell you the single biggest factor in my success isn’t a marketing channel, it’s deep work. nothing else comes close. The One Thing by Gary Keller and Deep Work by Cal Newport changed my career.

here are 7 rules I run sessions by:

1. use focus aids carefully. caffeine, Alpha-GPC, occasionally nicotine. used as tools, not crutches.
2. block the time on the calendar. if it’s not on the calendar it won’t happen. period.
3. kill all communication. Slack closed, phone in another room, no notifications, no exceptions.
4. build a ritual. same drink, same playlist, same desk setup. the ritual is the start switch.
5. set a target before you start. “I’m going to write this section” is a target. “work on the project” is not.
6. schedule it as a habit. daily, weekly, monthly, whatever fits, but recurring. one-off deep work doesn’t compound.
7. sleep is non-negotiable. every focus aid stacks on top of sleep, none of them replace it.

you can run a business on shallow work for a while. you can’t scale one.

Transcript

why deep work is my biggest lever

If you do not produce, you will not thrive. It doesn’t matter how smart you are. It doesn’t matter how talented you are. If you cannot sit down with a disciplined work schedule and produce, nothing else matters. And I will say this has been the biggest needle mover for me as an entrepreneur. I’ve been an entrepreneur for nearly 15 years.

I’ve had a lot of successful businesses. And if you ask me, Jerred, what’s the one thing that’s helped you succeed at the level that you have? My answer would be deep work. I wouldn’t be talking about email newsletters. I wouldn’t be talking about Facebook ad campaigns. I wouldn’t be talking about any specific marketing strategy.

I would say it is deep work. Now, the two books that have helped me with deep work, the first one was The One Thing by Gary Keller. In this book, he talks about a productivity system where you set aside four hours to focus on your one thing. And I implemented that right after I read the book. I would set aside four hours to focus on my one thing, the goal that needed to be accomplished right then.

A few years later, Cal Newport came out with the book Deep Work and really coined the phrase and the term. And when he did that, he gave all sorts of tactical information. So if you are interested in going deep into deep work, those two books are what I highly recommend. But as someone who has done this for a number of years, I’ve got seven tips to help you find that deeper work so you can really move the needle and accomplish things so much faster than anyone else out there.

All right, the first tip is to use a focus aid. And I’ve got three suggestions for you. So a focus aid is something that’s going to enhance your cognitive ability. The first one, we all know about caffeine. You can consume it however you want. This could be tea, coffee, it could be a caffeine pill.

rules 1 and 2, focus aids and the calendar block

However you wanna take caffeine, if you’re not too sensitive to it, play around with the dosage. But ultimately, caffeine is the tried and true cognitive enhancer that will help you with deep work. The second one is Alpha-GPC. This is a choline compound that will greatly increase or enhance your level of focus.

If you haven’t tried it, dosage is around 300 milligrams to 600 milligrams. And you need to play around with this to make sure that you tolerate it well. Some people have reported stomach problems. Some people get headaches from it. Me personally, I don’t have any negative side effects, even when I go up to the upper limit dose of 600 milligrams taken at one time.

Now the third focus aid, slightly controversial, is nicotine. Not in the form of a cigarette, but nicotine gum is what I recommend. And I’m not even gonna say I officially recommend it. This is up to you. And here are some rules around nicotine. Nicotine is probably the most potent of the three. It’s also the shortest lived.

It’ll only work for about one to two hours. Now, most people are scared of nicotine because of cigarettes. It just has a really bad negative connotation with it. Also, it’s an incredibly addictive substance. So you have to be careful with this one. So I’ll tell you what I do. When I use nicotine, which is fairly new for me, I don’t use it very often, I will use the gum and I will use it in a two milligram dose and I will never have more than two milligrams in a day.

Okay, that’s the first thing. The second thing, I will never use it more than two days per week. And in all honesty, I go weeks without using it at all. And this is a very infrequent usage for me because I don’t wanna become addicted to nicotine knowing it’s a very addictive substance. But if you are doing a public speaking event or somewhere where you just really need to be on it, or you need to just focus on some deep work and really get it done, nicotine is a great way to do that.

rule 3, kill all communication

Again, like I said, this is relatively new to me and I’m utilizing it in small doses and very infrequently to avoid the addictive nature of the substance. But I can say it is very effective. So those are the three, you got caffeine, alpha GPC and nicotine. I don’t know if I’d recommend stacking all three, I’d choose one, two or three, maybe two at the max.

But again, I’m not a medical doctor, I’m not actually recommending anything, I’m just telling you what I do. The second tip is to block time and black out. So block the time on your calendar early, make it a recurring habit if you can. But you wanna block that time out, whether it’s two hours to start, four hours, six hours, eight hours, whatever you can mentally handle, make sure that’s blocked on your calendar and people know what you’re doing.

Block it out and have it on the calendar so you don’t have to worry about anything interfering with that. Next is to black out all communication, put the phone on airplane mode, don’t allow anything to notify you, don’t check social media, don’t check email. You are focused, you are locked in. If this is new for you, it’s going to be hard at first.

You might just have to stare at a blank screen or wherever you are trying to create something, but it’s okay, you will get used to it and you will get better at it. But you do not want to be scattered. The research on task switching is clear, it slows you down, it makes you dumber. So you need to block everything out, have it blocked on the calendar and then black out every form of communication and just do the work.

Tip number three is to have some sort of ritual. So this is gonna be different from person to person. It can be as simple as, okay, I sit at my desk, I finish my cup of coffee, when the cup of coffee is finished, I then begin my deep work. Or maybe you wanna listen to a certain song or maybe you wanna do some breath work before you start.

rules 4 and 5, the ritual and the target

I do feel like there should be an entry ritual that you should set for having deep work. For me, I like to do a combination of all those things. I like to have a cup of coffee. I’m not gonna work until that is finished, which I’ve normally started well before I got to my desk. And then I’m also going to listen to some music that kind of gets me in the mode for creation.

It’s not anything crazy, mostly it’s like this instrumental brain music, but after I do those things, I’m locked in, I’m starting to focus, I’m getting ready to do the deep work. I really highly recommend making some sort of ritual entry process to your deep work and take it seriously. Tip number four for your deep work is to have a target, have a very defined target.

What I’ll see a lot of people do is they’ll block out the deep work on the calendar and they’ll say four hours of deep work, it’s blocked out on the calendar. And then when they get to doing the deep work, they don’t really know what they’re doing. They just wanna sit there and do four hours of work.

You need to have a very specific target going into the deep work day. So it could be something like, hey, I’m going to write three video scripts and a newsletter during this deep work session. Now you have a target, you can be done when it’s done. If you finish in two hours instead of three or four, just be done, set a target for that deep work session, work on those things.

As soon as one is done, you move to the next. That way you don’t break your flow. Again, task switching is what we’re trying to avoid here. So it’s not just having a four hour time block of uninterrupted work. You ultimately want to be able to say, this is exactly what I’m going to get done in this deep work session.

rule 6, schedule it as a habit

Know that the night before the deep work session begins. Tip five is to make it a habit. So this would be recurring in your calendar. I know everybody’s different with how much deep work they can actually squeeze into their day, week or even month. So at a minimum, set a monthly deep work cadence. Maybe it’s once per month.

You block out four to six hours for really deep work. If that’s all you can afford to time-wise put into your calendar. Or you can do weekly. Hey, these two days I have four hour blocks for deep work. Or if you can make it every single day, which is kind of what the one thing recommends, four hours every single day, deep work block.

Then after those four hours, you can do all the other crap that goes along with being a business owner and just doing life stuff in general. But I highly recommend daily. If you can’t fit that in, make it weekly or monthly. Tip number six, be organized. If you use a note-taking software or you have a place where the work happens, know that is where you’re going in to do the work.

If you are scattered on your computer, clicking around different Chrome tabs or you’re opening up different things, chances are you’re going to stumble across something you don’t need to be a part of, which is checking your email or social media or something else that’s going to distract you. Or it might not even be a distraction like that.

It might just be different work. That’s not the deep work in the target that you set for the day. And so you can find yourself bouncing around and we want to avoid that task switching. So you want to be very organized. Hey, I’m logging into this one thing or I’m opening up this note-taking app and this is where I’m living for the next two, three, four hours.

rule 7, sleep is the floor

I am creating, I’m doing this thing. I’m working on this project. Be very specific and very organized with your work. That way the chances of you getting sidetracked are very, very minimal. Now tip number seven, get some fricking sleep. You know you need to sleep for any of this to matter. All of the focus aids I was talking about, caffeine, alpha GPC, nicotine, those are going to suck if you don’t actually have a very good foundation of sleep.

So the night before, have your shutdown ritual. You know, don’t look at screens. Make it really dark and cold in your room. All the things that you need to do to get those strong seven to nine hours of sleep, wherever you fit in that spectrum, get as much sleep as you possibly can. It makes deep work so much easier the next day.

Like I said, the biggest game changer for me as an entrepreneur has been deep work, the ability to sit and produce. I don’t know many people who really set out to master deep work, but if you do, it is an absolute competitive advantage. And it’s only becoming more and more of a competitive advantage because people are becoming more scattered.

They’re scrolling more frequently with social media. We see that people’s attention spans are decreasing. This is bad for people, good for entrepreneurs who are in a competitive market. Because if you want to be competitive, all you need to do is learn how to focus, not get sucked into all the distractions.

And when you can produce more, you will thrive.