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Strategizing is easy. Executing is really hard. In his book “Deep Work”, Cal Newport recommends to make use of the 4 Disciplines of Execution to get work done and improve your process along the way.

The 4 Disciplines of Execution are:

First, have a wildly important goal (As in my case: “Deeply understand and absorb Customer Development as taught by Steve Blank”)

Second, act on those (lead) measures that you have direct control over (As in my case “Hours spent fully focused on this topic”)

Third, keep track of your daily progress with a scoreboard (I have a sheet of paper where I track every minute of focused work)

Fourth, create a weekly cadence of accountability to reflect and improve (As in my case: A Retrospective at the end of the week)

Given this context, I would like to share with you my results from this weeks’ Deep Work accountability session.

But first some high-level information:

When and how much did I work?

With my scoreboard, I was able to track 6.75h of Deep Work this week. It is 5% less than the week before (7h).

• Monday: 2h
• Tuesday: 1.5h
• Wednesday: 15m
• Thursday: 1.5h
• Friday: 0h
• Saturday: 0h
• Sunday: 1.5h

I am still proud about this achievement even it is the lowest amount of focused work I’ve done since I started 5 weeks ago. I am proud of it because my regular full-time work at Pivotal Labs has started again and I got the flu on Friday.

In general, I have gotten up at 5:00 - 5:15am to get going. My morning routine has changed slightly, too. I have come back to practice Yoga again instead of writing morningpages. I felt that 26 weeks of daily writing was enough for now.

You may already see some oddities here. Wednesday I barely had time in the morning to sit down. I did a quick Anki recall session but it was very short. On Friday I couldn’t clock in any time because, as it turned out throughout the day, I got the flu and needed rest. Saturday and Sunday were to be my regular days off but on Sunday I felt better and had the energy to put in some work. It turned out to be good.

What went well?

The Scoreboard helped me keep track This is the first week that I feel that the scoreboard helped me become aware how outside influences impact my morning routine. Also, the scoreboard was crucial to do a retrospective like this one because I would, otherwise, likely have forgotten what happened this week.

Planning ahead what and how I’ll work was crucial When I made a quick list of how I was going to spend the 1.5h beforehand, it was much easier for me to start a timer and dive into the work. In best case, I had made that plan the day before, but even just scribbling down a bullet list of tasks at the outset of the morning session helped to take my mind off planning and focus better.

Made progress on the course and book I feel like I have made solid, if a little slow, progress on the course and book. I am still trying to figure out the best rhythm between reading, taking notes and recalling facts. I started to notice my own speed of learning and what works good for me.

I was able to better reason about product and customer development at work. As a consultant it’s important to have my facts straight. In several instances I was able to apply my new learnings and past experience to help my clients understand and solve their issues.

I started my days with Yoga again While somewhat tangential to the time spent focusing, it felt great to start the day with breathing, asanas, relaxation and a short meditation again. While I only had 30 minutes, a short practice session still gave me more focus and calmness.

My kitchen-timer keeps me focused With the recommendation to split the time up into more manageable chunks of time, all I really need is a $5 kitchen timer. I’m amazed at how effective this little plastic tool is.

“Oh, hey! I can use some of my weekend mornings, too!” Structure is good for me. As it turns out, I felt happier throughout the week than during my usually unstructured, free-flowing weekends. So, I’ve decided to add a pinch of deep work schedule on Saturday and Sunday just because it makes me feel good.

What went okay?

Here are a few things that were “okay” or came up as questions. Not really bad or good, just sort of “Hm?”.

1.5 hours in the morning seem to be the practical maximum. Given that getting up at 5 is already pretty hard, and given that I want to shower, stretch, meditate and eat, 1.5h hours is a practical maximum before I have to head to work. It’s not good or bad, just a clear limit to my set-up.

Am I learning to slow? So, I set out to learn (about) Customer Development and just had the feeling that I wasn’t moving as fast as I could/should/would bla. I guess, I’m still getting used to this whole thing, so it’s too early to tell. But of course I want to know everything NOW!

How does such a schedule work with a partner? This is a question I wonder about. As a single I am in the position to completely command my time spent. Which is great. But how does it work when there is a lovely partner with me? Is it sensible to keep up such a strict regimen? Is it possible?

What has been my output? I feel like I haven’t produced much for others besides these blog-posts that are sort of meta to the whole experience. Then again, I have been able to pin-point clients to very specific Customer Development ideas and concepts to help them understand how to approach new customers.

Little time for breakfast and getting ready. I have to really get up at 5:15am latest to be able to get everything done. Breakfast is somewhat hurried and I usually wind up with 10 minutes to get ready for my day. It’s not ideal yet but also no deal-breaker.

What went bad?

Looking back, what didn’t go well and what can I improve upon this week?

Even just one drink in the evening throws my morning off. I’m not a huge fan of drinking anyways but it was significantly harder to get out of bed early on Wednesday and Friday because of drinks the night before. The main learning here for me is to really be careful when I go to town. It’s fun sometimes but it has its implications on my ability to get up and concentrate the next day.

Learning is not practicing. I am proud to have learned a lot, in an academic sense. But I am also not yet at the point where I have tackled the hard stuff “by hand.” In case of Customer Development, there is much I can learn about it but the hard work comes when you actually ‘get out of the building’. These are the skills I truly want to learn and master. And that takes practice not mere learning. (Learning is important to practice, but it’s just a step).

To mitigate this issue, I have looked to Josh Kaufman’s “The First 20 Hours” which is a great book to learn how to practice.

What am I working on?

The main focus of my work in the morning has been to learn and deeply understand Steve Blank’s Customer Development processes. For this, I have started to take his Course “How To Build a Startup” and have done most exercises and suggested reading. Since the video lectures are relatively short, most of my time was spent reading, annotating, transcribing and memorizing the key-facts from his book “The Startup Owner’s Manual.” I have also started to deconstruct the book “Business Model Generation” alongside. My goal here is to really get into this original work and better understand where I made mistakes in the past, make better decisions in the future and better serve my clients at work.

With this in mind, here is my assessment of what went well, okay and bad this week as I continued to learn and establish my concentrated practice:

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Wow, so there you have it. A recap of last week’s working on my own early in the morning. I have learned a bunch about myself already and I am looking forward to continuing.

If you have any questions yourself, please feel free to contact me here or on my blog.

Three weeks ago, my colleague Oleksii Fedorov mentioned that “adults are able to deeply work for about 4 hours per day.”

Something clicked in my brain. Deeply working? Deep work? I hadn’t heard the use of deep and work in the same sentence in years. I was curious. What is this deep work? And why are there only 4 hours of it per day?

I’ve felt so distracted and confused and frustrated for so years. Even before I moved to Berlin I would, after work, just go home and do nothing. A vicious cycle of depleted willpower and bad habits developed. Sure, I longed for an exciting, creative life with every cell of my body. But I ended up on my couch surfing the web, Facebook, Instagram, Hacker News and Reddit for hours. I would continue to do so until I was tired. My life had slowly emptied itself from meaning and wonder. I felt exhausted and deeply distracted. I felt like I was stuck. Trapped in a cycle of sleep, work, couch. I felt hopeless.

Cal Newport’s book Deep Work had the answer to the question I was too distracted to even ask:

“How can I be happy again and feel a depth and appreciation of my creative and professional life?”

With Cal Newport’s book I have re-created space and time for Deep Work. It has helped me regain a sense of focus, growth and creativity that I have missed for years.

What is Deep Work?

1. Deep Work is the ability to quickly learn and master hard things and then produce tangible results that others value at an elite quality and speed.
2. The ability to do Deep Work is rare and valuable in today’s economy. In a default state where everyone is distracted with “shallow” (low-value, high-stimuli tasks that are easily replicated) tasks, the missing link is to focus on “deep” (high-value, low-stimuli) tasks. To thrive, Deep Work is a competitive advantage that a knowledge worker like myself must develop.
3. Deep Work means to apply a craftsman’s approach to your work. It doesn’t matter what the work is but how one approaches it. I felt stuck in my work and complained that “This isn’t my passion” while at the same time I could not point you to what my passion was otherwise. As it turns out, focusing on turning your profession into a craft, appreciating it and improving your skill over time through active, deliberate practice, will create a sense of wonder and happiness that the quest for the “job of passion”, if it exists, will not produce. The key to happiness at work isn’t to work a rare and special job but to bring a rarified approach to one’s work whatever it may be. Side note: Newport has an excellent book on this that I am currently devouring: “So good they can’t ignore you.”
4. Deep Work can be incorporated in my daily life. I realized that my feeble attempts to “do stuff after work” never took roots because at that point in the day my resources for willpower were depleted. Instead, I have decided to front-load a daily session of working deeply in the morning just before heading out for work.
5. Having supporting structure and a plan (even if it changes) for my deep work is crucial. Willpower and focus is limited and distractions, the lack of structure and ambiguity siphon off precious glucose molecules (the raw material of focus) from the work itself.

What have I worked on deeply?

The first (meta) skill that I wanted to deeply learn and master has been to learn how to focus again and to learn how to learn hard things quickly. For this I intensely studied, practiced and rehearsed

1. Everything there is to know about “Deep Work” itself
2. The craftsmanship approach through “So Good They Can’t Ignore You”, also by Cal Newport
3. How to approach new scientific concepts and ideas with “A Mind For Numbers” by Barbara Oakley, Ph.D.

How did I incorporate Deep Work into my day?

In the past 2 weeks I created myself a simple structure where I worked right in the morning for 2 hours with full attention and focus.

I already had a daily ritual to write 2-3 handwritten pages after breakfast for the past (!) 26 weeks. This made it easy to introduce deep work right after the existing writing routine. This meant, after I finished writing my “morningpages”, I launched into a 1.5-2h deep work session. Monday through Friday.

Then I followed the book and implemented the following changes:

1. I decided on a deep work schedule strategy: The “Rhythmic Scheduling Strategy” where I allocate time every day to work deeply. I have found that I am the sharpest in the morning and so I have scheduled my deep work time in the hours before heading to work.
2. I created myself an environment, a clean table, a good desk lamp, a comfortable chair and snacks to support me during the work.
3. I used a kitchen-timer to keep track of the 25-minute focus sprints and short breaks in between. This was particularly important for me because my attention has been so shot that knowing that the intense focus will eventually end helps.
4. I rewarded myself for every 25 minutes of focus with a quick attaboy such as “You’re doing great!”
5. After each 25 minute session I got up, streched, ate some fruit. To embed a new habit, especially a low-stimuli one like concentrated work, it is crucial to be generous with rewards even if they feel silly at first. I’ve made myself a sticky note right in front of my workspace that reads “CELEBRATE EVERYTHING.” It’s doing a good job.
6. I shut off any internet notifications and noises. Sometimes a classical playlist from Spotify plays in the background.
7. I set myself a “wildly important goal” – Which is to learn how work deeply in order to apply it to the topics that I am professionally interested in (Customer Development, Software Craftsmanship). While the last 2 weeks were sort of “meta” in that I focused on the skill of deep work in order to do deep work on other things, I believe it was absolutely the right way to start.
8. I put up a scoreboard. I kept track of every minute that I worked with full focus. In week 1 I scored 10 hours and in the past week I scored 9 hours of uninterrupted focused work.
9. I created a schedule for the coming day every night in order to create structure and not waste willpower on having to figure that out every day anew.
10. To quickly learn and master this skill of deep work and focused attention, I learned to use Anki and spaced repetition to capture, rehearse and ultimately remember facts and ideas from several non-fiction books.
11. I recapped each week’s work on Saturday. I evaluated what worked and what didn’t work. How my flow was and where I lost concentration. I then planned small changes that would support me better in the coming week. For example, I learned that by the 4th “Pomodoro” (25-minute session), I struggled to concentrate. I realized that eating a piece of fruit, like an apple, just before helped give me focus again.

What was challenging?

Following Newport’s Rule #2 “Embrace Boredom” has been incredibly challenging for me. “Embrace Boredom” means to fight the urges to give in to low-value, high-stimuli indulgences like “The Internet”. The problem aren’t sites like Facebook or Instagram themselves (although they have sucked more hours from life than TV at this point). It’s the constant switching of attention that costs focus. Needless to say, before I started Deep Work, I was switching HARD.

The problem is: You can deeply work as much as you want but it’s not going to work if you feed your brain junk. High-stimuli, low-value tasks like checking the internet compulsively or watching YouTube videos or the news have been hard to quit. Really hard.

To mitigate this risk, I installed a website blocker on my phone to fight my trained routine response to boredom. I am however still struggling with scheduling internet access at home.

To help myself with weaning off from the the urge to distract myself, I also bought a really cool toy, an “Addict-a-ball” that I propped on my couch. Now, whenever I sit on my couch now and usually would have picked up my phone to check any and all internet (and lose an hour and not realizing) I now pick up the “Addict-a-ball” and play with it. Since it’s a high-stimuli game, I feel quiet entertained by it. It definitely has helped me deal with the withdrawal.

What’s next?

Next up is the challenge to continue my deep work before work (and at work) with a regular 40 hour full time job. I am confident I can do it because I study the topics I teach at work: Make something people want! I expect there will be significant synergies but there is also the reality of working before work.

I also started to be absent from any social media for the month of January and believe this will be a challenge to the habit of “just checking Facebook and Instagram to brighten up boring moments in my life.”

Deep Work has been an immensely rewarding journey so far. I have learned so much about myself, my life, my habits and my creativity. It hasn’t always been easy but I feel confident it has already changed me for the better.

Finally. If you are curious or would like to learn more about Deep Work, I highly recommend you get the print copy of “DEEP WORK – Cal Newport” and “A Mind For Numbers” by Barbara Oakley, Ph.D., like, today.

I am also happy to help you if you get stuck with implementing the structure in your life. It isn’t easy but it isn’t as hard as it may first seem.

Thanks

I would not have stumbled across “Deep Work” unless my awesome colleague Olekssi Fedorov had mentioned it. Clearly, I thank Cal Newport for writing the book and making it so clear and easy how to create Deep Work in my own life. I want to thank Chris Castiglione for giving me a good idea of what the tangible results of Deep Work can look like. He has consistently created great work with his podcast “On Books” and his classes at OneMonth that have led him to great places and people. My friend Marc Petri who recently showed me Sun Ra’s businesscards from the 50’s. To come up with a punch-line such as “Beta Music for Beta People”, you have to deeply love your work. Thank you.