Prioritise what to work on during deep work by ranking your to-do list by importance and urgency. The not-so-important and non-urgent tasks don’t need to be done right now.
Priority. What is most important for you to have done. Or you could do something that you find the most hard to keep consentrated on. Personally I use it for paper work, something that is easy to get distracted from, and takes a lot of thought.
I often feel frazzled because I have so many things to do, yet no clear desire to do Deep Work on one particular thing. I’ve found two things that help me tremendously when I get like this. First is the Fabulous "What are my 3 most important tasks?" habit. It’s a challenge to pick ONLY THREE things out of my day that are "important," but it has been a wonderful exercise to get me thinking in terms of PRIORITIES. (Some tasks are just noisy -- they demand to be done RIGHTNOW! But they aren’t actually a higher priority than others.) If I have a list of my 3 Priorities for the day, I can just grab one of those for Deep Work sessions. I’m finding it helpful to do a 3 Priorities list for my projects too, so I can be ready to grab one for Deep Work. (As an example, I’m an artist, so I keep 2 paying projects and one personal project on my priority list.) The second method that helps me SO MUCH for Deep Work is the "Just Get Started" exercise in the Deep Work habit. It’s ready, set, go, and just grab ANYTHING to do! It’s only for a few minutes, so I feel that it doesn’t matter if I don’t wind up moving my projects along. But I almost always get inspired and work longer than those few minutes; and it always helps to clear my head. And getting even a little bit done helps me feel less stressed about the rest!
Consider your effort as an investment... put a number on it (e.g. the effort i will put in the next hour is worth 1000 dollars), then as yourself where can you invest this effort to get the best return? Who is more worthy of your effort right now?
Deep work happens best if you are already rolling - it’s easier to keep going than to get started. The difference between the work you do regularly and deep work is that Deep Work is a period where you give yourself permission to focus. Even if there’s deadlines, varying priorities, other responsibilities, it is a time to do something for 25 minutes of your own choice, based on your goals in life. You won’t get it all done in 25 minutes, but it will help! If you schedule deep work later in your day, it will also make deciding easier since you’ll have a goal that needs more immediate attention, especially if this is at work.
Usually, I do the thing that is due before anything else and then work down from there. Another thing that works well is to do the hardest thing first. If you can get the harder parts out of the way first, then when you get to the other stuff, it is not as stressful and is easier to handle.
Prioritisation is key. It’s very important to take time to not only do a to do list, but to prioritise it, to help you know where to focus. There are many tools to do this, such as doing a 1-3-5 list, which is a list of 1 big task, 3 medium tasks, 5 small tasks that you will do that day. Or you can use an urgent/important matrix, where you have two axes, placing tasks by whether they are important, urgent or both.
That is why it’s so important to find your three most important tasks. Focus only on the most important one first. If the task is too short, I think that it’s okay to set to complete two short tasks within your deep concentration time.
1. Cal Newport wrote a book on deep work. Find a short YouTube summary here https://youtu.be/gTaJhjQHcf8 2. Deep work sessions should be focused on things that push your brain to work harder– stuff you cannot do well if you are distracted. Stuff that creates new value and that grows your individual skill. Stuff that makes you uniquely irreplaceable. Do not do mundane things that you could do distracted or that do not demand your absolute concentration. For example, are you trying to finish a project, write a book, finish an art piece, solve a scientific problem or answer a fundamental question that requires a lot of your brain power and concentration? This is what you put aside for deep work sessions. Make sure that you have set aside a comfortable and distraction-free time and place for deep work sessions 3. Think of your goals: annual or quarterly or five year goals. Focus your deep work sessions on achieving these. Achieving a goal usually takes many small steps. Choose a specific goal and Make your earliest deep work sessions about breaking down your goal into smaller tasks until you have bite-sized tasks that you can break down into daily specifics. This way, your next several deep work sessions will have tasks already defined clearly and you will spend less time deciding on what to use your sessions for. 4. Look up Cal Newport’s book Deep Work and the many easy summaries on YouTube and other platforms. Success!
The Thing which you Most like to do. I don’t know what you should do, But yes I can tell you what I do is. I choose the task which I love to do, So there is no much efforts to do that. And since I love that task, i can concentrate on that. Eg. I love Reading books, so that is my first task to do.
Answers reflect the personal experiences of Fabulous community members. They are not medical or professional advice — for guidance about your health, talk to a qualified professional.
