NORTHERN PLANNER

Nowadays we live in a world with more distractions and less time than any other era. Ever. 

Yet doing your best work requires focus. You need to be so lost in the task you're not thinking about it anymore. The flow state takes effort, it takes practice. 

The mortal enemies of flow is the smartphone, Zoom calls and 'can I have a sec'. Doing your best work means being ruthless at blocking out distractions and the people who create them.

Multitasking is a skill, but that quantity gets in the way of quality. Multi-taskers bash out a lot of average.

If you've read Deep Work you'll know you need to create three hours a day free of distraction. It's tough, but if you can achieve it. those three hours will be worth eight of the Slack addicts.

They'll be working longer AND their output will be shallow, barely scratching the surface.

Caving in to office gossip, photos on Instagram or some email that could wait, means they won't have the focus to solve difficult problems or hack through average to get to exceptional.

Every distraction takes 22 minutes to recover from, to get back into the momentum you left.

22 minutes.

'Just a sec' is a hell of a lot more than just a sec.

Just three hours of focus. Three hours saying no. That's it. 

Then you can spend the rest of the day saying yes. To gossip, WhatsApp, whatever.

You have time, with added satisfaction of a job well done.