I listened to the audio book of "Deep Work" and enjoyed it, as well as the fact that he didn't drag the book out with unnecessary waffle -- it ended suddenly while I was out for a walk and at first I thought there was a mistake, but that was just the end of the book!
The great thing is that you can get a lot of the benefits of "flow" without making drastic sacrifices like going cold turkey on social media (although if you feel like it, by all means do so). I strive for a "lite" version of this by using a Pomodoro timer, listening to binaural beats (rather than distracting music) and trying to avoid email and chat while the timer is running.
While on holidays, I occasionally activate Super Flow, in which I'm working on my own on a side project and 12 hours could easily pass without my attention being broken. It's amazing but do difficult to replicate at work, since I always tend to need information from people, or they need it from me, or the calendar is peppered with meetings.
Yeah that's a great point - one of the beauties of solo side projects is the ability to just get the work done without having to sit in back-to-back meetings! I love just banging out code for 6 hours straight, listening to rain sounds on Spotify (not kidding you, it's amazing for concentrated focus!).
I love the Pomodoro technique - do you use a special app for it, or just set a timer?
Yeah rain sounds are good - I used to listen to Noisli, and sometimes I use an Android app called Noice (admittedly, mostly when trying to sleep). Sometimes I'll listen to video game music since that tends to be composed in a way that loops naturally -- often when coming out of flow, I'll realise the same song has been playing for 40 minutes.
The Pomodoro timer I use is just a super-simplistic webapp called Tomato Timer and it does the trick without being too distracting.
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I listened to the audio book of "Deep Work" and enjoyed it, as well as the fact that he didn't drag the book out with unnecessary waffle -- it ended suddenly while I was out for a walk and at first I thought there was a mistake, but that was just the end of the book!
The great thing is that you can get a lot of the benefits of "flow" without making drastic sacrifices like going cold turkey on social media (although if you feel like it, by all means do so). I strive for a "lite" version of this by using a Pomodoro timer, listening to binaural beats (rather than distracting music) and trying to avoid email and chat while the timer is running.
While on holidays, I occasionally activate Super Flow, in which I'm working on my own on a side project and 12 hours could easily pass without my attention being broken. It's amazing but do difficult to replicate at work, since I always tend to need information from people, or they need it from me, or the calendar is peppered with meetings.
Yeah that's a great point - one of the beauties of solo side projects is the ability to just get the work done without having to sit in back-to-back meetings! I love just banging out code for 6 hours straight, listening to rain sounds on Spotify (not kidding you, it's amazing for concentrated focus!).
I love the Pomodoro technique - do you use a special app for it, or just set a timer?
Yeah rain sounds are good - I used to listen to Noisli, and sometimes I use an Android app called Noice (admittedly, mostly when trying to sleep). Sometimes I'll listen to video game music since that tends to be composed in a way that loops naturally -- often when coming out of flow, I'll realise the same song has been playing for 40 minutes.
The Pomodoro timer I use is just a super-simplistic webapp called Tomato Timer and it does the trick without being too distracting.