Change Your Life In 6 Months (My Deep Work Routine)

If you currently feel overworked, exhausted, and the list of things to do feels never-ending for your life, your career, your business, and your family, you're drowning in emails, text messages, and calls that need to be returned. You have all these big dreams, projects, and goals, but they seem so out of reach, and you just never have enough time to either start or finish them. I've been there.

I'm the average person, like everyone else. I have a four-year-old daughter who's the love of my life, and my husband and I both run separate businesses of our own. We also have parents who are getting old and need care.

I'm not someone with a 4 a. m. morning routine, jumping into an ice bath, drinking a green juice while doing push-ups with one finger, and telling you that you need to do more.

My frustration at seeing every year pass by and feeling like a failure made me realize that it's time for me to think about the way that I work. There must be a better way for me to work smarter, not harder. There's one thing that I realized can change all of this, and that is that you’re underestimating your potential—the potential that you have to get the work done that actually moves you forward.

It’s not about being busy for busy's sake. It has nothing to do with the tools you're using, what parts of the apps on your phone, or which habit boxes you're ticking off right now. The problem is actually much simpler than you think.

Since I tried this method of working and focused, I’ve been able to cut down the time I needed to learn marketing in half, which meant that I was able to go from unemployed to working at Google, delivering some of my best marketing training for my students in my own company, and ultimately creating some of the best keynote talks to land more paid speaking opportunities. This is not another quality video telling you that you need to fit more into less time because one of the biggest issues we’re facing in modern society is not doing more work but actually not having enough time. We are living in one of the biggest social experiments ever, as all these distractions and devices are playing off around us constantly, and we're no longer able to focus.

That’s why, in order for you to become the top 1%, the ability to focus and do this kind of work is going to get you there—and that's going to be your superpower. Finally, you can work less and get more done, but not the other way around. I made this video to make it easy for you to understand how we can all live as fully as we work.

Let's build you into the top 1% to become limitless in reaching your dreams and achieving some of your biggest goals. So here's a problem. When you were studying or entering your first job, you were probably conditioned to get the most out of every hour.

Am I right? Popular media makes business look cool, and when you are walking down the street, if you see someone you know, or maybe in the office when you ask them, "Hey, how are you? " most likely the response you will get is, "I'm good, just busy.

" So we all wear busyness like a badge of honor, not really knowing if this busyness can lead us anywhere. Cal Newport first introduced this concept to me, and it was a start that changed the way I work forever. A lot of daily tasks, which you’re probably familiar with, like checking emails and responding to messages, are the kind of things I would call shallow work because they don't require much brainpower to do.

But if you spend most of your day doing shallow work, you'll eventually be replaced by technology and AI in the current revolution that we're in right now because these two skills are mostly easily replaceable. Deep work is the ability to do work with distraction-free concentration at your peak brainpower, which means being able to produce something that's uniquely yours in your own zone of genius. Cal wrote that he was able to double his output of research papers while being a full-time professor, raising his family, and writing his book all at the same time by using this method.

It really resonated with me because I'm ambitious just like you. If you clicked on this video and you're watching it now, that means you realize there's something you need to change in your current work environment that will make you a lot more productive than you were previously. So I think it's a really good idea to take out a pen and paper and write this down.

Ask yourself this: If you were to work regularly, what major life or professional goals do you want to achieve? For me, that’s growing my personal brand business online and reaching and impacting more people with my digital products and services. I want to spend enough time with my family and travel to live a life full of experiences.

I don't want to be chained to a desk and just looking at the screen all day. What I also found fascinating is that according to research done in 2012, deep work can also train your brain to increase your focus and cognitive functions like a muscle. Before, I used to find it hard to get through a whole page in a book, but I could scroll for an hour.

Now, I can easily sit down for 90 minutes of deep work at a time and come out feeling completely fulfilled and accomplished because I did something with that time. One of the states that you tend to get into during deep work is called the state of flow, which has been documented in psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's book, *Flow*, where you reach this point of a standstill of time and are filled with contentment and purpose in what you’re doing. So before we get into the nitty-gritty of how to do better teamwork, I think it's really important to set up the first things first, which is your environment.

A separate area in your home, like a study or a separate room where you use it purely for deep working, and where you definitely won't be disturbed, if you're in the office environment. Think about using an empty conference room; maybe they can use it as purely a place to get away from that open plan nosiness. And if you don't have the spaces, as we are living in smaller and smaller places these days in the modern world, I found local libraries and also local quieter cafes to be really great for this because you have a separate space allocated to this.

It makes you even more concentrated on your sessions as well. What I like about the current world of mixing remote working with being in the office is that when you are home remote working, you can use some of those days for the much more important strategic deep thinking tasks you can utilize during these deep work sessions. This brings me to the distractions in our lives right now, and if possible, put all the distraction-related devices in a separate room.

I find that if it's not close to you, you probably won't be looking at it. If you clearly are going on the Internet, you might get distracted by going on social media websites, for example. There are Chrome extensions like Flora or SelfControl that you can use on your browser to block off those sites while you're working, so you don't get tempted.

But I think we're all adults here, so your level of self-discipline is probably your own take. If you want absolutely zero noise, if that's what helps you, use a pair of noise-canceling headphones. My ones from Sony—I’ll link them in the description below—you don't have to get exactly those.

I found them to be really helpful because they're light on my head, and when I'm working for, let’s say, an hour and a half, they don't actually weigh on my head to make it hurt. That’s just something I found in my own experience, but feel free to find one that works for you. Another benefit I've found is that if I wear these headphones in public spaces, like co-working spaces, I'm less likely to be disturbed because I look like I'm in working mode.

That visual cue usually helps create that sanctuary time to myself if I need it. So, if you have kids like I do, I tend to do my deep work sessions around the time when she’s at school. My personal ethos is that I want to be fully present when she’s around and not working around her all the time.

I actually work a lot less now—not that kids reduce your productivity; I’ve found that because I have less time and there are a lot more constraints, I tend to be a lot more focused and results-driven. Everything I choose to work on has the highest priority, either in my business or with my clients at the moment, and that seems to move me forward a lot more than before I had kids. So there you go—a little plus point there.

My biggest motivation is that the more efficiently I can do something, the more quality time I'll have to spend with my family. That’s almost a benefit to me to work towards whenever I'm feeling stuck with the will to do something. I find that this motivates me to keep pushing forward.

This really brings in the point of prioritizing our tasks. One thing I realize is that if I don't prioritize my tasks, suddenly everything on my list needs my attention. I don't know what else to focus on, but one question I found to be really helpful—feel free to write this down—is whenever I prepare my to-do list for the day, I ask myself, "If there are three things I need to get done today, what would those be in order to move my biggest goals and dreams forward?

" When you put it in that context, those tasks become a lot clearer in terms of which ones are the most important to get done that day, moving yourself forward one step at a time. Once you prioritize your tasks, this brings me to the next point, which is about putting intense deadlines into what you do. By that, I mean estimating how long it would take to do something and then cutting that down drastically.

By human nature, we know that we work best with deadlines. If we reflect on this, when I was in school, I remember having a looming deadline for a paper in college; somehow that paper, after procrastinating on it for weeks, would actually get done the night before it was due. So, it's things like this: if you set those deadlines for yourself that are much stricter and more intense than they should be, you will find yourself getting things done quicker than you think.

This also forces you to be in a deep work state more often, allowing you to use those intense periods to really get things done. For example, now I want to go out with my daughter in two hours. That means I have to get my deep work sessions in, and that two hours suddenly becomes much more efficient because I know that’s all I have for the day.

I can focus on what’s most important but can also get done the quickest. Based on what we talked about earlier, write this down as well: how can you create an environment around you that helps you succeed with this deep work? How can you maintain this deep work on a regular basis?

Now that we’ve gone through the environment and the different things you should have in place before you start working, how do you now. . .

? Make sure that your deep work sessions are more effective than most people's? Carl mentioned this in his book, where I thought it's a really great equation to share with you guys: the high quality of work produced equals time spent times intensity on this particular task.

So everything we talk about in this section really goes back to this equation of how we can maximize the amount of time spent and also the intensity spent on this during that period in order to create the highest quality work possible. Here are three strategies I recommend you try for yourself during these deep work sessions. Number one is you might not think about this very obviously, but schedule distraction periods.

Yes, you heard me say that right. Make sure that you have distraction periods scheduled in during your deep work days. What I mean by that is, in the reality of the world that we live in right now, the emails, the pings from your managers, maybe from your clients if you're in business, and the social media pings, updates, and notifications—they're not actually going to go away overnight, am I right?

The key thing is that you want to make sure to have specific times when you can actually get past these and address them, because they are part of our daily lives. We have to recognize that, and we have to think about how we can realistically include them, but at the same time, not let them infringe on what we do. The best way to do this is to schedule them at regular times throughout the day where it's under your control.

For example, I schedule those times for myself when I know that my energy levels are dipping through the day, and that's usually around 3 to 4 p. m. in the afternoon.

Most of you probably experience this or you have like a mid-afternoon slump, and that's the time when I can use these non-brain-intensive activities like shallow work to get those things done. For example, I can post on my social media content, I can reach out, reply to emails, I can text people back, and all these things do not take the intense brainpower you would use during deep work periods. But this is fine because that's the time when you have the lowest energy level anyway.

Secondly, I found it to be really helpful to have this rhythmic deep work ritual schedule, either on a daily or weekly basis, depending on your schedule. For me, I have purposely found that having daily sessions really helps me. The way my schedule works is that in the morning, I usually have a very quick workout after dropping off my daughter at school, and then I will have 3 to 4 hours to myself to really focus on the deep intensive work that I need to get done.

It could be writing a keynote speech, it could be preparing training materials for my students, it could be designing strategies for a client, or it could be writing a script for a YouTube video. But whatever it is, it allows me to use that time to really employ my deepest intense brainpower. That way, later on, I know that I've accomplished the most important things on my list and I can move on to the rest of the day with a lot more ease because I know that it’s actually been ticked off.

Generally speaking, the majority of people are more energetic in the mornings, so I recommend having these sessions early in the morning if you're one of those. However, there are lots of people in my community, including my friends and family, who are also night owls, and that's perfectly okay too. So know when your best performance period is—whether it's in the morning or late at night—and then just have those scheduled in for yourself on a regular basis.

I recommend that beginners aim for one hour in the beginning to really get into the rhythm of working in deep work mode. But as you get more used to it, feel free to increase that over time. Eventually, even for the most advanced people who engage in deep work, the most your brain can handle is around the four-hour mark.

Beyond that, it becomes really hard to do any more concentrated work because you feel like you've had enough for the day. It's also a really good idea to make sure you have regular breaks scheduled for these sessions—generally speaking, maybe an hour and a half an hour worked in intervals. During those breaks, try to do nothing, have a cup of tea, walk around the block.

Personally, I love looking out the window and taking a little time for my eyes to rest before getting back into the next interval session. Let's take a moment to reflect on this. Take a pen and paper and write this down: Given your current goal and situation, how many hours of deep work can you commit to on a daily and weekly basis?

Lastly, this is a part where I feel like a lot of people don't talk about, and that is how to shut down properly for the evening. We all know that sleep is abundant and free, yet it is one of the things that we currently lack the most. Sleep is crucial for laying a great foundation for the next day of deep work, as it ensures your brain has the most capacity and ability to engage in deep, intensive thinking.

I found it to be really helpful to write down some of the things that you didn't finish the night before, as well as some of the things that you want to get done the next day. Dump it all into your notebook— in my case, I write in my journal. I find it quite relaxing to take everything out of my head and onto paper, allowing me to relax into a deep night's sleep.

Sleep. And can you pour even as both have gone as far as shut down completely, saying that to himself as if his brain is a computer program? He says that it works, apparently, where he gets a chance to really completely shut down and have a good night's sleep.

Then, the next day, starting over again. And lastly this: the one thing I want to leave you with in this video is that none of the tips, the work tactics, or the policy tips that you see around the Internet are going to work unless you love what you do. Because oftentimes, when we're procrastinating on that big project, the dream job, or the dream opportunity, a lot of the issues behind procrastination are a lot deeper than we think.

It can mean a lot more than that, right? It could be that you're afraid. It could be that you don't know how to get started.

It could be that you're a perfectionist, just like me, waiting for the perfect conditions to get started. So, I really invite you to reflect on these things and to think about: Are there any other reasons that might be holding you back? How can you break free of those beliefs and eventually reach your limitless potential as your future self?

Thank you so much for staying with me until the end. If you liked this video, you might also love this video all about how to change your life in six months. If you liked what you saw in the video today, don't forget to subscribe and sign up for my newsletter in the link in the description below, where you'll get to learn a lot more about personal growth and business insights on a weekly basis in your inbox.

I also run monthly office hours for my audience to answer their specific questions and situations. So, if you're interested in that, feel free to join the waitlist in the link below as well. Thank you so much for watching this video.

I want to see you incorporate some of the DIY techniques into what you do, and I'm looking forward to seeing you thrive. All right, see you in the next video.