Deep Work by Cal Newport

The best way to encourage good habits and productivity is to reduce barriers to getting it done. Some people lay out their clothes the night before to eliminate early morning decisions, for example. Other people set their alarm clock or phone across the room from them to ensure they stand up and get out of bed to shut off the alarm.

For me, I’ve been writing with a pen and paper lately. For years, probably a decade, I tried to write on a computer. I tried everything to optimize my workspace. Lighting. Sound. Feel of the keyboard. Clean desk. Messy desk. Snacks. Coffee. Tea. Water. Open work area. Closed off. No matter what I tried, I couldn’t find the sweet spot. I figured I wasn’t meant to write without it being a struggle.

Then, one day in January 2019, I was overcome with laziness. I had an idea for a post and wanted to write but I didn’t want to leave the comforts of my couch. That’s right. I didn’t want to leave the couch and walk 25 steps to the office to write at my computer. Lazy.

So, I grabbed a nearby notebook. And wrote. And wrote more. Turns out, I wrote a pretty decent post - much better in the first draft than I could have on the computer. When I posted it, people came to me and complimented the post.

I’m not here to brag on my writing. But I suddenly realized that writing with messy handwriting and misspellings and crappy formatting is a semi-structured stream of consciousness was better for me. I write better, faster, and more. Something about writing in pen and constantly messing up allows me to keep going without editing.

So, when you’re struggling to get a thing done and it’s hard despite trying dozens of ways to make it easy, allow yourself to take the path of least resistance. Be lazy. You never know what solution your lazy brain might invent.

Our brains always want to do the easiest thing. That’s why we, as a society, love fast food. We get a huge amount of calories satisfying our primitive survival instinct with zero hunting. To reduce your barrier to writing, type it on your phone. Write in a notebook. Speak into a voice recorder. What is the easiest, laziest thing you haven’t tried? It might just work.

This all became brilliantly clear after I started reading Deep Work by Cal Newport. At the beginning of the book, Newport discusses the science behind shallow work (repeatable, automatable tasks) and deep work. Deep work is extended stretches of time where you’re uninterrupted and focused on a single task. If you need to be creative or work on something truly big and epic, you need Deep Work. For me, reducing my barrier to writing more meant using pen and paper to experience stretches of deep work. Eliminating distractions like email, analytics, slack, etc. is the key factor in an improvement in my writing and clarity in business. Whoever thought my utter laziness would unlock something so powerfully productive.

What barriers do you need to reduce? What’s getting in your way of accomplishing your goals?