Change Your Life in 6 - 12 Months with This One Routine

There’s one thing standing between the life you’re living now and the life you want to live:

Shallow work.

As Cal Newport, author of Deep Work, defines it:

Look at your calendar. Look at your to-do list.

How much of your time is spent on shallow work?

If it’s more than 50%, is it really a surprise that you're not living the life you want?

The life you want doesn’t happen by accident.

It happens through intention. Through design.

And until you intentionally change what you work on and how you work, your life will stay the same.

A Fight For Our Attention

The world we live in is something of a miracle.

We have robots that can vacuum our houses and dishwashers that save us time.

We’ve built cars and planes that make travel easy and instant.

We can start businesses from our laptops and phones.

We can talk to people across the world in seconds.

We order food with a tap of a button.

And now we have AI that some fear and others are using to do bigger and better things with.

But as with anything, there is a dark side to all this good.

We’re in a war zone for our attention.

We have thousands of notifications.

We know what's going on in the world at all times.

We have companies that pour millions of dollars into hijacking our attention.

We have instant messaging, overflowing email inboxes and endless online meetings and calls.

We have more and more creators joining the creator economy, which means more content 24/7.

Our attention is being pulled left, right, centre, up, down and any other possible direction.

And if you aren’t in control of your attention, you aren’t in control of your life.

The world you live in, with all its wonder, is also a world that keeps you distracted and stuck in shallow work.

Your brain is being conditioned for distraction instead of focus.

The life you want isn’t built through distraction.

The life you want demands that you take back control of your attention and invest it into something meaningful with deep, uninterrupted focus.

You need a routine that allows you to engage in deep focus with no distractions so you can do the work that matters and moves the needle forward.

You need a deep work routine.

What is Deep Work?

Deep work is a superpower in this war zone for your attention.

And the foundation of the life you want.

It’s how you create more, earn more, and grow faster—with less time and stress.

Newport defines it as:

In other words:

It’s your ability to work on one thing with no distractions.

It’s doing high-impact work instead of busy work.

The kind of work that moves the needle in your business and life.

But here’s the problem:

Modern life isn’t set up for deep work.

You weren’t taught how to do deep work.

You were conditioned to stay stuck in shallow loops.

This is why you confuse activity with impact. Busyness with productivity.

Productivity is about how long you work and how much work you get done from it.

Productivity is about getting the most effective, high-impact work done in the least amount of time.

It’s cool that you can work for 12 hours. But if you could have done the same activities in 2 hours, is it really impressive?

To engage in deep work, you need to change the way you work.

To give up the façade of productivity in the form of constant meetings, endless notifications, pointless, long meetings and social media.

When you spend less time on shallow work and do more deep work, you are focused, committed to creating value and improving your skills.

When you engage in deep work, you get higher-quality work done in less time, you create more opportunities for yourself, and you stand out in your field.

Deep work requires that you actively train yourself to prioritise uninterrupted work.

Deep work looks like:

• Two big breaks you take in the year to work like Bill Gates’ Think Weeks.

• Working for 90 minutes a day without getting distracted.

• Batching shallow work tasks into shorter windows.

• Learning how to get into flow states at will.

• Decreasing and quitting social media.

In an age of endless distractions, advancing technology and overwhelm, deep work is a no longer an option — but a necessity.

You have to block out time to design and work on your future.

Or else you will create a future by default and it won’t be the future you want.

Deep work is how you actualise your dreams in record time.

How To Do Deep Work

#1 Choose Your Deep Work Philosophy

Newport outlines 4 deep work strategies:

My deep work style is rhythmic: I like working in 60 - 90 minute work block sessions in the morning.

Choose the deep work philosophy that best suits your lifestyle and work. Feel free to experiment before committing to one method.

#2 Build The Routine

When creating your deep work routine, you want to consider 4 things:

• Where: the location you are working in, e.g. at your home office, a café or a library.

• Duration: The specific amount of time you’ll be working for each session. Start small, with as little as 15 minutes, and work your way up to longer sessions. Think of your ability to focus like a muscle. The more you train it, the better and stronger it gets.

• The Workflow: What are the processes and routines you are following to complete your deep work, i.e. where’s your phone? What are you working on? How are you measuring your progress?

• Support: What are the tools and systems you are using to get into deep work? Are you listening to a certain type of music? Are you working in a quiet environment? Do you have snacks, or are you eating after the session? Do you have water near you?

#3 Make It Simple To Execute

The biggest thing that holds most people back is knowing how to do what they know they need to do.

Knowing what to do and how to do it are two different things.

Most people spend a lot of time figuring out what to do, but little to no time on how to do it. And because they don’t know how, they don’t take action.

So, to make it as simple as possible for you to take action:

1. Focus on what’s important. Identify the 1 - 3 tasks you will work on during your deep work blocks.

2. Focus on stacking the odds in your favour. It’s good to know what your ultimate goal is, but what makes the goal a reality is the daily actions you take. Break the goal down into small actions you can take.

   • Your goal: Write a book

   • Your actions: Write 1 page or spend 1 hour writing

3. Track your progress, review and course correct. It’s easy to get lost in the work, but you want to make sure that you are going in the right direction. So from time to time, remember to look up and make sure you are moving in the right direction.

#4 Remove distractions

With all the distractions around us, many people’s attention spans have decreased.

You need to protect your attention like your life depends on it, because it does.

• Disable notifications

• Use website blockers

• Use noise-cancelling headphones

• Keep your phone in another room

• Batch your communication to 1 - 2 times a day (email, texts, etc)

• Let people know you’re in a deep work block and don’t want to be disturbed (unless it’s an emergency)

#5 Use Downtime To Rest

If you’re always working hard, you’ll burn out. Balance the deep work with quality rest.

You have two options:

1. Work hard, rest long.

   e.g. 4 hours deep work → full afternoon off.

2. Work short, rest short.

   e.g. 50 min work → 10 min break.

Work hard, rest hard.

You need to be ruthless in protecting your rest as you are about your deep work.

Create an “end of day” or shut-down routine.

Pushing to do work in the evenings is typically full of shallow, low-value tasks (unless you are a night owl), so best to leave it for the next day.

Recovery is productive.

Taking It to The Next Level

Once you’ve made deep work a part of your life, you might consider improving your deep work.

Here are a few tips for that:

• Repetition. You get better the more you do something. The more deep work sessions you do, the better you’ll focus and the higher quality your work.

• Say no more. If you aren’t saying no to something, you are by default saying yes. So be proactive and selective in the things you say no to and protect your deep work.

• Disable notifications and limit social media.My phone is on DND more often than not (my friends don’t like it, but they’ve made peace with it now). I also have notifications for all my social media apps off. I tried deleting them, but I found that made social media more ‘attractive’ to me. So, instead, I use the app limit on iOS to reduce my social media usage.

• Meditation. I’ve been meditating for the last 7 years, and it’s one of the best things you can do for your focus. If I haven’t meditated for as much as a week, I feel how it affects my focus and concentration. Meditation not only trains your focus, but it also helps in emotional regulation, which is really important for doing high-quality work.

• Nutrition. I’m not going to go too deep into this one because it’s very individualistic. Some people focus better on a high-fat diet, others on a high-carb and others when they don’t eat, i.e intermittent fasting. So please, I encourage you to experiment and figure out how your diet affects your focus and what works best for you.

How 1 Hour of Deep Work Changed My Life

When I started building my first business, I was a full-time university student.

Classes. Tutorials. Practicals. Leadership. Kickboxing training.

I had my hands full.

But building my business was important to me, so I started with carving out 1 hour a day.

That was all I had.

In that hour, I focused on my highest-leverage tasks:

• 30 minutes of finding leads

• 30 minutes sending leads

Because I only sent emails on weekdays, I used the weekends to fill the pipelines for the next week.

Through trial and error, I got better and faster at collecting leads.

I tested different email scripts and created a template.

Through iteration and improvement, it took me less time to find leads but I was sending out more emails.

But the surprising part?

That 1 hour of deep work spilled into other areas of my life.

• I started doing my uni work in deep work blocks.

• I was completing my work better and faster.

• I had more time (which I used for my business).

• My focus improved.

Though I closed down my first business and started digital writing, deep work changed the trajectory of my life.

It is now a non-negotiable in my life.

Deep work showed me that with even with 1 hour a day, you can make a quantum leap in your life in as little as 6 - 12 months.

So if you are tight on time and have only 1 hour, use it.

Use that hour to build your deep work routine and start stacking the odds in your favour.

If you don’t design your life, you’ll be living by default.

Start building your life with 1 hour of deep work, and in 6 - 12 months, the gap between your current and dream life will be that much smaller.

Thank you so much for reading.

I hope you enjoyed it.

I’ll see you in the next one.

— Shana

p.s. I’m working on a programme to help you master your focus and 2 - 5x your output.

I’d love to know what you’re struggling with and what you want in the programme.

Let me know here.