#Deep work

[inkedwingss]

The current tools are eating our brains, my darlings

[avidreadersandemergingwriters]

Do you want to improve your writing? These are some helpful tips.

[mario-breskic]

Log 004: Exit →

Take it from me: don’t waste your time on blocking ads, anonymity, and all that stuff UNLESS you are being paid to do so.

Everyone else, me included, should not ever worry about any of that.

Enjoy the internet. The people who tell you otherwise are just trying to sell you their latest books with subtitles like

“I know everything and you know nothing, buy my book so I can insult you while I praise myself”

and

“I also do TEDx talks if you pay for everything, you should see my hourly rates for talking to an audience of people who are already in agreement with me but are willing to pay to hear someone else say what they think”

Don’t fall for it. Install Chrome, Edge, or Safari, and be done with it.

Bet on yourself. Trust yourself. Propaganda is a meme. Don’t fall into the Firefoxhole.

I have not been this relaxed in years. I’ve even turned on telemetry on my devices, sending optional data, too.

Because I am a customer, and the only way to guarantee my own satisfaction is to take part.

Otherwise, we all end up with a world in which nothing suits us because we refused to participate, turning ourselves into fringe cases for some arcane poll.

Bring on the ads, my wallet decides what goes anyhow ;)

Here is my peace offering to everyone: you get to keep your data, I get to not having to waste one single minute on treading water ever again.

Take this exit →

[anjumbai]

Deep Work by Cal Newport - Thoughts

"I'll live the focused life, because it's the best kind there is." - Winfred Gallagher

Rating: very useful out of 10

I knew I heard the name Cal Newport somewhere before. It turns out he wrote that book named "How to Become a Straight A-student"; which I read back in 2021. Although I did not finish it, it was filled with a lot of practicality and very useful instructions. And this book, while focusing more on the fact that why going deep is necessary, is also filled with equal amount of well-explained examples.

The book argues why you should not drown in shallow activities which yield little to no impact on your life, but rather spend more time going deep and practicing deep work. Deep work refers to the practice of committing to a work with intense focus, reducing all sorts of distractions while you're going at it. While I approached this to learn more bout student life and the uses of deep work, it turned out to target knowledge workers more. But that wouldn't stop me from extracting something from the book now, would it? Well anyways, I won't go into much details about the book. I sometimes forget that I'm writing about my thoughts and not on a critical review of how the book is structured or anything like that.

So what did I like about the book? The fact that it advised you to quit social media. I liked how he said if you wanna do something different, if you wanna be able to focus more and get distracted less, you should be harder to reach. You shouldn't be available just by one email, or be just one instagram notification away. And I liked how he said that most people would argue that "I'm connected with my friends over there etc etc" and how it does have some validity, he names it the "any benefit" approach. Which means if something provides you with even just one benefit, you'll cling to it despite the overwhelming difference of the damages it can cause.

I agree with him on this part and being difficult to reach has now proven to be a good part of my life. I love it. You can even say I liked this because he mentioned something I already do. Which is true. I worked for it, so some recognition from an inanimate object feels nice.

He also states how deep work should be practiced on a daily basis. Which gives natural idiots like me hope cause even though I might be an idiot, I can still practice something daily without much issue ( thanks to atomic habits ). And like James Clear said, habits build up like compound interests do. I liked the book. I disliked some of it for the overwhelming office related examples but perhaps I should've understood students aren't the key target audience in this book. As he already has a rather amazing book for students. Check it out, I'd say.

A common argument that comes up would be that- I don't need to read a whole damn book to learn basic stuff like this. True. You don't. You can just learn em by scrolling through your Instagram food, or YouTube; maybe if you try hard enough you can resist clicking on that youtube short too. I'd still advise reading the book. It teaches you to practice something on a long term basis, and each chapter happens to have something new instead of all of it one, so you can gradually learn and apply. That's how self-help books work for me. You read and apply, learn something new, apply again. This book might encourage some to become delusional. Just reading self-help books don't take you particularly anywhere. So if this is your 14th self-help book, maybe seek therapy. Or you can ignore me, which is the natural order.

Atomic Habits and Deep Work, both happen to be helpful in their own ways. But I'd prefer Atomic Habits over this, due to how much more practical the first one is. But if you really wanna understand the need of deep work and eventually apply it in your life, or maybe you lack focus like me- try it out. It has boosted my focus span. Or maybe the fact that I don't really have much to do daily is what made my focus span increase but hey, nobody is looking into that.

Next read: The Subtle Art of not giving a damn about the books title. (or grammar)

[femmefatalevibe]

Hi femme! I’m starting to work on my shadow self and doing some shadow prompts? Can you share some tips? And some of your shadow prompts? Thanks a lot ❤️

Hi love! I use this journal (hyperlinked) if this helps. My best suggestion is to stick to a routine schedule for engaging in shadow work (let's say three nights per week) and following through with it no matter what. Ritualizing this difficult work will force you to do it and help you build confidence through this disciplined action/initiative.

Hope this helps xx

[tinyreviews]

Tiny View: Philosophy of Happiness

What’s essential in this modern day? What makes a good life? What ideals, once mastered, enable happiness to fall effortlessly into place?

Explore

Be curious. Stay curious. Never lose that sense of wonder.

Look: Pay attention. To the big stuff. To the small stuff. To nature and our environment. To how things come together, go together, in marvelous ways. To how life finds a way.

Play: More to the point, create! Distill, press, filter, mix and remix your experiences into something creative.

Select: All these magical moments, write them down, take pictures of them, etch them into memory. Keep the ones that resonate, good or bad, and make them a part of yourself.

Produce

Production fills our bellies. Production gives us nice things. Production pays the bills. Be so good they can’t ignore you.

Deep Work: These days, the ability to focus on one important task is becoming increasingly difficult, and becoming increasingly valuable. Shallow, distractible work is common, cheap, and a trap. Train yourself to have intention and priority. Master yourself.

Atomic Habits: Develop a consistent routine. Adjust your habits. Show up and do the bare minimum. Be purposeful and effective in your everyday behavior.

Become: Be that person. Celebrate small wins. Make small changes. How you do anything is how you do everything. Become the person you would admire.

Reduce

Minimalize: Declutter your space. Declutter your mind. Sometimes, it’s best to let things be. But sometimes it’s best to let things go. Keep what’s needed. Discard everything else. Enough said.

Protect

Protect the vessel through which you experience the universe. Simply put, cultivate a healthy life. Good food, good exercise, good sleep. Good thoughts, good words, good deeds.

Exercise: Walk in daylight. Jog in daylight. Run in daylight. Skip. Squat. Plank. Pullup. Pushup. Heck, just hang on a bar for as long as you can. Do something that gets your heartrate up. Do the bare minimum, but do it consistently. Make that vitamin D.

Nutrition: Whole, nutrient-dense foods. They go by the moniker “superfood”. I think they are just food, everything else is not-food. Chicken, eggs, peas, leafy greens, fruits, nuts and berries. Fatty fish. Salt and plain water.

Relationships: Find your family, no, forge your family. Find yourself. Forge yourself. Be gentle to people. Be gentle to yourself. Be firm with people. Be firm with yourself.

Sleep: Life revolves around rest and sleep, not the other way round. Plan your rest. Darkness, silence, comfort, emptiness, no distractions. Your bad day started last night when you failed to prepare for sleep. Win at life and sleep.

That’s all of it. How to live a happy life to 150. See you in the 22nd Century!

Thanks for coming to my TedTalk. Universe bless.

[pivotpathways]

Productivity 101:

1. Wake up

2. Get sunlight in your eyes

3. Turn off your phone

4. Sit at your computer

5. Listen to the Interstellar soundtrack

6. Focus for 4 hours

7. Get your 5 most important tasks done

8. Go for an adventure in nature

This is the perfect day formula.

𝕏

[usunezukoinezu]

''...the use of a distracting service does not, by itself, reduce your brain’s ability to focus. It’s instead the constant switching from low-stimuli/high-value activities to high-stimuli/low-value activities, at the slightest hint of boredom or cognitive challenge, that teaches your mind to never tolerate an absence of novelty. This constant switching can be understood analogously as weakening the mental muscles responsible for organizing the many sources vying for your attention. By segregating Internet use (and therefore segregating distractions) you’re minimizing the number of times you give in to distraction, and by doing so you let these attention-selecting muscles strengthen.''

-Cal Newport, Deep Work

[goddess-of-alchemy]

[hang-on-lil-tomato]

or kneaded like a Zamboni slams ice!

[mario-breskic]

Log 003: The heart of the matter

Writing about this is difficult; I can’t pretend it isn’t. Studying Csíkszentmihályi’s book “Creativity” alongside Newport’s “Deep Work” has sort of answered a question I’ve had since at least 2019: Why aren’t there more graphic design students on Tumblr? And now I realize that this question is just a version of the more obvious question: Why aren’t professional graphic designers more active on social media? And I think I understand now why. I am reading these two books to reconnect with the deep satisfaction I felt working on my bachelor’s thesis, which was difficult for two reasons: it was heavily theoretical, and there was very little time left to write the thesis. And somewhere along the way, I started to realize something about social media—two answers to my questions. Professionals simply don’t use it that much to talk shop. Unless what they talk about sells a product. Social media is marketing. That is easy enough for me to accept. The second answer is more difficult for me to accept: professional graphic designers are not more active on social media because neither their (deep) work nor their study is a good fit for social media. By and large, they are simply too busy doing the actual work to be interested in writing about it on social media, worst of all, maybe even on some sort of schedule. Professionals, in short, are either out of the office or available for business. And I think that is also why most professionals are hard to reach and come by, why so many of them become seemingly absent from media: they are deeply involved in their work. And I feel that this is a fair price to pay for professionalism, for flow states, for deep work, for becoming so good they can’t ignore you. I, for one, still struggle with doing something without then telling someone about it, be that a person or on social media, and this series of posts I’ve been doing lately illustrates this issue quite well. Of course, I can tell myself that I want someone to be inspired by what I write here, but that is not really the truth. The truth is that I have accepted the social programming of social media to such a degree that I’ve started finding it difficult to simply do what I do and do what I want to do for the sake of doing it. I am a temporarily inconvenienced influencer, just 99,930 followers short of 100k, on average. And by knowing that about myself and telling you about it, I am forcing myself to accept the deal to turn pro, instead of turning myself into an influencer whose racket is graphic design or into a person who can’t focus on work. I don’t know where that leaves my social media accounts. And for right now, it doesn’t need to be addressed or solved. If you ask me, go out and find these two books and read them. That is all I can say right now. I don’t even know if this post makes sense. I’ll have someone look it over without touching its Flesch-Kincaid score and then read through it a few more times. How can you write about something when the central point is that publishing it is an issue?

Impostor syndrome is just a poser’s guilty conscience, you know?

[recsspecs]

Good students, on the other hand, constantly raise the bar for themselves

as they focus on what they haven’t learned and mastered yet. This is why high achievers who have had a taste of the vast amount of knowledge out there are likely to suffer from what psychologists call imposter syndrome, the feeling that you are not really up to the job, even though, of all people, they are (Clance and Imes 1978; Brems et al. 1994).

- How to Take Smart Notes (Sönke Ahrens)

[keepittightsisters]

The Deep Work Challenge: 7 Days to Unbelievable Productivity Now

Let’s face it—staying focused is hard. Notifications ding every five seconds. Emails pile up. And shallow work takes over our day. No wonder our brains feel fried by the end of it all. That’s where the Deep Work Challenge comes in. For seven days, you’ll spend just one or two hours daily in a state of distraction-free concentration. No listening to music, scrolling on social media, or peeking at…

[kavinjindal]

The Best Books I Read in 2024

I read 31 books in 2024 including biographies, fiction, non fiction and a few novellas. Even though 31 is relatively a small number considering there are people I have stumbled upon on the internet who have read over a 100 books within a year’s time. Yet I consider this a milestone for me as I was able to re-ignite my old reading habit which had been lost for quite a while. Here are the best…

[talkativeobserver]

First, let's expose the part we have to work on…