How To Be More Focused While Studying - A Quick Guide

Hey, it's Joey and welcome to Better [Music] Ideas. So, if you're anything like me, you find it sometimes really difficult to just dive into work. I'm talking not really about procrastination, but the specific inability to eliminate distractions and get into a flow state of just super concentrated, uninterrupted deep, good work.

This is especially a problem in today's day and age. You got 10 emails you got to answer, the Facebook page is open, somebody just liked your post on Instagram, and you forgot you didn't respond to a Facebook message on a group chat about a group project, something like that. There's a million things you have to worry about. Sometimes, even if you do manage to begin a project, it's not really focused work. You might have Facebook still open; there might be people talking in the background.

Moral of the story is we need to be able to just block out all distractions from the outside world for a little while and just focus in, hone in on one thing for a long period of time. This is something called deep work, and it's a skill that is becoming increasingly rare in today's social media-addicted society, but increasingly important.

Deep work is professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. Shallow work is non-cognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks often performed while distracted. These efforts tend not to create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate.

So, what Cal Newport is getting at in his book is that today we're treating everything like shallow work, even things that really need our full undivided attention. This is unfortunate, because to produce at your peak level, you have to be able to give something your 100% undivided attention. In other words, deep work channels every little fiber of productivity you have and optimizes your performance.

The nice thing about deep work is that it allows you to be fully present and immersed in whatever you're doing at the time. Even when you're not working, since after a deep work session, when you're done, you're done. You can then leave your difficult work for the day and forget about it. Then you can focus in on having a really relaxing, fulfilling, recharging break.

You could even start doing the shallow work that needs doing, like responding to your emails, writing that thank-you card you need to do, all without having that big looming cloud of guilt in the back of your mind. That big important task that you haven't done yet. You've already expended all your brain power, so now you have just the amount of brain power you need to respond to those emails, do the less important stuff like writing the thank-you card, respond to your group message, email thing, whatever I said earlier in the video. You can do that now because you don't really need a whole lot of brain power to do that anyways.

But if there's one takeaway from this video, it would be the importance of giving something your full and undivided attention. It optimizes your performance, and it's so difficult to do that these days with the internet, so give it a try.

So, it's been a while, but that's mostly because I was kicked out of my routine. When I was making videos before, I was just going to class, I would come back, write a script for the video, and then maybe shoot it the next day after class. You know, it was a nice little system I had going on, but then exam season hit, and it was a hellish exam season, blah blah blah.

I had to move out of my apartment; now I'm back in my hometown. Crazy, crazy, crazy! But now I'm making a new routine, and I'm going to release a Better Ideas video every Tuesday and Thursday, every single week for the whole summer. Discipline!