Have you ever wondered why your friend gets to push high quality work within 2 hours while you slog away at 10 with little to show for ? What makes these individuals, such high-performers ? Are they wired differently ? What gives them visibility into cranking out the exact steps to solve a problem without meeting too many deadends ?

In this blog, I am not going to give you any algorithms or instant tips to supercharge your workflow. Rather I would like to discuss some very simple and fundamental concepts which are robbing us of our joy at work.

Believe it or not, the quality of work we produce is directly correlated to the fulfillment we derive from it.

How to Produce Quality Work

1. We are not selective about our work environments

We believe that work gets done wherever we can find a power-socket for our laptops; and that is one of the biggest modern day fallacies. Work environments are a vital part of getting into the mental framework of churning out quality work.

A rule of thumb is to have a dedicated table and chair for work rather than working from your bed. If you cannot afford to alter your physical environment then you can either cover the bed with a different cloth to signal your brain to not go and lie on it. Alternatively, you can work from a library or a coffee shop if that’s accessible to you.

2. Your timeboxes are not wolverine

Whenever you sit down to work, visualize that you are creating a shell around your physical space with all distractive elements kept outside. Everytime, you allow a distraction to take over you, you are choosing to grab a driller and drill a hole through this shell.

Bear in mind that the shell is not self-healing like Wolverine! Everytime you drill a hole through it, you allow more distractions to torpedo you and ultimately suck you into a whirlpool. But the damage goes beyond that. The shell is almost irrepairable. What this means is that the physical space that you have allocated for deep work has now become a spot for watching movies and doomscrolling.

It would require an insane amount of willpower to reverse the long-term damage that you cause to your work environment if you allow it to become a distraction spot!

The more willpower you spent keeping yourself in check, the more your brain patches up these holes. The only drawback is that your energy is not spent 100% on the task but divided amongst focusing on the task and keeping distractions away. Pricey affair I would say!

3. Don’t delude yourself while preparing schedules

Studies and surveys have shown that humans are most deluded when deciding about how much time they would take to complete a task. If you feel you can do something in 5 hours, you would probably need 8-10. Don’t kid yourself.

• We believe that we worked for 4 hours whereas in reality we were staring at the screen or looking elsewhere for 2 hours.

• We believe that we binged a series for 3 hours but it’s been occupying our mental space for over 6 hours.

A rule of thumb to follow here is to prepare schedules like you are scheduling someone else’s day and not yours. Allow your brain to mock and scoff at yourself for believing that — you could actually get it done in 5 hours! LOL!

Be generous with your time and stingy with your tasklist.

• Schedule 3 tasks a day try to get them complete them as if you owe them money and you are on gunpoint.

• Schedule your deep work tasks when you are fresh and your mind is a blank slate. These can either be early hours of the day or if you are a power-napper then after your wake up from sleep.

• You are bound to miscalculate either ways so you might as well allocate buffers and contingency plans into your schedule.

4. Build a ritual

Often times, NBA basketball players have a ritual (a set of actions) that they perform before making a free-throw. In layman’s terms, performing some mini-tasks before sitting down for a session of deep work is often considered useful and improves productivity.

These could be simple things like:

1. Filling all your water bottles

2. Setting up lofi music and putting on your headphones

3. Turning your phone to DND + silent mode

4. Closing the door to your room

Performing these actions and then sliding into your work session is analogous to reaching for a towel after washing your face. You don’t think about it, your brain doesn’t spend energy on it. Otherwise, it takes time for the brain to get into the gear of sitting down and getting to work.

5. Focus is not a personality trait

Just like how your muscles atrophy when you don’t use them for long, your ability to focus and concentrate undergo the same levels of erosion when not deployed regularly.

No, you are not neurodivergent. You don’t have ADHD. You are simply unskilled. Learn to focus.

Don’t fill up every gap of boredom with YouTube shorts, Instagram reels or TikToks. Sit in silence. Stare at a flower-pot or the ceiling fan. Don’t stimulate your brain. Let it rest…

If you cannot sit with yourself in silence for a couple of minutes, then you cannot focus on solving a difficult problem by yourself, and feel triggered to doomscroll at the first sight of mild stress.

6. We multitask the wrong way

Every single instance of multitasking is essentially a lightning fast switch between different contexts with serializing and deserializing a cognitive load. While some people may seem very efficient at it, it tires their brains out and they can only work for ~4 hours out of 24. Comparing against someone who chooses to go about focus working blocks of 2 hours and works for 6-8 hours a day.

The right way to multi-task is to pick up tasks that are a mixture of cognitive and non-cognitive workloads.

• Commuting to work while listening to a podcast / audiobook

• Reading blogs and articles in your short gaps of boredom.

7. Chill’ the nobel way

Relaxing is important. Allow your brain to recuperate from the hardwork it has put in over the hours of deep work. Recalcitrate tasks like meetings, reviews and joining meaningless clubs/committees.

Clarity on the meaningful provides clarity about the meaningless.

— Carl Newport

8. Avoid the productivity mirage

Your brain likes to do loads of shallow, low-value tasks because they require less energy and increase the number of tasks done during the day. However, when you don’t wish to do low-value tasks, it starts tricking you into “rationalizing” some of these behaviors.

• Scrolling Twitter or Reddit keeps you up to date with all the relevant news

• Checking instagram for the latest movie news for booking tickets on time

Just because an option has “some benefit” doesn’t mean it is a good choice. Identify the highest ROI tasks and spend your deep-work time blocks exclusively on those.

9. End your day, the right way

Spent the last 15 minutes at the end of your day on crafting the todo-list for the next day rather than squeezing out that last chunk of code.

Allow your brain to relax knowing that you have the next day’s battle plan ready and jotted down.

Unwind and go to bed.

Closing Thoughts

The ideas enlisted above may or may not apply to everyone. They are not axiomatic, and are only written to serve as lamposts on your trail.

With shortening attention spans, our generation is more and more prone to shallow tasks and not discovering the fulfillment of engaging in quality work. As we constantly chirp about work-life balance, we fail to ask about work-life harmony. Constantly demonizing work and demarcating anyone who discovers joy within their work might be a strong sign to reflect upon one’s self.

The ones who are enjoying life the most are the ones who are absolutely stretching the capabilites of their brain’s limits in the most difficult and meaningful ways imaginable.

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Hungarian-American Psychologist (1934-2021)