deep-life
What does a the optimal day look someone focused on deep work and sharing remarkable results?
This post argues that a day can be split into four categories for optimal impact of deep work and minimal risk of burnout: preparation, deep work, sharing, and input.
preparation - prioritize tasks for the day to accomplish, prepare internal and external environment for best work
deep work - important tasks to be fulfilled requiring flow/100% focus
sharing - sharing atomic, distilled elements from work. These are the scraps from the cutting-room floor (202212181947), leveraging the Feynman Technique to solidify the results of the deep work process
input - consuming high quality curated content to input for future deep work inspiration
The idea is that the preparation phase leads into the deep work phase leads into the sharing phase leads into the input phase.
Rigid, Yet Flexible Schedule
- Up to 4 hours of deep work a day (cornerstone)
- Up to 3 hours of sharing (livestream/office hours/performance/etc)
- Finish the day with high quality input instead of low quality interspersed throughout the day
- Maintain critical health hygiene habits (sleep, exercise, diet)
Here's a tentative schedule with clear boundaries (+/- in hours):
- wake up - +3(hours) = preparation
- +3 - +7 = deep work
- +7 - +10 = sharing
- -3 - sleep = high quality input
Preparation Template
This template is filled out in the morning to align on the priority tasks so the deep work phase can be 100% focused. In addition, this template seeks to excite about interesting content to be looked forward to at the end of the day.
### What Project(s) Do You Plan On Working On Today?
#### What Three Most Important Tasks Need Priority?
### What Are You Consuming To Help With This?
#### What Are You Looking Forward to Consuming?
### How Will You Move Your Body Today?
### What Are You Hoping To Be Able To Share From Your Deep Work Session?
Deep Work -> Content Template
This template concludes the deep work phase of the day and extracts high quality content to share.
### What Project(s) Did You Work On Today?
### Is Any Of Your Deep Work in a Directly Shareable State?
### What Interesting Thing(s) Did You Learn?
### How Would You Convey What You Learned As A Short Summary?
Input Alignment Template
### What Are You Consuming?
### What Project(s) Are You Working On Tomorrow?
### How Does Your Consumption Help Progress Your Projects?
Personal Example
Here are my daily priorities and deep work activities (marked):
- exercise (preparation)
- zettelkasten processing (reading -> to-process inbox -> zettel -> publish) (deep work)
- content creation (sharing)
- livestream (sharing)
- coding (deep work)
- writing (deep work)
- improving my website (sharing/deep work)
- client work (deep work)
Here's how a day might look using this structure:
- 1st block is prep
- filling out the Input Template and the Preparation Template
- light exercise
- cleaning the work space
- 2nd block is deep work
- open external tasks owed to clients (priority 1)
- going through #to-process and converting notes to distilled items (priority 2)
- (or) creating bespoke content like videos or essays (priority 2)
- (or) coding open projects (priority 2) (why priority 2? to not waste time on coding for coding's sake 202212251454)
- at the end of the deep work session, filling out the Content Template
- 3rd block is sharing
- going on livestream and reviewing what was made and why
- using the Content Template as a guide, share what was done and what was learned
- 4th block is input
- catching up on books and reading/watching/listening to content that will become raw material for future deep work
Each of us has many, many maps in our head, which can be divided into two main categories: maps of the way things are, or realities, and maps of the way things should be, or values. (Location 808)
The more aware we are of our basic paradigms, maps, or assumptions, and the extent to which we have been influenced by our experience, the more we can take responsibility for those paradigms, examine them, test them against reality, listen to others and be open to their perceptions, thereby getting a larger picture and a far more objective view. (Location 868)
Our character, basically, is a composite of our habits. “Sow a thought, reap an action; sow an action, reap a habit; sow a habit, reap a character; sow a character, reap a destiny,” the maxim goes. (Location 1163)
The world we live in is an amalgamation of physics, biology, and chemistry. These are invariants, facts about the universe that build the blank canvas that we live on.
On top of this, people have individual preferences (Joe decides to open a pizza shop because he thinks he's good at making pizza and he likes money), and societal preferences (Joe's pizza shop becomes a societal phenomenon, and people demand that it stays open, and serve them the hours that they want pizza).
There is a interesting emergent property where (human) reality is the agreed (or imposed) shared values of a society. The location and rent of buildings in Manhattan, to the acreage of a farm come down to shared values about property ownership, on the backdrop of physical reality (you can't have a 200 acre farm in the middle of Times Square, so the solution is to build vertically -- but you also can't herd cows on the 30th floor of the Grace Building, so the solution is to go wide).
Genetic determinism basically says your grandparents did it to you. (Location 1465)
Psychic determinism basically says your parents did it to you. (Location 1467)
Environmental determinism basically says your boss is doing it to you—or your spouse, or that bratty teenager, or your economic situation, or national policies. (Location 1471)
I'm of the belief that personal values are the final "sieve". In every individual, environmental, genetic and social dramas play out, and the individual forms their own mental framework to deal with these stressors. The result is preferences, and preferences whittled down become values over the long term.
Indeed, I have my own values and as far as I can tell, they emerged from what I consistently rank as personally important. Values Document
It’s also worthy of mention that every pattern has at least one small bias, and one day it will tip itself over, or fall from one page to another. (Location 3278)
The worst characteristic of mood possession is that it robs one of all sense of meaning. Suddenly the “out there” is dominant in one’s inner life and the inner meaning of life is lost. One is then at the mercy of the “out there” for one’s sense of value or happiness. One is so tied to a new purchase or gaining the favor of someone that he is unaware of his own inner meaning, which is the only stable value he has. Mood possession also robs him of the objective world and its true beauty and magnificence, a deep meaning in its own right. (Location 385)
An amateur is defensive. The professional finds learning (and even, occasionally, being shown up) to be enjoyable; they like being challenged and humbled, and engage in education as an ongoing and endless process. (Location 1334)
at this age, i'll be a contender!
But he has the secret of those people to whom success comes by itself, whether it is due to being born under a lucky star or whether it is magic, or whether he has learned it from the Samanas. He always seems to be playing at business, it never makes much impression on him, it never masters him, he never fears failure, he is never worried about a loss.” (Location 598)
“Do not scold, my dear friend. Nothing was ever achieved by scolding. If a loss has been sustained, I will bear the loss. I am very satisfied with this journey. I have become acquainted with many people, I have become friendly with a Brahmin, children have sat on my knee, farmers have showed me their fields. Nobody took me for a merchant.” (Location 607)
Fear is the cause of every problem. It’s the root of all prejudices and the negative emotions of anger, jealousy, and possessiveness. If you had no fear, you could be perfectly happy living in this world. Nothing would bother you. You’d be willing to face everything and everyone because you wouldn’t have fear inside of you that could cause you disturbance. (Location 1045)
Ernst Becker philosophized that the fear of death being the root of all fears means the root off all prejudice, anger, etc. is death
A wise person realizes that at any moment they may breathe out, and the breath may not come back in. (Location 2196)
You really don’t need more time before death; what you need is more depth of experience during the time you’re given. (Location 2290)
Never had it been so strangely clear to Siddhartha how closely related passion was to death. (Location 724)
Words do not express thoughts very well. They always become a little different immediately they are expressed, a little distorted, a little foolish. (Location 1328)
The Values Document cannot be fully distilled into words, but words can serve as a key-value store for the feelings the values are meant to emote. In a way, words are like a familiar smell from your past, that allow for memories to flow in. But words can be shared amongst many people in many different points in time.
Muses Live in the Routine
I find that the muses come to me when I'm in the process of creating, whether it be through routine or hard work.
“The routine is important to me,” said a successful painter who works in her studio for four hours five times a week. “When I get started, there’s a wonderful sense of well-being. I like to feel myself plodding along. I specifically choose that word, plod. When it’s going good, I feel ‘this is the essential me.’ It’s the routine itself that feeds me. If I didn’t do it, I’d be betraying the essential me.” (Location 478)
The Muse arrives to us most readily during creation, not before. Homer and Hesiod invoke the Muses not while wondering what to compose, but as they begin to sing. If we are going to call upon inspiration to guide us through, we have to first begin the work. (View Highlight)
The computers that nowadays catalogue galaxies may or may not do it better than the graduate students used to. But they certainly do not experience such reflections as a result. I mention this because I often hear scientific research described in rather a bleak way, suggesting that it is mostly mindless toil. The inventor Thomas Edison once said, ‘None of my inventions came by accident. I see a worthwhile need to be met and I make trial after trial until it comes. What it boils down to is one per cent inspiration and ninety-nine per cent perspiration.’ Some people say the same about theoretical research, where the ‘perspiration’ phase is supposedly uncreative intellectual work such as doing algebra or translating algorithms into computer programs. But the fact that a computer or a robot can perform a task mindlessly does not imply that it is mindless when scientists do it. After all, computers play chess mindlessly – by exhaustively searching the consequences of all possible moves – but humans achieve a similar-looking functionality in a completely different way, by creative and enjoyable thought. Perhaps those galaxy-cataloguing computer programs were written by those same graduate students, distilling what they had learned into reproducible algorithms. (Location 676)
^989e62
Whether it's the routine or the fever pitch of hard work, the muses will attend. 202301051910
https://youtu.be/nJ-ehbVQYxI
00:32
now this is pod racing
01:41
i love the dedication to the bit, buy space to fulfill obsession
04:31
d&d actually had the stranger things satan/cult leader vibe. stranger things seems to be pretty accurate!
06:42
multiple generations of story arcs and characters, 1000s of sub plots
08:11
if your character dies, you lose the game permanently
09:15
don't invite your boyfriends to the game because the game lasts longer
such a inspiration for people like me interested in building decades long spanning worlds of thought and ideas -- massive systems that can be cared for and built an entire lifespan!