The second week of the life of focus course consisted of digesting the science of attention, expanding your frustration threshold and not relying on inspiration.
The science of attention is never something I had paid much attention to in the past. Scott summarized and highlighted the most important take aways from the research around it. The most important being that multitasking is a myth and the big cost of it and distractions is the attention residue they cause.
After diving deeper into the components of working memory we explored ways to increase our frustration threshold. Frustration threshold is the amount of frustration you are able to endure when trying to solve a hard problem or difficult task before giving up. Not suprisingly Richard Feynman came up again as someone with an exceptional frustration threshold.
The final lesson this week came from Cal and about dispelling some of the myths around deep work. Namely that it will be hard and a slog in a deliberate practice sense. Most people myself included imagine deep work in a romantic sense. Locked away in a cabin having the muse guide us through my work. All the while being in a flow state. Cal explains while sometimes that is the case in reality it is much more like deliberate practice. Slow hard won gains over time.
In addition to this weeks lessons I have been rereading and digesting Deep Work, especially the rules for deep work section. I am just finished rule one: work deeply.
Studying the book in tandem with the course helps give me more context and examples to illustrate the concepts.
This week my target of 15 hours seem out of reach. I was called in as a pharmacist on Monday and Tuesday so was immediately down 6 hours of work. I had good days Wednesday through Friday getting a solid 9 hours. Saturday I found myself tired, hungover and not able to concentrate, but still managed 1.5 hours.
I am finding doing 90 minute periods of deep work of certain work much better then Pomodoro cycles. There is some truth in Cal’s recommendation of 90 minutes as it does take some time to get into the swing of the work.
I need to start to iron out my rituals around deep work and that will be my focus this week.
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