How to FOCUS on what you're doing

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/13/smarter-living/how-to-actually-truly-focus-on-what-youre-doing.html?mc=aud_dev&ad-keywords=auddevgate&subid1=TAFI&ad_name=1BEHA_20_XXXX_XXX_1P_CD_XX_XX_SITEVISITXREM_X_XXXX_COUSA_P_X_X_EN_FBIG_OA_XXXX_00_EN_JP_NFLINKS&adset_name=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2019%2F01%2F13%2Fsmarter-living%2Fhow-to-actually-truly-focus-on-what-youre-doing.html&campaign_id=23843395553450358&fbclid=IwAR2NfAIG9zYnbLyQwLzltz-su6buDTJ76A8KyKfwo1PgwOkUy5oe1UqMWWg

1: "successfully integrate more deep work into your professional life, you cannot just wait until you find yourself with lots of free time and in the mood to concentrate. You have to actively fight to incorporate this into your schedule."

2: "The second rule is to “embrace boredom.” The broader point here is that the ability to concentrate is a skill that you have to train if you expect to do it well. A simple way to get started training this ability is to frequently expose yourself to boredom. If you instead always whip out your phone and bathe yourself in novel stimuli at the slightest hint of boredom, your brain will build a Pavlovian connection between boredom and stimuli, which means that when it comes time to think deeply about something (a boring task, at least in the sense that it lacks moment-to-moment novelty), your brain won’t tolerate it."

3: "The third rule is to “quit social media.” The basic idea is that people need to be way more intentional and selective about what apps and services they allow into their digital lives. If you only focus on possible advantages, you’ll end up, like so many of us today, with a digital life that’s so cluttered with thrumming, shiny knots of distraction pulling at our attention and manipulating our moods that we end up a shell of our potential. In “Deep Work,” I introduced this idea mainly to help professionals protect their ability to focus, but it hit a nerve, and eventually evolved into the popular digital minimalism movement that I’ve been writing about more recently."

4: Drain the shallows: “Shallow work” is my term for anything that doesn’t require uninterrupted concentration. This includes, for example, most administrative tasks like answering email or scheduling meetings. If you allow your schedule to become dominated by shallow work, you’ll never find time to do the deep efforts that really move the needle. It’s really important, therefore, that you work to aggressively minimize optional shallow work and then be very organized and productive about how you execute what remains. It’s not that shallow work is bad, but that its opposite, deep work, is so valuable that you have to do everything you can to make room for it."