Course Content
Introduction
Do you actually know how busy and when your staff is really busy? There are so many staff members that always looks busy, but are they just keeping themselves busy, or are they actually busy with productive work?
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Focus on most important tasks first
Prioritization is a key part to productivity
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Cultivate Deep Work
By Newport's definition, deep work refers to: “Professional activity performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.”
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Keep a distraction list to stay focused
Often our own mind can be the biggest source of distractions when we sit down to work: • We suddenly remember the bananas we forgot to pick up at the grocery store. • We begin worrying about the presentation we have to give next week. • A sense of dread creeps over us when we realize how much work we still have to get done by the end of the day. The Distractions List is a simple but powerful technique for dealing with internal distractions like these. By immediately writing down our distracting thoughts, we signal to our minds that those distractions are acknowledged and will be taken care of if necessary. I first came across this idea, by the way, in Chris Bailey’s book Hyperfocus.
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Busy vs. Productive: The Ultimate Challenge
About Lesson

Let’s get right to the point: bouncing between your inbox, pointless meetings, and group chat notifications is no way to get ahead in today’s information economy. Instead, succumbing to these attention traps leads you off the path of excellence and down the road of mediocrity. To be truly exceptional at the work you do, and to gain recognition for it, you’ll need to adopt a different strategy entirely.

Enter “deep work”.

Many of us have forgotten how to focus deeply on a single task, or never really learned to in the first place. In school you may have done well enough by practicing mostly shallow work on a day-to-day basis, with the occasional deep work session a few times per semester to write a last-minute paper or cram for a final exam.

Learning how to practice deep work requires you to be more intentional than you’ve ever been in sitting down regularly to concentrate on high-impact tasks. You must select your preferred form of deep work, build a routine from scratch, and provide operating principles and tactics for embracing the power of directed focus.

Cal Newport’s best selling book, “Deep work: Rules for focused success in a distracted world”, published in 2016 defines deep work as follows:

“Professional activity performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.”

We will have an additional series of articles, 19 in total. Focussing just on the concept of deep work, which will guide you through the full concept of deep work from how to decide upon a strategy to the implementation of the same.