1st September, 2021

Yesterday, I got around to a coding task I’d been procrastinating on for nearly a year. I kept putting it off. But yesterday, once I reminded myself of what I was supposed to be doing, I got to work…and lifted my head three hours later. It was once of those rare but unmistakably satisfying periods of silent concentration. From the chaos of conscious distractions to the calm of the flow state.

It got me thinking about the concept of Deep Work again. I mentioned this on Day 151 in the context of commuting and how taking that lost time back can facilitate deep work. There’s more to that. In the microcosm of a single several-hour period of deep work, the real enemy is task-switching. You work for 5 minutes, then look at your phone. You work for 5 minutes, then check your email. And so on…

During a podcast interview, I was once asked about time management; a question that then triggered a short rant on how disgusted I once was with how much time I’d been spending on my phone. You can associate a conceptual cost (or penalty) with task switching. Every time you move away from the thing you’re trying to do, you pay a penalty (in energy, in brain power, in time). One way to put numbers against such task-switching costs is to look at the cumulative time you spend on your phone. In my case, I calculated phone time when I was averaging around 4 hours screen time per day. If I be really conservative and knock out 6 weeks of the year for holidays (overgenerously assuming there’s no phone time therein), then those 4 hours per day, for 7 days per week, for 46 weeks of the year…

…leads to nearly 54 full days lost to the doom scroll!

That, for me, was the revelation that stripped away many of the excuses I was making for myself around how little time I thought I had to get stuff done, to try something new, to learn a skill, complete a project, connect with friends.

Once you realize how your time is controlled, you can take back control of your time.

If you have a question for Marc, upload an audio recording for it to be featured on a later Q&A episode!