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044 - The Secret to Higher Quality Work

Hello there. Kevin here, and welcome to another episode of the Feel Good English podcast. The only podcast that helps you become a better English speaker and a better business person all at the same time.

Today, we have a crazy amount of distractions, all of the time, all day long, wherever we are, supermarket, at home, at work, at school, when we have our phone nearby or computer nearby, there is an incredible amount of distractions all day long.

And how come some people can avoid these distractions and work harder, while other people just constantly get distracted and stressed, and aren’t able to focus on what needs to get done.

Well, in the book “Deep Work” by Cal Newport, the author goes deep into the importance of doing distraction–free work and diving into the work that we’re doing and creating an environment that allows us to focus, as much as possible, on work, so it can be more valuable, more productive, and we can get things done in a better way.

This is one of the more interesting books I’ve read lately, thanks, Thiago, one of my old students and friends, for the recommendation. This book really impacted me because it reminded me of why I need to really focus on doing quality valuable work, and not letting all of the distractions of the day, which a lot of them are totally meaningless, get in the way of me doing quality work.

In this episode, I’m going to talk about the book “Deep Work,” give you some ideas on how you can do more deep work, and also talk a little bit more about the problems with getting distracted, and through research, they have found that there are many reasons why we should not be multi–tasking, and trying to do different things at the same time. So that’s the episode for today, “Deep Work” by Cal Newport.

If you want a transcript to this and other episodes of the Feel Good English podcast, just go to my website, feelgoodenglish.com and you can learn how to become a member, and join us which gives you free transcripts to the episodes along with other perks. So go over to feelgoodenglish.com after this episode. Let’s get into the lesson.

So, it’s pretty obvious these days that we are constantly getting distracted by all sorts of different stimuli: our phones when we’re online when you’re on email. You have all these different emails, or you’re on a website and they have ads and different links and different photos and all of this stuff all over the place, and we get distracted by this. Our attention spans are extremely short, meaning we only have, sometimes even

thing and do a very good job of that, are the ones that are going to get ahead, compared to other people that are not capable of focusing on any one thing.

So, something really interesting in this book. He talks about something called “attention residue.” Believe it or not, and this is through some studies that they did, let’s say you’re working on something at work. Let’s say you’re coding for a software, and you’ve been on it for about ten minutes. So you’re working on it hard, but then, you say “Oh! I wonder what’s going on over at Facebook. I wonder if that girl I liked posted any pictures of her on the beach from the weekend. Let’s check that out.” So you go over to Facebook, you check it out. You’re only there for five minutes, and then you go back to work. What they found through research is that when we get distracted by something, and then leave that and then go back to work, we actually have a residue, meaning leftover attention that stays in our brain and doesn’t allow us to fully go back to what we were working on. We can’t go and focus a hundred percent on what we were working on when we get distracted by something, and this lasts ten to twenty minutes after we looked at that thing. So you’re coding, you look at Facebook, you check out your girl’s pics on the beach, which there wasn’t any, unfortunately. But anyway, when we go back to coding, you’re still going to have that in your mind just leftovers, sitting there, distracting your attention, taking up some of your attention. The residue from what you looked at.

Very interesting, huh?

So, this also means, let’s say you are working for ten minutes, and then you go check your email, or there’s something called the Pomodoro Technique, which you use and, you do twenty minutes of work, five minutes of a break.

Twenty minutes of work, five minutes of a break. Well, according to the author of Deep Work, this is not ideal. What happens is you work for twenty minutes, and then let’s say you check your email for five minutes. You have all those new thoughts coming into your brain, and when you go back to that work, you’re going to have a residue; you’re going to have leftover attention from your emails, and you’re not gonna be able to put in a hundred percent and to put in that really deep focus onto what you were working on. Interesting, right?

Even having open tabs in your browser. Let’s say you have one tab with what you’re reading, and then you have five more tabs of different things.

We all do this sometimes, you have another five websites open in the background. Those little tabs can actually distract you, pull your attention from what you are working on. So, a simple trick: close those tabs. But anyway, through studying the brain, they saw that this actually is affecting us negatively. Getting distracted, having multiple tabs open, having multiple things that you’re trying to do at the same time, makes it so we can’t focus one hundred percent on the main task.

So, the overall idea is we really need to plan time to do focused work. And the author actually suggests that we plan our non–deep focused work time.

Interesting, so it’s kind of backwards. So when we’re working, we’re saying “We’re going to work for an hour, 90 minutes on this important stuff, and we’re going to plan for some Internet time or surfing the net, looking at websites, Facebook, social media, and we plan for that time, but we reserve it for only once every hour and a half, something like that.” So we get used to focusing on work, doing one thing at a time.

Some other tips to do this: We have to create a space that is distraction– free. We can have a lot of different things going on, people calling us; turn off your phone, TV on in the background, music. You can select certain music that is good for concentration and focus, but that’s a topic for another day, depends on your style. But getting rid of distractions around you, really having a quiet, focused workplace.

One thing the author talks about is this whole new concept of open workspaces, where we have big shared rooms, where everybody works in the same area, even on the same tables. He doesn’t think this is a good idea.

He thinks we need to have more private spaces, where we can focus deeply on what we’re doing. And it probably comes down a little bit to your style. If you’re able to work around people or if you’re not, but one of the big factors in this book as well as he tells us that we need to train our brains to be able to focus on something for a longer period of time. This doesn’t come automatically. We need to train our brain through practice, and through practicing on how to focus on the main task, and over time, through this training, we’ll be able to do it easier.

Another tip that he suggests is something called “Productive Meditation.” So if you have a big problem you’re dealing with, or something at work, or a project that you’re trying to complete, finding time to go on a walk in the forest. ** Going on a walk somewhere. I talked about this in other episodes, but finding time out of the workplace, out of school, where you can just think about this problem, and keep bringing your attention back to this problem while walking around or at the gym, but something where it allows you to keep bringing your attention back to this problem, and trying to focus on this problem without a lot of other distractions going on.

Treating your attention with respect: Treating this limited attention that we have with respect, like we would our bodies, we eat healthy, we exercise.

We need to do that with our attention as well. We need to train our attention and treat it with respect. You ever feel overwhelmed and stressed out and tired sometimes,? we do all of this work, which in the book, is actually called “Shallow Work,” the opposite of “Deep Work,” but we put all of the time on these little things, these little tasks, and we feel exhausted at the end of the day. All of this shallow work depletes our energy, and through practice, this is something I’,m gonna start doing a lot more myself, focusing on deep work, and getting the most of the important things done and feeling very accomplished at the end of the day. It will relieve us of a lot of distress, and we’ll be directly affecting our attention capabilities.

Another tip: Be okay with being bored. Sometimes, we get bored and what do we do? You grab your phone, and then you look at something. If you have a space of a minute or two, don’t just pull out your phone. Resist the temptation to do this. Remember, we’re reserving our social media time and Internet time for specific times during the day. So if it’s not the time, resist the temptation. If you’re standing in line at the bank, just stay there and relax and look around you. Don’t give in to the urge of whipping out your phone whenever you’re getting bored for ten seconds. This is difficult. You’ll notice that it’s not easy to do.

When we’re checking our phone, and we’re basically filling our time with social media and what not, we’re building an addiction to this. We’re creating an addiction to filling every single second of our day with stimulation, often from different apps and websites on our phone because it’s so convenient.

So, we need to break this addiction, and it’s going to take work like breaking any addiction, but stopping yourself from pulling out that phone every single time you feel a little bored will benefit your life greatly.

So finding an isolated workplace, distraction–free work time, planning for non–deep work, so we are focusing the majority of our time on deep work is something we need to challenge ourselves with doing. If we don’t have a distraction–free area, we need to look for one. Maybe you’re at home, trying to get some work done and your family, distracts you. Just tell them, “I need to focus now, but soon, in an hour, we can sit and talk about this.” If you plan for the quality time with your family and friends or what not, it’ll be of higher value, anyway. You won’t be distracted with all the work that you’re trying to do, all these little things. You get the deep work done, plan for time with your family, and you will be much more present and much more connected with them when you are together.

At work, if it’s very noisy, get some good headphones, some noise– reduction headphones and find music that helps you focus: some soft, gentle music. There’s a website called “Brain FM, brain.fm.” It has some really interesting background music that you can use.

Or maybe you need to go to work early. You need to arrive a couple of hours early or stay a couple of hours late. That can help, as well. I’ve known people that have done this. If you can get that really important work done first thing in the morning before people leave and get there, you’d be a lot less stressed during the day, and you will also be a lot more productive. Then, who knows? Maybe you’ll become the manager of the company, one day, and you’ll have to work and you’ll get to work a lot less and get that nice car and have a lot more vacation time. So, that could happen.

Applying this to English, of course, I don’t promote studying an hour of deep English every day. I think that’s hard for a lot of people, but if you could even do it for a few minutes, starting small with five minutes, and just putting your whole attention into a podcast episode or reading something or whatever that may be, and just starting small and making sure you’re putting your full attention into something and not getting distracted, This could come in a lot more handy if you have a test coming up or you need to get really serious about English. If you are dedicating an hour or two a day to English, make sure this is distraction–free time. Learn deeply. Read the things deeply. Listen deeply, and go deep into your lessons and use this concept of deep work to improve your English deeply.

Going over vocabulary from today’s episode: First, what I used in the beginning, the intro, perks. PERKS. The perks. A perk is a benefit. So you’re getting a job, a new job, and you ask the HR Manager, the Human Resource Manager, “What are the perks of this job?”

Next word, stimuli. Stimuli comes from a stimulus, stimulation. So, stimuli is the plural form, so you have a lot of different things that are stimulating you. Stimuli is the plural form.

Attention span. Your attention span is how long you can keep your attention on something. These days, with all these different factors and distractions in social media, our attention spans are getting very short, when companies advertise to you and they want you to get their message, they have to be very quick. Five second or ten second advertisements like on Youtube. They have the fifteen–second advertisements because our attention spans are so short.

Another word, a phrasal verb I used, “get ahead.” To get ahead is to progress. To progress is something to overcome something, to advance in something. If you want to get ahead in your career, you have to work hard, and you have to work deeply.

Residue is our things that are remaining or leftover. Left over, I also used two words: A phrasal verb left over or residue; would be things that would be left over from using something. In this case, your attention residue.

You’re looking at Facebook, and then you go back to work. There’s some attention remaining from what you were doing on Facebook. To visualize this, let’s say in your shower, on the walls or on the windows, you have kind of that residue from soap and humidity that stays there. That’s residue. It’s stuff that’s left over after using the shower so many times.

Another word, overwhelm. We hear this a lot in the Feel Good English podcast because we’re trying to avoid feeling overwhelmed. Feeling overwhelmed or being overwhelmed is being stressed out. Too stressed.

Too many things going on. Too much work. Over, in the case of when it’s in the beginning of a word, means too much. So, “You’re overwhelmed. You have too many things going on. You’re stressed out. So, focus on deep work, minimize shallow work to feel less overwhelmed.”

Another phrase here, I have a lot of good stuff in this: “ give in to the urge of whipping out your phone.” So there’s a lot of stuff here. “To give in to” is to succumb or submit, or maybe to accept something. So you’re giving in to the urge. U-R-G-E An urge is a desire. You’re accepting the desire, you’re succumbing to this desire, of whipping out your phone.

Cool phrasal verb, “whip out.” Whip, W-H-I-P, like whipped cream. You ever heard of that? But anyway, whip out is to pull something out quickly. You whip out a gun. Oh, you pulled out the gun quickly . Or in this case, you’re standing in line at the bank, you have an urge to look at your phone because you’re bored, and what do you do? You whip out your phone from your pocket. You whip it out quickly. So, the point of the lesson is to not give in to the urge of whipping out your phone. Don’t succumb, don’t accept this urge.

We want to not give in to this urge. We want to resist the urge of pulling out our phone and be okay with being bored so we don’t fill our mind with a lot more stimuli.

Last phrase here, “come in handy.” Handy, H-A-N-D-Y, basically the word hand with the “-y” on the end. If something comes in handy, it means it’s convenient for you. So take this, let’s take this example. When you’re a kid and your mom gives you a jacket, because you’re going out with your friends, she said: “Hey, Johnny! Take your jacket with you. This will come in handy later,” you say “Oh Mom! It’s sunny out. It’s not going to be cold. Oh, why? My friends don’t have a jacket,” and your mom says “Johnny, take your jacket.” So, you take your jacket. It rains later, your friends don’t have a jacket. You do. The jacket came in handy, and you say “Wow! My mom is so great.”

True story. :)

And that is it for today’s lesson. I hope you enjoyed the lesson on “Deep Work.” The book is really, really, really fascinating. It shows us how important it is to respect our attention, give our attention the respect it deserves, and to give our work the respect it deserves. If you want to know more about this book and the author, go to my website,

feelgoodenglish.com and search for the episode, and to remind you to get transcripts to this episode, also go to feelgoodenglish.com/member. Learn how you can join us over at Feel Good, become a member, and get free transcripts for you to learn deeeeeply.

And I have a blonde cellphone joke for you:

So a blonde gets a new cellphone from her husband. The next day, she goes to the mall, and her phone rings, so she answers it. Her husband says on the other line,

“Hey wife! How’s the new cell phone?”

And the blonde says, “Oh! It’s great! But how did you know I was at the mall?”

Sorry if you’re blonde out there, but I’m a blonde too. So, let’s not take it too seriously.

Thanks for listening. See you in the next episode of the Feel Good English podcast.

Have a wonderful rest of your day. Bye!