Every time you check your phone, you cost yourself twenty-three minutes. That’s not an exaggeration—researchers at UC Irvine found it takes an average of twenty-three minutes to refocus after an interruption.
Now consider: how many times do you check your phone daily? How many emails arrive? How many Slack messages?
The modern worker fights a losing battle against constant distraction. Deep work—extended periods of distraction-free concentration—is becoming a superpower. Those who cultivate it produce outsized results.
What Deep Work Actually Means
Deep work isn’t just “trying hard to concentrate.” It’s purposeful, distraction-free effort on cognitively demanding tasks. It produces new value, improves skills, and is hard to replicate.
Shallow work, by contrast, is non-cognitively demanding, often performed while distracted, and doesn’t create much new value. Answering emails, attending meetings, basic administrative tasks—these have their place but don’t build anything meaningful.
The goal isn’t to eliminate shallow work entirely. It’s to dramatically increase the time spent in deep work.
Why It’s Getting Harder
The Attention Economy
Every app on your phone was designed by teams of engineers whose job is capturing your attention. They have powerful incentives and sophisticated tools to do exactly that.
The average person touches their phone 96 times daily. Checking “just for a minute” becomes twenty minutes of doom-scrolling. The notification that seems urgent can wait—and usually isn’t.
This isn’t a character flaw. It’s designed behavior. Fighting it requires intentional architecture, not willpower.
The Myth of Multitasking
You can’t actually multitask. What you do is rapidly switch between tasks, with each switch carrying a cognitive cost.
A study at Stanford found that heavy multitaskers performed worse on every measure of cognitive function than light multitaskers. They couldn’t filter out irrelevant information and took longer to switch between tasks.
Single-tasking isn’t slow. It’s faster.
How to Cultivate Deep Work
Protect Your Prime Time
Identify your peak cognitive hours. For most people, this is morning—before email, meetings, and other people’s demands creep in.
Protect this time ruthlessly. Treat it as your most important meeting—the one with yourself. Many successful people schedule deep work before their workday begins.
Create Friction for Distractions
Willpower doesn’t work against sophisticated attention-capture. Instead, create friction:
- Leave your phone in another room during deep work sessions
- Use website blockers (Freedom, Cold Turkey) during focused periods
- Close email and Slack during concentration time
- Put physical barriers between you and distractions
The goal isn’t to make distraction impossible—that triggers the “forbidden fruit” effect. It’s to make distraction slightly inconvenient while making deep work easy.
Batch Shallow Work
Instead of answering emails throughout the day, batch it. Check email at set times: once mid-morning, once after lunch, once late afternoon.
This seems counterintuitive—what if something urgent comes up? But urgent things find a way. People call, text, or come to your desk. Email as the primary communication method usually means it’s not that urgent.
Use the gaps between shallow work batches for deep concentration. Protect the larger blocks for uninterrupted effort.
Start with Small Sessions
If you’re not used to deep work, don’t start with three-hour sessions. You’ll fail.
Start with forty-five minutes. Then build to ninety. Most people can sustain two to four hours of true deep work daily. Beyond that, returns diminish.
The goal is sustainable, not heroic.
The Environment Matters
Your Physical Space
Deep work requires a dedicated environment. This might be:
- A specific room or corner of your home
- A library
- A coffee shop (if it works for you)
- A coworking space
What matters is consistency. Your brain learns to focus in certain contexts. Changing locations frequently makes this harder.
The Digital Environment
Close unnecessary browser tabs. Turn off non-human notifications (apps, emails, etc.). Consider a separate browser profile for focused work without your usual bookmarks and saved logins.
Some people use a “focus music” playlist—ambient, lyric-free sounds that signal to their brain: this is concentration time.
The Mental Game
Reframe Boredom
Deep work feels uncomfortable at first. Your brain will desperately want distraction. This is normal.
Instead of fighting the discomfort, notice it. “My brain wants distraction. This is what distraction feels like. I’ll wait it out.” The urge usually passes within minutes.
Accept That You Can’t Do Everything
Deep work requires saying no. No to meetings that could be emails. No to side projects that spread you thin. No to “quick questions” that become hour-long conversations.
This is hard. But producing meaningful work requires protecting your most valuable resource: attention.
Track Your Deep Work
Measure what matters. Track hours spent in deep work weekly. You’ll be surprised how little it is—and how much difference small increases make.
Set a target: maybe ten hours weekly. Build from there.
What You’ll Gain
The ability to focus deeply gives you:
- Faster learning of complex skills
- Higher quality output in less time
- Genuine expertise rather than surface familiarity
- The satisfaction of producing meaningful work
In a distracted world, concentration is rare. Those who cultivate it will find themselves increasingly valuable.
Start small. Protect your mornings. Measure what matters.
Your best work awaits.
