The shallow work that increasingly dominates the time and attention of knowledge workers is less vital than it often seems in the moment.
A nontrivial amount of shallow work is needed to maintain most knowledge work jobs.
Deep work is exhausting because it pushes you toward the limit of your abilities. For someone new to such practice, an hour a day is a reasonable limit. For those familiar with the rigors of such activities, the limit expands to something like four hours, but rarely more.
We spend much of our day on autopilot, not giving though to what we're doing with out time. This is a problem. Adopt the habit of pausing before action and asking what makes the most sense right now?
Divide hour fo your workday into blocks. Not every block needs to be dedicated to a work task - also lunch and relaxation. Minimum size of a box is 30 minutes. Batch similar things to a more generic task blocks.
Your goal is not to stick to the schedule but rather to have a thoughtful say in what you are doing with your time.
Make the blocks longer than what you think will be required to finish the task.
How long would it take in months to train a smart recent college graduate with no specialized training to complete this task?
Tasks that leverage your expertise provide double benefit - return more value per time spent and stretch your abilities leading to improvement.
Firm goal of not working past a certain time; work backward to find productivity strategies that allow to satisfy declaration.
Reduction in shallow frees up more energy for the deep alternative, allowing us to produce more than if we had defaulted to a more crowded schedule. Limits to our time needs more careful thinking about organizational habits also leading to more value produces as compared to a longer but less organized schedules.
Fixed-schedule productivity is a meta-habit - simple to adopt, broad in its impact.