Mikey
Almost five stars, as I will accept any advice that suggests I can have a terrible diet - and as long as a wrap up my eating to a 8 to 12 hours window a day I will be healthy. Lots of interesting details on the body's circadian rhythm I didn't know - I struggle with poor quality sleep, and have used a simulated dawn wake up light to try to help set my daily rhythm in darker Canadian winters, so it was really interesting to read how much else in the body is driven by it's own circadian rhythm and how we might better benefit those natural rhythms through time restricted eating, sleep, light exposure, exercise.
When I first finished the book, my gut was a 3-star review for ‘good' but not really adding to the conversation from other treatise on productivity and focus - then, I started to experiment and implement some of the suggestions. I tried removing email and Safari from my iphone, setting an intention outside my normal routines, and planning more of my day outside of work - and decided to up the book to 4 stars. I don't think Make Time breaks new ground, but it does take a lot of strong concepts and ideas - and turns them into actionable plans to try. While I tend to be on top of organization, the suggestions are helping me carve out time for things from the ‘Someday/Maybe' to actually getting done in a normal week.
Slow to start, and then I began enjoying the easy to digest advice and anecdotes about a third of the way through. I would like more practical advice on applying usability research. While the advice seems like common sense - then why doesn't my cell phones company accept my credit card with their new website redesign?!? I have no idea, and no error messages, MetroPCS probably needs this book.
Overall, the concepts in the book resonated with my past attempts to limit distraction in the work place, and get more done. The sentence structure and prose were long for my taste. On content, I think Deep Work pulled together concepts and research from other sources on working efficiently, and my main complaint is that too much of the justification fell to the authors personal anecdotes and experience. I would have preferred to see a wider range of interviews and sources, across different disciplines and careers, relating to the strategies suggested. This would have added more strength to practical application of Cal's advice. There is a long section on social media use, but fails to add any new perspective. I think this chapter would have been much better structured talking about the nature of digital distraction as a whole, and then making suggestions to manage and carefully select what you allow to consume your attention (including social media simply in the broader spectrum of app or phone usage).
The practical advices that I intend to apply:
1. Putting more effort into structuring my down time to advancing personal projects (creative outlets like drawing and painting, fitness focused on yoga and cycling, cooking).
2. On focused projects, think about how to chunk the work between ‘deep work' focused sessions, and actively seeking collaboration to improve the overall end product.
3. Read the referenced Christensen book, The 4 Disciplines of Execution, as I've see these concepts being applied at work but not the source of the execution strategy before.
4. Try to ‘close the loop' more efficiently in email with more specificity in responses, try not to allow simple threads to get dragged out.
5. Extend ‘meeting free time' focused currently on output production (doc writing, launching campaigns, etc.) to include research time and more longer term thinking. I'm going to try the advice to not just disable notifications, but work offline completely sans internet for these time chunks.
5. Implement an end of day shutdown ritual to clear out any remaining threads, and schedule the next day. Cleaning up incomplete tasks to not dominate my attention until the following day.
Excellent, one of my favourite books. Prescott lays out the tale with vivid details and I couldn't stop reading.
