7 Exercises to Cultivate a Deep Work Habit

1. Define your most important tasks

One of the best ways to cultivate deep work is to first define your most important tasks. If you don’t know what your most important task is, how will you work deeply on it?

Defining our most important tasks requires being brutally honest with ourselves, but it’s also critical for success. Begin by making a list of your responsibilities at work and then asking: What are my highest-impact tasks? Eliminate all distractions:

One way that many professionals cultivate deep work is by eliminating distractions altogether. This could mean giving up email for an hour or two or removing social media from your phone.

This post is an excerpt from my book Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World. In it, I outline seven exercises that can be used individually or in sequence to help build up your capacity for deep work.

I’ve also provided specific examples of each exercise at various stages of practice and performance. This book contains everything you need to know about learning how to concentrate on cognitively demanding tasks without distraction.

Before you can plan out your deep workdays, you need to clarify what your most important tasks are. If you already have an idea of which projects are on your radar, that’s a great place to start.

Or if you’re feeling lost in terms of where to start, it can be helpful to return back to our Why and What sections; these exercises help unearth your true motivation and productivity drivers. Once you identify and prioritize those tasks, pick one and get started!

2. Think about what distracts you from working deeply

If you’re like most knowledge workers, your days are filled with urgent tasks that keep you from doing your most important ones. To increase your productivity and make sure you’re focusing on what matters, start by sorting all of your tasks into three categories:

Urgent and important, urgent but not important, and neither urgent nor important. The key is to concentrate on only these high-level tasks and eliminate distractions like email or social media.

Think about what makes up your most critical work — the stuff that gets results for your boss or company — and spend at least 70 percent of your time focused on those projects.

There’s no doubt that deep work is hard. It takes a lot of effort, discipline, and energy. In order to deepen your practice, you need to know what distracts you from it — so that you can remove those distractions or avoid them altogether. Be honest with yourself as you review these common pitfalls

If you’re not sure what distracts you from working deeply, try sitting in front of your computer and trying to work for just 20 minutes. Then pay attention: What do you find yourself doing?

After four or five minutes, do you get up and grab some water? Do you check email or social media? Try again tomorrow. Each time, note what it is that pulls your attention away from working deeply.

3. Use the Pomodoro technique

A big part of cultivating a deep work habit is being more aware of when you’re being distracted. It could be anything from Slack notifications to pinging phone apps.

Practice staying focused on what you’re doing, even if it means putting your phone in airplane mode for an hour. As time goes on, better and better at resisting distractions — and sticking with your deep work focus. You might even find yourself getting annoyed by all of those notifications that used to seem so important!

The best way to cultivate your deep work habit is through disciplined concentration over time. One of my favorite techniques for doing that is called Pomodoro, developed by Francesco Cirillo in 1992.

The technique asks you to use a timer for 25 minutes without distraction and focus only on one task. After you’ve completed four of these sessions, take a five-minute break, then repeat up to two more times.

You can do whatever you want during your breaks as long as it’s not social media or email-related. If your mind begins wandering while focusing on one task, write down what it was thinking about and when the timer rings jump back into your work.

The Pomodoro technique is very simple. First, you choose a task to work on — ideally, one that takes between 25 and 45 minutes to complete. Once you’ve decided on your task, set a timer for 25 minutes and begin working.

4. Take away distractions

The best way to improve your deep work is to take away distractions. If you are working for multiple hours at a time, you need all of your focus directed toward your work. In order to achieve that, you need an environment where there is nothing pulling you away from it.

The first step is to get rid of as many distractions as possible. There should be no TV in sight and nobody should be coming by every hour or so asking if they can help you with anything else. Only start one task at a time:

Multitasking might seem like an efficient thing to do, but it actually slows down our performance. Instead of doing five things at once and getting them done quickly, it takes us roughly five times longer than if we had just focused on one thing at once.

The first step toward developing a deep work habit is to eliminate distractions. Don’t keep your phone within arm’s reach while you work, and limit your use of social media and other time-wasting websites.

Using software like Freedom or Anti-Social can help you avoid temptation altogether. For those occasions when real life requires your attention, don’t worry — it won’t last forever! Think of these distractions as necessary breaks from deeper concentration.

You can’t develop a deep work habit if you’re constantly worried about what’s happening on your Facebook feed. Focus solely on your work by taking away all external distractions, like social media and emails.

5. Remove everything except what you need to complete the task at hand

According to Cal Newport, if you want to cultivate deep work habits, you should remove everything from your workspace that might divert your attention. That includes smartphones, email notifications, and even loud co-workers.

If your workspace can’t be 100% dedicated to deep work activities, block out time on your calendar in advance so that you have no distractions. Newport also recommends setting aside physical sanctuaries where you can only engage in deep work;

If possible, schedule an entire day with no meetings or appointments (no matter how pressing they are). Taking these steps will help ensure that when you do sit down to engage in deep work activities like writing or creating, you don’t get distracted by other distractions!

If you work in an office, it’s easy to get distracted by your coworkers, constant phone calls and emails, or social media notifications. Make it easier on yourself by shutting down email and all other notifications when you’re working on a complex project.

Get rid of your phone, shut down your computer, and remove all potential distractions from your desk. You want to remove everything that can grab your attention for more than five minutes at a time.

The goal is for you to be able to work deeply without interruption for long periods of time (while also allowing you enough time in between projects and responsibilities so that you can recharge and get back into deep work mode). If it helps, turn off notifications on your computer and phone.

6. Break down big tasks into manageable chunks

Don’t feel like you have time for deep work? Don’t have an hour (or even 30 minutes) to devote to it? Then use the Pomodoro technique. It provides constant reminders of focus time and breaks while encouraging you not to work in huge chunks.

Set your timer for 25 minutes and give yourself a 5-minute break after every 25 minutes (5 is used as a number because studies show it’s an optimal break time).

Of course, you can change intervals if it fits your lifestyle better. The main point is that during focus times, you should devote 100% of your energy to what needs doing at that moment.

If you’re struggling with procrastination and lack of focus, it may be that you set goals for yourself that are too big or vague. A good way to remedy that is breaking tasks down into small chunks;

Being able to look at what’s required for completion and mentally slotting them in one by one helps with clarity, focus, and keeping on track. It’s also a great way to avoid burnout.

A great way to get started is by breaking down large projects into manageable steps, which can be completed in twenty-minute chunks. At work or at home, it’s easy to procrastinate on larger tasks and goals.

By making excuses like I don’t have enough time. But studies show that even short breaks in concentration (think: social media) can negatively impact our performance.

7. Get enough sleep

Sleep deprivation is all too common and has dire consequences for your productivity. While it’s true that getting more sleep won’t automatically make you productive, being sufficiently rested will help your brain operate at optimal levels.

When you’re well-rested, you can plan better, react faster and produce better results. When you have time to concentrate on one thing without distraction or interruptions, deep work gets easier.

How much sleep should you get? The National Sleep Foundation recommends 7–9 hours per night for adults between 18 and 64 years old. Adequate sleep is critical to cultivating a deep work habit.

If you want your brain at its sharpest, you need at least seven hours of shut-eye each night. Plus, with sleep as your foundation, you can start building deeper work habits with exercise and meditation. We’ll get into both below.

We’ve all been told countless times that getting enough sleep is important for productivity, but exactly how much sleep do you need to be productive? For most people, 7–9 hours of sleep is ideal.

A study by NASA found that among their pilots and flight surgeons, those who slept less than 5 hours per night had significant increases in microsleep incidents — when they actually doze off while driving or operating machinery.