The opposite of Deep Work? Confetti Time. Confetti Time is where you have entire days of on/off time blocks. You never have more than 20 or 30 minutes to yourself. Zoom meetings. Travel. Constant interruptions. Calls, texts, and random emails.
It never seems like things move forward. It’s frustrating. The opposite? Meaningful Momentum. The method? Deep Work.
There’s a big need for Deep Work in business development:
- Reviewing what’s working and what’s not
- Setting growth strategy through a system
- Writing compelling collateral and copy
- Automating processes
- Reengineering processes
- Refining your market positioning and value story
- Figuring out how you can better create curiosity
- Perfecting that amazing potential Give To Get you’ve been thinking about
- Creating templates of great questions, objection/resolution matrices, meeting agendas, standard responses
Big blocks of time. Big movements forward. So how do you get more Deep Work time?
Three ways.
- Daily.
Build in little blocks of uninterrupted time. This is generally best near the beginning of the day. Start with a small time block and make it bigger over time.
- Quarterly.
I try to build in a “just work on the big stuff, whatever it is” for a day a two near the end of each quarter. We have some seasonality in our business where it slows down twice a year, so I build in a little more time then. You can leverage your seasonality for Deep Work too.
- Episodically.
When I see a big project coming up, I try to block off a few days for it, sometimes longer. I have to schedule these sessions a couple of months in advance because my schedule books up to 6 months out. I have to look ahead on these, which isn’t my natural tendency. When I have the foresight to plan this out, it works great.
You can set these time blocks in your calendar right now. Pick your desired cadences with time blocks and schedule recurring meetings forever.
A few seconds now will get you started.
Here’s Pro-tip. You have to block off the time. Deep Work will never happen naturally. Plan it. Block it. Hold it. Deep Work only works if the time is uninterrupted. Scheduling is pretty easy. Holding the time is hard.
It’s really hard. But do it. Your future self’s success is depending on it.
Inspired by Mo Bunnell.
