My Deep Work Struggles
I got introduced to the concept of Deep Work back in 2019 by Cal Newport through this blog. At the same time, I also started following the practice of Bullet Journaling. I was on fire at that time. I combined the ideas of time blocking from Newport and the BuJo practice, this made it easy to track my time and get through tasks in a pre-planned manner. Since then, I tried so many different things, but one thing I noticed is that nothing has worked as well as the original BuJo practice. Since covid, my attention span seems to have taken a major hit. I lost interest in many of my hobbies and it was harder to push through my graduate research work. Work would only get done whenever deadlines are nearby or I am highly motivated on one random day. Since then, I have constantly been comparing my work discipline to the times when I was a rockstar with everything figured out and working through shit like there is no care in the world. It is getting harder and harder to do my deep work. My entire work and identity is now defined around me being able to do deep work. I am trying to make things happen. Somedays it is harder, but I try to sit through the discomfort and finish what I started. I don't want to be the person who waits for the deadline and then do something about it. I want to be proud of things I create and do. I realize that I am comparing myself to the version who was very effective, but I don't remember the bad days from that time. Its easy to blame myself thinking that I am not as productive as I used to be, but I forget how less experienced I was at the time. I need to cut myself some slack and stop comparing myself to a version from when the times and the knowledge work demands were different. I know I am trying, maybe not my best yet, but I am confident I will reinvent a new version of myself who is proud of how I manage my research and work on making progress towards my commitments without deadlines. There are a bunch of things that I am working on right now, and I think I will make them public in my now page soon.