Monk mode

What is monk mode?

It is a state of maximum concentration in which every second of time is taken advantage of. Similar to what monks do in monasteries: concentrated, flowing, without anyone or anything being able to get them out of there.

If you are in that state of maximum concentration it is because you have been able to eliminate everything that took you out of that state of flow. You have been able to erase any possible distraction from your mental map.

This state of maximum concentration is known as focus mode, deep work, deep work in English, or monk mode.

A distracted and entertained flock

The modern world is constantly checking your attention span.

We must protect our mind from this loss of attention.

When people live distracted, their entire being lives in distraction, and their life wanders in entertainment.

A better life is a virtuous life, and to achieve it we must cleanse our mind.

When our mind is healthy, we are able to acquire complex knowledge and, therefore, produce quality work quickly, which is why we will also be better professionals.

Results are the fruit of concentration, and achievements are the goal of discipline.

Lack of productivity: lack of effectiveness

To be truly productive we must disconnect from all digital communication tools, at least for several hours a day.

When we work in focus mode, or monk mode, it is when you are focused without distractions on a cognitively demanding task in the absence of context changes.

Context switching is when you shift the focus of your attention from one cognitive context to another.

Our goal should be to enhance that state of maximum concentration. Which is quite complicated in today’s society, since we are surrounded by constant notifications and warnings: the message from a family member or friend, checking the email compulsively, etc.

When you switch from one task to another because you have or accumulate many tasks, that is when you are not effective.

We don’t think clearly

When we do work, it is common for it to be “pseudo-deep” work. During the time this job lasts: every six or seven minutes you check your email inbox, also check your phone to see what is happening because of the fear of FOMO.

Our work will never be deep, as context changes are being made that significantly degrade effectiveness.

“Pseudo-deep” work is superficial work, it is work that is not cognitively demanding.

Superficial works can never produce clear thoughts.

«No matter how much skill and talent you have, if you don’t produce, you won’t prosper.» Cal Newport

Residual attention

Every time attention is diverted from one target to another and then back to the first, there is a loss, a cost. That transition creates an effect called «residual attention.»

Every time we constantly glance at devices or inboxes, we are maintaining a continuous state of that residual attention.

This implies that when we switch from one task to another, our mind remains hooked on the previous task for a while.

The fact that while we are doing something, our mind is still thinking about the previous task is what undermines the quality of the work at hand.

Only through deep concentration can we get the most out of our brain, which is why mentally demanding tasks require deep concentration to be performed effectively.

According to studies from Stanford University, the adaptation time it takes for the brain to move from one task to another makes us 40 to 50% less productive.

This lack of productivity is always accompanied by a personal and labor cost.

The 20 minute theory

According to William Clem, a professor of Neuroscience at the University of Texas, he defends the 20-minute theory.
It takes our brain 20 minutes to return to full focus of attention when it is interrupted.

Those 20 minutes in an eight-hour workday becomes two hours a day, and more than 23 days a year that we could use to dedicate to something more productive.

Adam Grant’s Great Productivity: Avoiding Residual Attention

Cal Newport, a big productive brain, is a Professor of Computer Science at Georgetown University. Newport interviewed Adam Grant for his book Deep Work: The Four Rules for Success in the Age of Distraction. I recommend your reading.

Adam Grant is a master of productivity. He is currently the youngest person appointed as a full professor (the highest category of professor in the United States) at Penn University.

The book Deep Work is based on the benefits that cultivating deep concentration brings to productivity. The monk mode is one of the secrets of the enormous production of the young Penn professor. Grant carves out his time in big chunks throughout the day and sometimes for months, working exclusively and uninterrupted on one thing.

For Grant, the explanation of his productivity is found in a mathematical formula:

High-quality work produced = time spent X intensity of concentration

The young professor’s method consists of separating 2 or 3 hours during the day, in which he completely isolates himself (no emails, no social networks, no calls) and dedicates himself exclusively to mentally demanding tasks.

A deconcentrated future

As time progresses we are losing our ability to concentrate. This is nothing new, the irrefutable fact that we are heading towards a world where everything, absolutely everything, threatens our attention span.

Likewise, currently, the vast majority of industrialized foods threaten our health.

Today there are service engineers, specialists in the user experience of applications. These engineers are specifically dedicated to determining how to make a social network more addictive so that it captures our attention.

On the other hand, as we use these types of products more, our attention span decreases.

Thus reaching a point where people cannot tolerate paying attention for 15 minutes straight to a topic of their own choosing.

Planning as a pillar of the monk mode

Planning makes life easier.

To work in monk mode the most important thing is to plan.

Reserve a certain time, it can be two or four hours.

The more hours in a row you can work, the more effective and focused the work will be.

It is actually almost unsustainable to dedicate more than four hours per day to deep work.

During that time, the ideal is to get rid of distractions. No cell phones, tablets, calls, or interruptions.

During that time, we will be alone with our task, her and us, nothing and no one else. It is a reunion in which there is no room for three, only us and our task.

Newport advises whenever one can: isolation. She recommends notifying those who live with us so that they collaborate and do not interrupt us. On the other hand, in a large office, full of people, it is more difficult. For this reason, good teleworkers are so productive and despair in an office full of noise and colleagues who do not know how to activate themselves in monk mode.

This is why in some environments it is practically impossible to achieve monk mode.

Internal alerts in monk mode

Not all alerts or interruptions come from outside. Interruptions can also come from within us.

I have to remember that when we are distracted by irrelevant things, our results will also be irrelevant.

Our involvement when we want to work in monk mode must be 100%. Our ideal should be to disappear from the world. We must turn our mind into a metaphorical cave.

The use of headphones that isolate us from acoustic signals is always very helpful, since we live in constant noise pollution.

To avoid our internal distractions as much as possible, I recommend using paper and pen. Write the ideas that may arise automatically, which may be ideas, projects, productive thoughts on said paper. What we are going to achieve in this way is that the brain does not enter into that adaptation process that takes away our most valuable resource, which is time.

According to a joint study by the universities of Chicago (USA) and Zhejiang (China), human beings continue to consider everything that is written down on paper more seriously, which leads us to make more virtuous decisions if we see them or commit to them. them on a sheet of paper. The authors of the study point out that manuscripts make our brains feel the decision as more real and, therefore, more representative of who we are, so we are more careful and tend to have more integrity with it.

How long can you stay in monk mode?

Many times it happens to us that in a class, in a meeting or studying something, we have realized that the last few minutes you have been lost in your thoughts and you have no idea what was being talked about. That is something unavoidable.

Monk mode is not about holding out as long as possible, but about understanding when the brain naturally wants to get distracted and go think about something else.

Cognitively out of shape

There are people who are unable to concentrate for 10 minutes straight on an important task, they are eager to abandon the task that that same person decided to start: these people are very out of shape at a cognitive level, very out of shape at the level of attention span.

I have to remember that we need to be in shape both physically and mentally.

Improving our ability to focus more intensely and for longer makes us more productive, allowing us, on the one hand, to improve results in our daily lives; Furthermore, on the other hand, it allows us to dedicate less time to tasks that we do not like.

However, being out of shape on a cognitive level can be worked on or trained.

Training at a cognitive level

Stop living on autopilot

We must turn off our autopilot. Choose something we like to focus on, eliminate distractions and check what concentration capacity we really have.

We must be fully aware of where we are starting from.

The first thing to do is take a watch to time yourself, or a mobile phone in airplane mode. We write down the time that we have been able to sustain attention on the activity we have chosen without being distracted.

The activity can be: reading, studying, listening to someone bored, whatever. It can even be done in class, at a conference or at the university.

Once you see that your mind wants to distract itself and think about something else, stop the stopwatch and write down the time.

Your goal is to train your attention span so that you can increase that time.

If the first time you measured the time in which you can stay focused, it was 5 minutes, what you are going to do to train your ability to focus is to practice these 5 minutes focusing 5 times a day.

You are going to try to do 5 sets, focusing for as many minutes as you can last without distraction.

And of course, remember to rest between each series.

All this in the same way that when you go to the gym, your muscles need to rest to recover. The same thing happens to your mind.

To improve your long-term attention span, it is important that you manage to focus on the parts of your work, on the parts of your study; yes, enjoying it, so that your brain looks for associations.

Finally, the rest becomes much easier due to brain association.

The difficulty of monk mode

This discipline that is needed for the monk mode is so necessary for work and for other things in life that it must be applied in a practically monastic way. Something similar to retiring to a refuge to meditate.

Working on one task, eliminating interruptions and finishing our task before moving on to another, is much more difficult than you may think.

But the good news is that this is a muscle.

It’s all about starting small, warming up and staying active in practice. And when you improve your attention management, the results are impressive.

The immediate benefit of monk mode: value

This is the type of monk-mode work that makes companies grow to another level, that changes things.

It is seen very clearly in knowledge and innovation companies.

No one will pay a company for how quickly they respond to emails, or for that Zoom meeting or PowerPoint presentations they can deliver at high speed.

When is that company going to win?

When you provide value, this value is almost always preceded by deep work.

An expert thought that is not easily replicable.

Social networks are junk food for our minds

Nowadays it is very difficult to refrain from using the Internet for enjoyment.

Social networks are tempting, being up to date is also very seductive. But we must resist, because in the long term it can harm us.

There is content that is entertaining, that is easy to watch, that is short and that is hyperstimulating. Such content damages your attention span in the long term.

This social media content – short and hyperstimulating – is the junk food of the cognitive world.

This content not only hurts your ability to focus, but also your motivation and ruins your dopamine levels because it leads to a level of satisfaction and newness that isn’t real.

Do not use social networks out of boredom

If you get bored, hold on, but don’t take out your mobile phone, because an idea may come from there.

By not using your mobile phone you are training your brain to take advantage of boring moments.

This way you concentrate, reason and reflect in a more productive way like when you go out for a run or to the gym and ideas come to you about how to solve the problems in your life.

Social networks are especially harmful when the work day is over and they take up practically all of our free time.

If we wait in line at the supermarket, at the doctor, etc., the mobile phone is taken out. If you go on the subway, you’re going to look at your mobile. If you become exhausted from work, you directly look at the networks on your mobile.

The mobile is our mental comforter.

Block planning

We have all seen it in offices, there are few who work full eight hours all the time.

In a day there are scheduled meetings, informal meetings. There are those who surf the internet aimlessly, there are those who are looking for a trip. If we condensed actual work hours, we would end up with a work week of four days or less.

I propose that we not have empty blocks left in the day, that is, I propose to plan every minute of the day. In such a way that we end up being more disciplined and thus we will make effective use of time.

You should always have objectives, identify what proportion of hours of deep work you should have per week.

It depends on your type of work, but if you work for someone else, you should know how much time you dedicate to deep and superficial work to give the best to that company.

Identify a goal and generate a time block plan for the week.

The art of monk mode

If you want to master the art of deep work, you’ll have to regain control of your time and attention.

The idea behind this is that if you want to successfully incorporate more deep work into your professional and personal life, you can’t wait until you have a lot of free time or are in a good mood to focus, you must actively strive to integrate it into your schedule.

You can master the monk mode at an expert level as the great Stoic philosophers did: Seneca, Epictetus or Musonius Rufus. Also Winston Churchill, Bill Gates, Neal Stephenson, or Tim Cook

I will explain all this… soon.

“With the force of thought the world can move. Thought has great power. It can be transmitted from one man to another.” Swami Sivananda

David EPC ©

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