How I Focus for Peak Productivity (My Deep Work System)

In this video, we're going to be talking about how I focus for peak productivity using my deep work system. We'll start off by discussing the philosophy of deep work, why it is particularly important, and how building your own deep work system can completely change your life. Then, I'll go over my personal, fairly simple four-step system that I've evolved over time on how to actually focus.

If you are new to the channel, hello! My name is Ali. I'm a doctor turned entrepreneur and the author of the New York Times bestseller "Feelgood Productivity," which is a book about how to do more of what matters to you in a way that actually feels good. Since 2017, on this channel, I've been documenting my journey from a broke medical student to working full-time as a doctor, and now being an entrepreneur and author. None of the success I've ever had would have been possible without having some sort of deep work system to actually focus on something for an extended period of time.

So, if you are in a stage of your life or career where you would benefit from having more time in the day to actually focus, then building some sort of deep work routine or system for yourself will absolutely move the needle. I hope you enjoy this video! Let's get to part one, where we start by zooming out a little bit.

All right, let's start by defining shallow work versus deep work. Cal Newport defines shallow work as non-cognitively demanding logistical-style tasks often performed while distracted. These efforts tend not to create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate. On the other hand, deep work is defined as professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.

There are a few key phrases here. For example, shallow work is often performed while distracted, and unfortunately, distraction is the state that most of us find ourselves in most of the time. Shallow work tends not to create much new value and tends to be fairly easy to replicate, whereas deep work is a state of distraction-free concentration—this is often what we call focus. Crucially, deep work pushes our cognitive capabilities to their limit; it is hard and effortful. Deep work does not feel easy, and it tends to create new value and be hard to replicate.

These definitions give us a hint as to why deep work is so important. If you are anything like most people in my audience, you are somewhere along the freedom path. What is the freedom path? Well, the freedom path is the journey from where you currently are to a place of freedom, often defined as financial freedom, time freedom, and location freedom—basically, where you have the freedom to do what you want, with whom you want, and have a good time while working on your own terms and from anywhere.

As it relates to work, there are actually three paths that can lead you to this kind of dream life. You've got path A, path B, and path C. Path number one, or stream number one, as I like to think of it, is the career stream. Stream number two is the side hustle stream, and stream number three is the entrepreneur stream.

What's interesting about this is that all three of these streams could take you to this version of freedom that you're aspiring to, where you have time freedom, financial freedom, location freedom, and flexibility to do what you want. However, each of these three streams has different characteristics. The career stream can get you there; Tim Cook, for example, the CEO of Apple, has never started his own business, but he's pretty rich. He got there by working his way up through the ranks at IBM and then getting hired into Apple as their operations guy, working his way up. You can achieve the freedom you want through being an employee and being part of a career. It tends to be slower and less risky, and there is nothing wrong with being in the career stream if that's what you want to do.

Some people go from the career stream into the side hustle stream, where you're trying to keep a career going while also building some sort of side hustle, hoping that it makes an extra $5K a month, $10K a month, or eventually enough money that you can go part-time in your career or maybe quit the career altogether. After a while in the side hustle stream, when you're making $5K to $10K a month, you could jump completely to the entrepreneur stream and try to build your own business, etc. That tends to be a faster path to the freedom you aspire to, but it is also a riskier path.

In this video, we're not going to go into the differences between these three streams; we'll do more videos on that later. The crucial thing to remember is that for all three of these streams, there is a key thing you have to do in order to get to the freedom you want, and that key thing is two words: create value.

Within the context of a career, if you are trying to achieve financial freedom, there is no way you will succeed unless you are creating value in some way for society, your employer, your boss, or your customers. When you start your own side hustle or become an entrepreneur, there is no way to make money unless you are creating value because the only way to make money is to create value and then find other people who are willing to pay you for that value.

Oh, by the way, if you are interested in sustainable routes to monetizing a side hustle, you might like to check out Circle, who are very kindly sponsoring this video. As a creator, one of the most common questions I get is how to earn a sustainable income online. Sure, there are plenty of ways to do this, like ad revenue, sponsorships, affiliates, and selling merch, but in my experience, one of the most fulfilling and sustainable ways is by building a community.

When you set up your own community, you create a dedicated space around whatever your passion is, where like-minded people can come together to learn, grow, and support each other. You can also make money doing this, which is where Circle comes in. I have found Circle to be the absolute best platform to create and manage your own online community. We've been using it since 2020 for our part-time YouTuber Academy, and we're also using it for our productivity lab. We've even migrated all of our online courses over to Circle.

Whether you're running courses, hosting live events, or offering premium memberships, everything is all in one place. They've now even introduced built-in email marketing, so you can grow your audience, nurture them over time, and invite them to join your paid offerings—all without juggling a bunch of different tools. The cool thing about building a community like this is that you can see connections forming among people online, and those connections often translate into real-life events. For example, for our YouTuber Academy and even for the productivity lab, we've hosted events, and our members have also hosted in-person events, all because everyone is together in these communities hosted on Circle.

If you're looking to build a community full of people who share your interests and want to invest in your content, then do give Circle a try. It is quick, easy, and affordable, and you can test it out completely free for 14 days using the link in the video description. If you like it, Circle might just be the next step in turning your passion into a thriving, supportive, and potentially even profitable community. So, thank you so much, Circle, for sponsoring this video, and let's get back to it.

Now, coming back to our definition of shallow work versus deep work, overlaying all of this, shallow work tends not to create much new value, whereas deep work tends to create new value. If we can create a system or routine for doing more deep work and creating more value, then whichever of these three streams we happen to find ourselves in, we are going to be working towards our goal of financial freedom, time freedom, and location freedom—the freedom to do whatever you want.

Now, I'm going to double-click on this "create value" concept because this is worth understanding. This is a video about a deep work system; you can skip to the deep work system in the timestamps if you really want to. However, my personal recommendation is that if you understand the "why" behind this, it makes the motivation to build and maintain your own deep work system much stronger.

To be honest, if you're watching this channel, you've probably seen some of my videos in the past. You've probably seen some self-help videos on YouTube and tried to solve the problem of focus and distraction before. But unless you've had a compelling reason to solve it—unless you understand the "why" behind why we are even bothering to do this—it's really hard to sit down and focus for an extended period of time without getting distracted by TikTok, Instagram, and all the other things you could be doing with your time.

So, that's why we are double-clicking into this stuff. Anyway, let's dive into the "create value" concept. What the hell is value? Well, there are various ways of thinking about this, but the way I think of it is that you take raw materials, which might be worth, I don't know, $1. You then do stuff to the raw materials, and it creates output that might be worth, I don't know, $2. In the process of doing the stuff, you have basically transmuted $1 worth of raw materials into $2 worth of output. Therefore, you have added $1 worth of value.

Crucially, this output is only worth $2 if someone else is willing to pay the $2 for it. This is not a subjective thing; it's not like, "Hey, I've created this piece of poetry, and it's super valuable." It's valuable in so far as people are willing to pay for it. This is not the only definition of value; there are all sorts of other definitions of value. But if you're trying to achieve financial freedom, then we have to be creating the sort of financial value that the market values in this capitalist world we live in.

Now, whatever your job is, you are probably not really converting actual raw materials into actual output. If you're a baker, for example, you are converting the raw materials of flour, sugar, milk, and water into bread, which you then sell at a bougie bakery for like $7 a pop. However, I suspect if you're watching this channel, you probably don't have a physical manufacturing-type job. Instead, you are likely doing some sort of knowledge work, where you probably don't have too many raw materials for the thing that you're doing. The key stuff you are doing is using your brain—this is why it's called knowledge work.

You're using your brain, skills, and knowledge to transmute probably pixels on a screen into more pixels on a screen, and then you're trying to sell those extra pixels for something. This is how management consultants make money; they transform a blank Keynote or PowerPoint slide, along with a bunch of research and knowledge work, into a PowerPoint presentation that they present to a client and charge a significant amount of money for it. But they have created value, at least in the eyes of the client.

Oh, by the way, quick thing: if you are watching this before the 4th of January 2025, you might like to check out the completely free two-day productivity workshop that I'm hosting on the 4th and 5th of January 2025. It is called "Productivity Spark," and it's essentially a two-day series of workshops hosted by me, my wife, and a couple of guests. The aim is to help you reflect on 2024, figure out where your work and life are heading, and set active goals and quarterly quests for 2025. It is completely free; you can check it out with a link down below, and I hope to see you there!

So, what does any of this have to do with deep work? Well, on this freedom path, in order to get to the freedom we desire, we need to create value. The way that we likely create value is by using our brains, and in order to use our brains effectively, we need the skill of deep work or focus. Essentially, we need to sit still for an extended period of time and do cognitively demanding things that use our brains to try and create new value in the world.

Crucially, this deep work and focus thing is sort of like a muscle in that it can be trained. You're doing it in a reflective way, where you can improve the strength of that muscle over time and improve the strength of that system over time. Fundamentally, what all of that contributes to is that you are able to create more value in less time. That is ultimately, in many ways, the definition of productivity: increased productivity is creating more value in less time.

Now, let's imagine two different people. One person is really good at doing deep work and focusing, while the other person is not very good at deep work and focus. Let's say both of these people have a day job, maybe they're working 9 to 5, and they both want to start some sort of side hustle that makes them an extra $5,000 a month or $10,000 a month so that they can achieve financial freedom, location freedom, time freedom—all of that sort of stuff. They're on the freedom path.

Both of these two people have a job, and therefore, let's say they only have five hours a week to devote to their side hustle. Which of these people do you think is going to be quicker at getting to their goal of making $10,000 a month with their side hustle? Obviously, it is going to be the person who is good at deep work, right? The person who struggles with deep work is going to get home, feel super demotivated, and sit down to figure out their business plan and strategy. They will try to do the cognitively demanding things that it takes to get a side hustle or business off the ground, but they will be all over the place, unable to focus. They might be getting distracted, have their phones on, and be browsing Instagram reels while trying to answer emails.

This person is still spending five hours a week on the side hustle, but the amount of value they are creating in that time is pretty low. In contrast, the other person spends the same five hours a week, not working any harder, but they are fully focused and less distracted during that time. They have discovered the power of a deep work routine, have it scheduled into their calendar, and have a system they are following. They block off distractions and do not allow social media or their phones to affect them while they are in that five hours of deep work.

This person might well be consuming TV or entertainment or reading books and having a life outside of that time, but they are just not doing that during their five hours a week. Even though money is not everything, it is a pretty important thing if you're trying to achieve financial freedom or even financial security. For some people, the goal of financial freedom is simply to be free from the stress of paying the mortgage. For others, it might be to live lavishly, like a "Dubai boy" with a yacht.

Regardless of the specifics, this person is creating way more value in those five hours than the person who struggles with deep work. So, coming back to our freedom path, figuring out some sort of deep work system—whether you use mine, someone else's, or figure out your own—is crucial. To be honest, I would recommend you figure out your own. The point of this video is to give you some ideas. When you establish a deep work system, you are creating value in less time, which means whether you're doing the career stream, the side hustle stream, or the entrepreneur stream, you're able to create the value that gets you to your goal of freedom a lot faster and more likely.

The final thing I will say on this front, which I think is also important, is that on the freedom path, freedom is the destination that many of us are aspiring to. However, there are two other things related to work that are more underrated: fun and fulfillment. Yes, everyone is striving for freedom, but generally, what you realize when you get to freedom—by the grace of God, in a position where I am financially free and don't need to work another day in my life if I don't want to—is that freedom is a currency, kind of like money. Freedom itself has no intrinsic value; it only has value when it is exchanged for other things.

For example, if you had 168 hours completely free, you would be depressed pretty quickly if you had nothing to do with that time. The point of freedom is to be able to cash it in for fun and fulfillment. The freedom to spend more time with your kids, for example, gives you fulfillment and fun. The freedom to read, play video games, go for a walk in the middle of the day, or play squash in the evenings provides fun and fulfillment. It's not really about the freedom itself; it's about what the freedom can get you, which is ultimately fun and fulfillment.

Interestingly, on the freedom path, you can—and I would recommend you should—find a way to experience fun and fulfillment. Because whether or not you reach the destination, you will realize that the journey was what always mattered in the first place. Even when you do get to the destination, you realize that the destination is worthless on its own; it is only worthwhile in that it gives you fun and fulfillment.

What does any of this have to do with deep work? Well, when you speak to people who have achieved time freedom, location freedom, and financial freedom, you tend to find something fairly common: firstly, these people still want to work—work as in doing something that uses their skills and feels like it is providing a meaningful contribution to someone or to society. I would argue that this is the definition of work. They still want to be useful in some way, but if you ask these people what sort of work they would want to do, they never say shallow work; they only ever say deep work.

In your case, for example, let's say you had all the money in the bank and all the time in the world, and you could do whatever you wanted. You might sit poolside on the beach in Thailand for about two weeks before realizing that it makes you miserable and depressed, and you will want to find some sort of work to do. What sort of work would you like to be doing? You probably wouldn't answer, "I'd like to answer emails while getting distracted on TikTok." Your answer is probably related to deep work to some degree. You might say, "I'd love to have four hours free every single morning to just focus on writing," or "I'd love to have hours each day where I can just focus on expanding my creative pursuits, my art, my music, or whatever."

The reason I'm saying all this is that deep work is not just the means to an end; it is not just the way to create value, monetize that value, and then achieve financial freedom. That's not the only thing that deep work is good for. Deep work is also the way you get fun and fulfillment from your work. Again, this is something that I don't think enough people talk about. The skill of focusing—the skill of being able to sit down and just work on something for an extended period of time—buys you financial freedom, but it also gives you fun and fulfillment.

You feel way more fulfilled when you're in the flow state, working on something that's hard but within your limits, maybe at the edge of your limits. You feel like you're growing, and time is absolutely flying. You get to the end of that session, having done deep work and been in the flow state, and you experience that glow of fulfillment. You probably do not get that glow of fulfillment while you're distracted, watching Instagram reels, answering emails, and trying to do a zillion things at once.

That is why deep work is important. I hope that if you're at this point in the video, you agree with me that deep work is really important. Cultivating the skill of focus and being able to engage in deep work is vitally useful for fun, fulfillment, and financial freedom.

Let's now move on to part two, where I talk about my personal deep work routine, which I've built over the last several years of trying to get really good at this.

Okay, so there are four steps to the deep work system. What I would recommend you do, which is a philosophy I talk a lot about in my book "Feelgood Productivity," is that building your own productivity system is a very personal thing. Yes, you can copy and paste my system or someone else's templates, but really, by experimenting with what works for you, seeing what happens, and tweaking your own system, that is what will ultimately get you to the result you want.

In this video, I want to tell you what the four steps of my own personal deep work system are so that hopefully you can get some ideas for how to apply them to yours.

All right, so step number one is to actually schedule the deep work into the calendar. I have two methods of doing this. The first one is that I have an ideal week calendar. More details on that in the video up there about the Trident system of managing your time. Basically, I've got a separate Google Calendar for my ideal week, where I block out what my ideal ordinary week looks like in a dream world.

Now, I want to talk about four different types of deep work. This is from Cal Newport's book "Deep Work," where he defines four different ways of scheduling deep work into your calendar.

Deep work method number one is monastic. This is monk mode before it was called monk mode. Method two is bimodal. Method three is rhythmic, and method four is journalistic. The stuff around this is very interesting. If you haven't yet read "Deep Work" by Cal Newport, I would recommend reading it. You could also get yourself the summary of the book on Shortform; there is an affiliate link down below if you want to sign up for Shortform. It's the world's best service for reading summaries of books. They even have a summary of my book, and I read the summary of my own book and thought, "Damn, this is an annoyingly good summary of my own book."

So, let's talk about these four different ways of scheduling deep work into your calendar. Monastic is the monk mode thing, where you carve out an extended period of time to just do deep work. This is like going on a writing retreat for a whole week. This is probably not suitable for most people because most of us can't take a whole week off to just do deep work in a focused fashion. We can maybe do it some of the time. I occasionally do the monastic thing; for example, when I was on deadline for my book, I went to Bali to give a talk and stayed there for an extra week just focusing on the book. However, that's just not feasible for most people in most parts of life, so I generally ignore the monastic approach.

Then you have the bimodal approach, which works for some people. This is where you have some days that are entirely deep work days and some days that are entirely shallow work days. Then you have the rhythmic approach, which is trying to build a daily rhythm for yourself as it relates to deep work. This is what I do. I focus on the first four hours of every day being dedicated to deep work, usually making videos, working on one of my courses, or working on one of my books because that is the key way in which I add value.

Finally, you have the journalistic approach, which is kind of named after journalists who are just trying to squeeze in random small amounts of deep work here and there because they literally don't have any other choice. Back when I had a real job working as a doctor, I was really unable to do a lot of these things because I had an unpredictable schedule based on on-call rotas and work. While I was at work, I had a sort of journalistic approach to deep work, where I would squeeze in time in the middle of the day or an extra 20 minutes on my lunch break to work on videos. For example, if I happened to be on night shifts for a week and then had three days off, I would say, "All right, in those three days, I'm going to be absolutely laser-focused on deep work in the monastic sort of camp." In those three days, I could bang out so much stuff for my videos or for my course or whatever side hustle I was working on.

When my side hustle of this YouTube channel and the business around it was enough for me to quit my day job as a doctor, I suddenly had free time to do whatever I wanted. I experimented with all the different types of deep work and landed on the rhythmic approach. So, the first four hours of every day are focused on deep work, from 9:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. Then from 1:00 to 2:00, I have lunch, and from 2:00 to 3:00, I attempt to go to the gym. From 3:00 to 6:00, I do shallow work, meetings, and all that sort of stuff. This basically guarantees that roughly the first four hours of the day are focused on deep work.

So, that is step one of the whole thing: figure out what sort of schedule you would like to use for your deep work. Generally, when I coach people on this—because people come up to me on the streets and want to do talks and stuff sometimes, and ask, "I'm really struggling to focus," or students in my YouTuber Academy or productivity lab who struggle to focus—usually, they haven't done step one, which is to actually schedule the deep work into the calendar. It must be scheduled into the calendar; otherwise, it's not going to happen.

Let's say you have scheduled the deep work into your calendar. What do you do when you get to that slot? At this point, we have points two, three, and four. The first part of my deep work system is that I take five minutes to align and organize. This is part of my life productivity system, which I'm releasing as a course at some point soon. If you want to sign up for my newsletter, you'll hear more about it if you want.

Anyway, five minutes to align and organize basically means I spend five minutes at the start of every deep work session figuring out what I actually want to accomplish in that session. It's very useful to have a goal. Research around flow state and all this sort of stuff says that it's very difficult to achieve flow when you don't have a clear goal that you're working towards. So, that is the point of aligning. Secondly, I organize, which means I make sure I have a cup of water or a cup of coffee if it's sufficiently early in the day, which it often is because it's in the first four hours. I make sure I have all the materials I need to actually do the work because something that will distract me from deep work is having to get up from my desk or coffee shop and go do something.

I also make sure I've done a wee so that I don't need to go to the bathroom in the middle of my deep work session. In those five minutes, I do a little startup routine. For example, I have nice blue headphones, or I just put in my AirPods. If I'm at my actual desk and there's no one else in the room, I'll play some music. I'll put on my "Study With Me" playlist on Spotify because I know that always gets me into the focus zone. I think this startup routine is really helpful because it eases you into the focus.

For a lot of people, even if you have scheduled in the deep work, when it comes time to sit down and do it, there is this enormous activation energy barrier of, "Oh, I don't want to sit down and do the hard thing." I used to have that a lot, and I still do to this day. But what I can do is set a goal because it's easy enough to do that; it doesn't take much cognitive effort. I can also put on my headphones, get my coffee, and organize my desk nicely. All these tiny little things help me ramp up towards the actual focus block.

Then, step three is focus, which I often do for about 50 minutes. To be honest, the focus time varies. I'm not wedded to doing it for 50 minutes; I tend to just do it for however long it takes me to start to lose focus. Sometimes it's 50 minutes, sometimes it's 45, and sometimes, if I'm really tired or have a lot going on in my brain, it's only 15 minutes. In that case, I'm focusing for 15 minutes, and then I start to feel like I'm itching to get distracted and do something else.

If you want more details on exactly how to stay focused, I've got a whole evidence-based guide up there somewhere. There's a three-part playlist on how to actually focus, which is about maximizing the use of this time here. Finally, I spend the last five minutes of the session reflecting and recharging.

Crucially, one thing I do in this section, if I'm in a stage of life where I'm struggling to focus, is something I've talked about in videos a lot: the focus log. What is the focus log? The focus log is where you log the amount of time you spent actually focused on deep work. This is something Cal Newport absolutely swears by in his book "Deep Work." If there is just one thing you do that will radically change your relationship with deep work and focus, it's actually keeping track of how many minutes or hours each day you spend focusing.

This is something I was really bullish on when I first taught my life productivity system course to students in the productivity lab about nine months ago. We built templates and systems into our course and community that helped people do their focus log, and we had so many testimonials from students who took that course. They said that tracking the number of minutes they spent each day focusing made them realize how little time they actually spent focusing on deep work and gave them awareness of that problem so they could increase that time.

There are all sorts of studies in the world of business; Alex Hormozi talks about this a lot around measurement as intervention. There are studies showing that people who want to lose weight will lose weight if they just weigh themselves every day because they become aware of that number. Most of us who struggle with focus probably have no idea how many minutes each day we actually spend focusing on deep work. If there is just one thing you were to apply from this entire video, it would be to start tracking how many hours you spend focusing each day.

You could do it on a post-it note, in a notebook, or on an app. You don't need a fancy tool for this; you can just do it on a Google Sheet. I do it on a Google Sheet these days because I can't be bothered to deal with apps. If you just track the number of minutes or hours you spend each day focusing, the goal is four hours—or rather, that's the upper limit.

There's a great book called "Rest" by Alex Pang, which cites a lot of evidence and anecdotes from people throughout time that say about four hours a day is the upper limit of how long humans can focus. The goal is to track your focus hours through your focus log and get that number to about four hours a day. If you could do four hours a day, you would be off to the races!

I don't even do four hours a day, and I have full control over my time. I can do whatever I want. I might sometimes manage to do two and a bit or three and a bit. Back when I was working on my book, I would get up to four, and then the whole day would be gone because getting in four hours of focus is really hard. It obviously doesn't happen all in one go; it happens in strips and bits and drabs. But the goal is four hours.

If you just do that one thing—track how many hours you are spending focusing each day and then try to get that number up to four hours—you will be completely transformed, and your life will never be the same again. Now you have figured out some sort of deep work system. But unless you know what that number is, unless you are tracking how many minutes each day you are actually focusing, it's very difficult to improve on the thing.

As Peter Drucker famously said, "What gets measured gets managed," and "What gets measured gets improved." So, that is the system that I personally use pretty much every day to focus for peak productivity. It's a system that I've built over the years of being obsessed with productivity to the point where I realized that this focus and deep work stuff is super important. Without having some sort of deep work system, I would not be anywhere near the level of financial freedom I currently enjoy.

My sincere hope for you is that the takeaway from this video is that A) it's worth building your own deep work system, and B) it's worth tracking the numbers so that you can actually improve your deep work system. I would love to get an email from you a few weeks, months, or years from now saying, "Wow, I've been tracking my focus minutes for the last X number of time, and it's completely changed my life." Because I know that doing that did it for me, and I hope it will do it for you as well.

If you are interested in more details on how to focus, I've got my three-part playlist on how to focus over there somewhere. Thank you so much for watching, and I'll see you hopefully in the next video. Bye-bye!