Tim Ferriss and Cal Newport should have babies.
If you're reading this, it means you have an internet connection, which means you already know who Tim Ferriss is. The author of the best-seller The Four Hour Work Week, he's famously keen on productivity, eliminating useless activities, and generally accomplishing more while doing less.
Cal Newport is a Georgetown Computer Science professor and the author of several books, including one of my favourites, So Good They Can't Ignore You, and his latest book Deep Work.
It's in Deep Work that Cal reveals his formula for success -- and it's the same formula that Tim Ferriss arrived at, independently:
High-Quality Work Produced = (Time Spent) x (Intensity of Focus)
Let that sink in for a moment.
Even if you don't have a maths background, you'll probably notice that the right-hand side of this equation has two variables: (Time Spent) and (Intensity of Focus).
Producing high-quality work will bring you professional success -- whether that means more sales, a promotion, winning awards. So by altering either the amount of time you spend or your intensity of focus, you can alter the amount of high-quality work you produce.
With me so far? Good.
In Deep Work, Newport argues that you should aim to eliminate distractions and therefore increase your intensity of focus, meaning that with the same amount of time, you can produce a higher level of output.
In The Four Hour Work Week, Ferriss argues that you should aim to eliminate distractions and therefore increase the intensity of your focus, meaning that in less time, you can still produce the same level of output.
Those are two different goals. Newport is concerned with achieving great career success. Ferriss is concerned (at least in The Four Hour Work Week) with maintaining your lifestyle but creating more free time.
But they've both hit upon the same formula, and realised that the key lies in increasing the intensity of focus.
Let's admit it -- it's easy, even satisfying, to work long hours at a low level of intensity. You never quite challenge yourself, but you can still tell yourself the story that you're "working so hard at the moment", even if that means slowly reading and answering emails for 12 hours a day.
Working at peak intensity: that's hard. It requires focus. Planning. Turning off your phone and locking yourself in a quiet room. And it's tiring. Which is 95% of people don't do it. Which is why there are such outsized rewards to be had if you can be in the 5% that do.
So now that you have this mental model to refer to, you can start to ask the right questions, and think about exactly what you should be doing.
Once you start to answer all of those questions, you start to see how exactly you should be spending your time in order to have the greatest impact.