Speaking of Deep work, setting aside time to work on your business is important for your career but if you aren’t sure what to do with this time, you may not reap the rewards. Time set aside to work on your business (versus in your business) prioritizes dreaming, brainstorming, ideating, developing, continuing your education, reading, and creating.
It does not include billing, record keeping, reaching out to clients, or other action items directly related to servicing clients. It doesn’t even involve servicing your clients (i.e., conducting a session or a class). Working on your business covers all activities that can build, scale or otherwise enhance your business, taking it to a whole new level.
Deep work
Let’s take a closer look at the activities that are sure to be a table-turner for you. Collectively, this type of work is referred to as deep work, a term popularized by Cal Newport, author of Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World.
Deep work is often overlooked, deprioritized, and trivialized for various reasons, the least of which is the importance of the work. The type of work considered “deep” is not easy to place or cross off a list, making it hard to work into your daily list.
It requires focus, concentration, and uninterrupted chunks of time. The time you spend doing deep work puts the projects, action items, and outreach on your list.
Deep work Categories
Deep work is subdivided into three broad categories:
Vision
Work here may include brainstorming, dreaming, researching, or otherwise anticipating innovation and growth needs. You might be considering, for example, what moves are needed for your business growth, an area of your business that requires attention, or a project you have in mind within your business. It could be creative, operational, or somewhere in between. Vision work is always the first, in fact, it comes before and leads to strategic work.
Strategy
Strategy work involves painting your vision work into reality. This can also be seen as planning work. Often, we don’t set aside time to figure out all of the steps, resources, or knowledge you might need to make something happen, whether for a big project, writing a blog, or getting a newsletter out. When you give yourself time to concentrate on a project from all angles and scope it out thoroughly, completing the job becomes much more manageable and easier.
Creative
Creative work is the time you spend building everything on your road map, using the planning you did during strategy sessions to make your vision a reality. Creative work can be expressed in a variety of forms which includes,
- Writing
- Crafting a presentation
- Designing marketing assets
- Filming a webinar
- Building a new spreadsheet to track a process
Usually, results come after a sufficient input of effort and the least amount of time input. The important factors here are focus and consistency, coupled with the steps given above, your business is set to move to the next level. Further research can be done on Google.
