Deep work requires protected time, not stolen moments

Alpha refers to a relaxed, daydreaming brain state, while gamma refers to intense, deep-focus thinking mode, as opposed to beta which is regular productivity work.

As a rule of thumb, if 25% of your year is spent in gamma and alpha, you're probably a lot better off than the teams who spend less than 25% of their year thinking deep, and being in this more daydreaming mode.

Forest time is the idea that you make time within your week, within your month to see the forest for the trees. Most of the time when you're operating, you're seeing the tree, which is the problem in front of you.

Take three hours during a workday. Has to be during a workday. Block off your schedule, sneak out. Go for a walk without a destination or do something from your childhood that you used to do all the time.

Go slow to go fast. Sometimes people have a tendency to rushing into things and especially, I think, in startups, but other places too, you have this like... I think urgency is important, but then sometimes you have too much urgency and you are rushing things, and what happens is that you rushed it and now you need to come back to fix it.

The "switch lock" is Vohra's technique for tracking actual work by messaging his executive assistant with "TS:" (task switch) notifications whenever he changes tasks.

This is a technique that I call the switch lock. What if I just did whatever the heck I wanted? What if every single time I change task I just Slack DM'd my EA and I said, 'TS:,' and then a few words for the task I was doing.

What are you focused on this week? And then reflecting on, did you get done the things you were focused on last week? Seems super simple, but just the exercise of thinking about what matters, writing it down, and having a little bit of social proof or articulating it out to others creates some degree of accountability.

Now, we can also make a 45-minute work block useful because getting into the flow is actually kind of handed off, at least, in part to the machine or the machine can help us get back into the flow by reminding us of context and generating diagrams of the system.