I finished Deep Work, a very good book with a focus on doing essential work, written by Cal Newport. In this modern society overloaded with information, we are constantly pulled into different channels and media to deal with alerts, notifications, messages, emails and many others. Our attention spans are becoming shorter.

However, for those subjects that are truly important to our lives and careers, that require a deep focus and hard work to make great progress, we need to be able to drill down into the subjects, and really work our way up. This, of course, requires great disciplines.

One of the important disciplines is to overcome the desire to check social media, which compete for lots of attention these days. Someone liked your tweet? A friend commented on your post? Another email reached the inbox? Think about whether dealing with them is truly what’s important and absolutely what you need to do at the moment. If not, assign a dedicated time block to work on them all at once, and put your time into the things that are essential to your life.