16 Radical and Unusual Tools To Help You Reach Deep Work
High concentration starts with zen-inspired design
Have you ever dreamed of working on a project vital to you but never had the time?
Now it’s time to get started, but not just in any way.
Your work habits are usually undermined by distractions and interruptions that prevent you from focusing deeply on an object. So to really get the most out of your skills.
According to Cal Newport in Deep Work, if you seek to create a differentiating skill, you need to boost your ability to get into intense concentration.
Unfortunately, the motivation to work intensely is limited and unnatural. It depends on specific working conditions, only accessible to those who possess the right tools.
Only applications that rid you of distractions, increase your ambient awareness, create highly focused work environments, and trigger your deepest motivation, can lead you there.
Here is a list of the most remarkable of them. Tap into their explosive potential!
Getting Rid of Distraction
You may have all experienced those moments when distractions took you away from your focus. No matter how hard you try to concentrate, new objects achieve to get your attention.
Well, these applications will help you recover the strength to deepen your work on your projects:
Freedom is a tool that helps you regain focus on your web research and navigation. It blocks and filters ahead of time the content you will have access to. By preventing distracting sources such as social media and blogs, it forces you to make real progress in your work.
Sanebox cleans up your email inbox and gives you control over the time of your communications. The integrated IA filters and lists messages according to whether they are really useful for you. The priority ones will land directly on your main list, while you can enjoy the others later when you really have the time. You won’t even need to sort them or make an effort because you will train the technology to do it for you.
Twist makes you regain time for deep tasks enabling asynchronous team communication asynchronous. Without disturbing notifications, you can work at your own pace without fear of being interrupted or missing a conversation. Since essential information is grouped and exchanges structured according to the subject, you’ll find them when you need them.
If you want the same app for personal scheduling, take a look at Todoist from the same company. This kind of to-do list will help you find a new work-life balance.
Use these tools to recover the energy you lose every day in multitasking!
Boosting Ambient Awareness
On another level, some apps seek to deepen your environmental awareness. They try to harmonize the perception of each of your senses (haptic or sensory) with the focus on your work.
I will talk here mainly about audio tools that combine sound ambiances with the psychological concentration on your project.
Ambient mixer music provides calm and authentic sensory atmospheres, similar to natural settings. Its sounds transport you into the landscape of your deepest dreams. They reduce stress and increase your imagination in your work.
Noisly is a solution that helps you create your own background music. By using natural sounds such as the sound of rain, thunderstorms, or the rustling of leaves, he calls for a deep and joyful concentration within you.
Brain.fm generates music that stimulates specific mental states. Using technologies supported by neuroscience, they activate brain waves that boost your productivity and keep you focused on your projects.
To color and enlighten your workplace atmosphere, F.lux adapts the screen brightness according to the moment of the day. As the day begins, the application creates sunlight, while at night it takes on warmer, softer hues to allow the eye to gently fall asleep.
By using these tools, you will find your attention more in touch with your work environment, and thus mobilizing all the energy on your work perception.
Creating a Deeply Focusing Environment
The secret to high productivity lies in the details. Especially details related to the environment and the timeframe of your work.
Depending on whether your work environment inspires you, you can tap more or less into your concentration energy. But also, depending on the structure of our schedule, it is more or less easy to enter deep work. There are some remarkable apps to set the mood for you :
Rescue Time is the ultimate productivity tool for managing your time. It helps you understand how you meticulously use your time.
With it, you can finally realize the waste of time in tasks that don’t really matter to you. You will also be able to know which hours are the most suitable for tasks that require a high level of concentration.
Haze Over saves you from multitasking with a very simple trick: by coloring only the window you are using and darkening the others. So that you can finally focus on your current project and you don’t have to worry about all your open windows anymore. Besides that, Haze Over got also other features to prevent you from multitasking and boosting your eye comfort.
Aimed at writers, the Mac Focused App helps you start on your work by preventing the blank page syndrome. Its text editor offers a “zen mode” workspace where no distractions are possible. It provides both a clean and inspiring Html interface and typography, with no other superfluous tools. Its zen mode gives a visual and auditory experience that puts you in the game.
When it comes to the work environment, Breather has a decisive solution. With its flexibly rentable and isolated workspaces, you can easily book an intense afternoon of work in a setting without distractions. The change of environment will push you to surpass yourself and reach your true potential.
All these solutions will help you find a new and more controlled concentration in your work habits.
Driving an Intense Motivation to Deep Work
Ultimately, your ability to enter and remain in flow is not unlimited but requires deep psychological resources.
These last tools, the most powerful, will make you regain an inexhaustible potential of concentration :
Making a bold claim, Flow State Apple store app forces you to persist in your writing sessions by a radical trick: if you don’t type anything in the next 5 seconds it erases all your text.
Combined with a simple and intense black interface, its UX triggers surprising inspirations. Use it when you really want to move forward in your work!
One big thing app has a simple principle: every day it makes you decide on the highest priority of your working day. By that, it makes you think about the meaning and daily goals by focusing on your major successes. Its essentialist philosophy will make you consider the true sources of your motivation and how to stick to them.
Forest app uses gamification to keep you focused on your goals. Similar to a meditation application, it gets you out of the habit of checking your phone. If you manage for at least 25 minutes not to look at your phone, the app promises to grow a tree in reality. You may awaken your hidden fertility by regaining a taste for presence and concentration from that.
Another meditation app, Headspace is one of the best when it comes to boosting concentration. With its many exercises carefully designed to make you aware of the use of your attention, you learn to choose what you want to focus on. By practicing the tool over the long term, you will be able to trigger intense concentration whenever you want.
Now it’s your turn to use these tools to go deeper into your work!
