My one goal in everything that I do this year is going to be total immersion. Total immersion is the obvious-yet-overlooked key to success and extreme productivity in life. I got the idea from language learning. In the world of language learning there are those few people who learn languages in two to six months. And you know what they apply to their lives? Total immersion.
To make it clear, total immersion is not about a balanced life. It’s not about doing a little of everything every single day. And it’s not about giving equal time to everything. Total immersion is about focusing on only one thing for an insane amount of time. It’s about letting everything else wither away in the meantime. And it’s about leading an unbalanced, yet highly passionate, and driven life.
Total immersion requires that you lose any and all sense of balance you hold dear to you. Repeat, any and all sense of balance. It means watching your social life dwindle to nothing while you focus entirely on your career. And on the contrary, it means watching your career dwindle down to nothing while you focus on your social life (a social life is necessary but it shouldn’t be all consuming, all the time).
Way too many people live the “I multi-task” lifestyle. Which I think is stupid given that it’s proven that when we stop concentrating on something for 5-15 minutes, it’s going to take a full hour for us to go back to that level of concentration. Calculating that the regular person checks their e-mail, Twitter, and/or Facebook every 5 minutes, it’s amazing that people get anything done (if they do). But, this does explain the 10 hours of ‘real’ productivity in 40 hours of work that these people usually get.
The thing about total immersion is that it’s basically the ultimate cheat code to life. When you spend 8 full hours totally immersed in something, you would think you got 8 hours of productivity right? Wrong. You get around 24. Yup, three times more work done in the same amount of time. And the thing is the longer you’re immersed, the higher that productivity ratio goes up. In fact, if you find yourself totally immersed and concentrated for a full 24 hours, you can find yourself having completed 186 (24 x 7) hours of work. I wonder how much can get done if you’re totally immersed for one full year :).
So, how am I applying this to my own life? Well, for one thing, I’m cutting back my internet use (eMail, blog reading, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) to only 1.5 hours a day: 12:00 AM – 1:30 AM. And, if I’m too busy with life to meet the time, I don’t use the internet at all that day.
Now you ask, why at 12:00 AM though and not at a normal time like oh say, when people are actually awake? Well, 12:00 AM allows me to concentrate without distractions, especially on answering comments and fully interacting with you guys, the passionate few who read my blog. This is my #1 priority. Screw everyone else, I think that if you deemed me worthy enough of your time, then I at least gotta try to live up to it, right?
And, believe me when I say how hard this is for an internet junky like me (the withdrawal is going to be painful). I am going to send the occasional tweet here and there though, through SMS only, during dead period in my life (such as sitting in traffic or listening to a certain self-righteous person speak for an hour), but outside of that, nada. All, the others hours of my life will be spent with me being totally immersed somewhere else.
I’m batching my tasks into weekly talks so that every week I am totally immersed in one thing. For example, all my blog posts are written at the end of the previous month (without internet), giving me a full three weeks to never worry about providing new content for you guys. Which, if you think about it gives you better content (three weeks totally immersed in other things allows me to get more information about them, and a full week immersed in writing allows me to convey my knowledge about them better). The only thing I can’t apply this to are my monthly Dymaxion Polyphasic Sleep and Ubervegan posts (for good reasons) which are done every Sunday, the day before they’re posted.
But believe me when I say that total immersion can apply to anything and everything if one chooses. And, as I said [and guarantee] this is one of those obvious-yet-overlooked keys to success that few people do. I am going to be one of those few. And so should you.
photo credit: orcmid