I know the feeling. For years.
I'm Robert Müller, a self-employed entrepreneur from Leipzig, Germany, and the author of “Deep Work Block”.
I didn't write this book because concentration comes easily to me. I wrote it because for years it didn't.
Busy for eight hours. Nothing done.
No boss giving me structure. No team carrying me along. If I don't work with focus, no project gets finished and I don't earn money.
Still, every morning I sat at my computer and couldn't get going. Checking email, reading the news, “just quickly” researching something. Often it was noon before I'd started the actual work.
I put off my bookkeeping for weeks. In the evening I was tired and dissatisfied. And work kept running in my head.
The absurd part: I knew what to do. I could do it, too. Between knowing and doing there was a gap I couldn't close.
I tried everything.
I read the books: on focus, concentration, deep work. They explain why focus matters. None of them showed me how to sit down and work with focus for 45 minutes.
Pomodoro helped sometimes. But I still needed willpower to start, and that's exactly what I lacked. My GTD task lists kept growing and mostly scared me off.
Meditation and short workouts lifted my mood. That still wasn't a system.
I started too big.
At some point it hit me: all these approaches start with your whole life, your whole day, your whole task list. I had to start with the smallest unit.
One single block of focused work. What happens before, during, after?
I took that block apart. Tested every step, discarded, refined. Over years, not out of academic interest, but out of necessity.
Small things. Big effect.
I react strongly to caffeine. A coffee feels like motivation, but it makes me jittery. When I want to focus, I skip it.
A phone on the desk, even in airplane mode, pulls my attention away. Today it sits switched off in a drawer in the hallway.
Only when I started writing down distracting thoughts did I notice how loud it is in my head. A sheet of paper, a keyword, and my mind settles.
Every one of these steps is in the book. With the why, the how, and what worked for me and what didn't.
Four to six blocks a day.
I've worked this way every day for more than ten years. On good days that's five to six hours of highly focused work. On weak days, three. That's fine.
170 emails in my inbox are two blocks. Bookkeeping and taxes, which I used to put off for weeks, take 45 minutes a week. I wrote this book in three days.
And in the evening I'm off. With a clear conscience, because I know what I got done.
No guru. A practitioner.
I haven't run a study and I don't hold a professorship. I had a problem and solved it, for myself, in the everyday life of a one-person business.
Bad days still happen. After a bad night, even the best process doesn't work perfectly. But those days have become rare.
If you recognize yourself in my story: you don't lack discipline. You lack a process.
The process is in the book.
Read in 30 minutes. Then put it next to you and do your first block.