How deep work transformed my life

Spreading my wings

For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to be an entrepreneur. Working in various (well-paid but ultimately unfulfilling) product management jobs throughout my 20s, I’d constantly be dreaming up business ideas.

I gave a few of those ideas a shot. I failed a lot, but I always went back to the drawing board, tried to learn the skills I needed to not fail next time, and give it another shot. Eventually, that strategy worked. I founded a startup called Skimlinks, an unsexy but very useful product a lot of blogs and websites used to make money from writing about products.

Over my 11 years as CEO, I grew Skimlinks to 80 people, expanded from London to San Francisco and New York, and served high-profile clients all over the world. I gave TV interviews and spoke at conferences. I won all sorts of awards for entrepreneurship.

We generated millions in revenues. On the outside, I looked wildly successful… but the reality – as with anyone chasing a big dream – was more complex.

I struggled with my workload: I was frequently overwhelmed, and prioritising big and proactive tasks was difficult when so many shallow and reactive tasks were clamouring for my attention. I’d often finish each day feeling that I’d accomplished very little, and that wore me down.

Also, the truth is, I’d always been an ideas person. But as you get more successful with an idea, your job stops being about idea generation, and becomes about execution. It becomes about profit maximisation and managing investors, rather than about building products and talking to customers.

I knew I could be this type of late-stage startup CEO. But I also knew I was never going to be the best in the world at this job, at this stage of the company’s growth. I yearned to return to the early stages of building a company, where I could exercise my creative powers, and really connect with the people whose problems I was trying to solve.

So I made the difficult and humbling decision to step down from my own company.

I told my Board, and I hired in another CEO. After 11 years of soul-wrenching hard work, I was no longer involved in the day-to-day of my business. It was crazy, as much of my identity came from leading this company. I had to start again, and to do so, I took a two year sabbatical to work things out.

As luck would have it, my company was acquired during that sabbatical, so I had the time and space to really work out what I wanted to do next.

Learning to fly

For many founders (me included), leaving or selling a business can feel like a career destination in itself. Maybe a lot of professions have that illusory target. You think: “When I get there, I’ll have made it.” But once the post-sale euphoria wore off, I realised I was actually at another beginning.

What to do next?

I still wanted to create – and to create something worthwhile, that I could put my whole heart into. But I was also afraid of jumping back into the startup driving seat. How would I avoid getting burnt out again?

Over the next year or so, I experimented: I took a ton of courses, tried different industries, and played around with various startup concepts. All while attacking my travel bucket list with gusto (I’d spent a long time working 14-hour days). I even tried writing a book.

The first thing I noticed, was that it was hard to find the space to do the type of creative deep thinking I wanted to do. Everywhere was full of distractions. Online notifications kept pulling me out of my flow state. The offline world was noisy and full of interruptions too.

And I started to notice something else.

When I did manage to get away from online and offline distractions, when I immersed myself in nature, or when I did something novel and exploratory, something weird and wonderful would happen. I would get particularly inspired, creative and focused on the intention I’d set myself. 

These moments of experiencing awe – of getting outside my busy mind – would help me join dots and discover insights that deliberate thinking would never have achieved.

It was a revelation. I told whoever would listen. And one of them (the guy who invented Amazon’s Alexa, so a bit of a revelations expert), said: “I know a book you should read.”

I'm always up for a book recommendation. The book was Cal Newport’s Deep Work, and I’m not exaggerating when I say it changed my life.

The first thing I noticed, was that it was hard to find the space to do the type of creative deep thinking I wanted to do. Everywhere was full of distractions. Online notifications kept pulling me out of my flow state. The offline world was noisy and full of interruptions too.

And I started to notice something else.

Newport described Deep Work as what we do in a state of focused concentration – flow – where we do our most valuable work, learn new skills, and achieve pride and contentment. Multitasking and distraction are the enemies of deep work, keeping us busy and overwhelmed without achieving anything meaningful.

The clincher for me was Newport’s idea that deep work isn’t just about work. To do our best work with focus and creativity, we need to weave in time spent exploring, playing, and being immersed in nature. We need rituals of accountability. We need to be exposed to diverse people and ideas.

And it wasn’t just me whose best work was inspired by beauty and achieved in flow: for centuries, writers, philosophers, scientists and entrepreneurs had used this approach to help them achieve their best. And now there was actual science to back it up.

Here was a set of mental and physical ingredients that could optimise our ability to be focused, prolific, creative, and – most excitingly – happy.

Now I knew what I needed to do next. I wanted to help humanity flourish by providing the optimal conditions for deep work and flow states, every day.

What can I say, I like to aim high.

I came to believe that deep work and flow states can help address many of society’s challenges and opportunities, and help each of us to achieve our best. But I also believed that flow is something that should be accessible to everyone. 

Not just to rich folk who can travel to beautiful places and find novelty regularly, but to all of us who think and work for a living.

And that’s how FLOWN was born.

Starting to soar

I wanted to build a platform that delivered the ingredients we need to achieve and entwine deep work and flow states into the way we worked, every day.

A platform that helped people realise that sometimes extraordinary insights come from non-cerebral spaces; that sometimes not doing results in more progress than doing; that sometimes waiting to receive can be more bountiful than aggressively seeking.

I realised after my time at Skimlinks, and all my other startup experiences, that the best way to survive the ups and down that come with chasing a dream is to see it as a game.

You want to win games you play, obviously, but as long as you enjoy the game, it doesn’t matter so much if you win or lose. How do you reframe work so you see it as a game, one that you can get better at playing, even as you play?

So I developed FLOWN to be not just about focus and productivity (there are plenty of self-help books for that), but about creating the wider set of conditions that enable great work to happen: play, exploration, and learning. Thus FLOWN’s deep work platform offers two complementary types of experience, Focus and Recharge.

• Our Focus-oriented experiences help you work. Flocks and Portholes deliver both the best of being in an office (accountability, community, access to diverse people and ideas) and the best of being out of the office (focused bouts of distraction-free work). They trigger focus by using research-based psychological tools like rituals of accountability, body doubling, and the Hawthorne Effect.

• Our Recharge-oriented experiences help get you back to work. Quests, Airflow and Almanac are different types of content that provide explorative, restorative and movement experiences to spark curiosity, creativity, and mental resilience.

My vision is that FLOWN becomes a complete platform for people to be their best selves, every day. And that it will do that by allowing people to weave their periods of deep work in with moments of creativity, playfulness and rest – so that each and every day will be a ‘complete mental meal’ of productivity, joy, and restoration.

The concept of deep work is what taught me how to make work an expression of my talents and passion, rather than a duty. It also inspired me to help others change the way they work so they too can transform their lives. Come join me, and see what deep work can do for you.