Learn how to ruthlessly eliminate the shallow work that prevents you from reaching your four-hour-per-day deep work capacity, a concept proven by 37signals' success with a four-day workweek.

We cover four core strategies to minimize the shallow footprint:

1. Schedule Every Minute of Your Day: Implement minute-by-minute scheduling to escape "autopilot" and force continuous, thoughtful decision-making about how your time is spent. Use the quantifiable depth question—How long to train a recent college graduate to perform this task?—to objectively measure task value.

2. Finish Your Work by Five Thirty: Adopt Fixed-Schedule Productivity. By fixing a hard stop time (like 5:30 p.m.), you enter a scarcity mindset, forcing yourself to become "ruthlessly efficient" and cull unnecessary shallow commitments, as demonstrated by Professor Radhika Nagpal's career success.

3. Ask Your Boss for a Shallow Work Budget: Establish an explicit budget (e.g., 30–50%) for shallow work to provide "cover" when saying no to low-value commitments.

4. Become Hard to Reach: Take back control of electronic communication by deploying e-mail control tactics: creating a Sender Filter, using a Process-Centric Approach to minimize message count, and adopting the "Don't Respond" heuristic of busy academics.