#931: Book Club: Focusing With Deep Intent

Dental A Team Podcast

It’s Dental A-Team’s last book club episode of 2024!

December’s book is Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World by Cal Newport. Kiera dives deep (heh) into what it means to work with such intensity in a world overrun with distractions, including layers of cognitive focus, an increase in the ability to master topics, the power of routine and ritual, and more.

Episode resources:

Find the full book club rundown here!

Subscribe to The Dental A-Team podcast

Join Dental A-Team Consulting

Leave us a review

Transcript:

Kiera Dent (00:01.124)

Hello, Dental A Team listeners. This is Kiera and welcome to the book club. This is the last book club of 2024. Can you believe it? We are to the last book club of the year. And just as a fun little book club, let's do a year in review of all the book clubs that we've done together this year. So in case you didn't read these books or you need a book or you need to remember the book clubs we did, January, we did the Go Giver. February, we did Crucial Conversations. March, the Noticer.

April, buy back your time. May, high output management. June, come up for air. July, you can heal your life. August, your next five moves. September, die with zero. October, the power of fun. November, who, how. And December, deep work. This is our last one. And like talk about a really fun year that you guys have actually gone through of all these different books. And I hope you've enjoyed them. I hope you've read them. I hope you've enjoyed the book club. I'm excited to...

like, you know, we're doing in 2026, it's still TBD or excuse me, 2025 still TBD. But talk about how many incredible books that you guys have read this year. and just think like that's so much wisdom brought into your life. And I hope you're implementing these ideas. Like I think back to, as we look back, the go-giver remembering to do those simple acts of kindness for people and to notice and to give more value than people expect. Crucial conversations, saying what needs to be said, not like dodging and beating around the book.

or the Bush. Wow. the noticer just noticing people. remember the, the, was either the beach. He was sitting on a beach and eating seafood and was like, I'm on this crummy beach eating this like day old food. And the noticer said like, I am eating surf and turf with a view and just looking at things differently. thought was it such a cool perspective, April, buy back your time. You guys know, I'm obsessed with this. What's your dollar per hour? how can we buy back more of our time and do more of what we absolutely love?

High output management, figuring out how we can actually maximize and be high output consistently within our management team. Really lovely book. Come Up for Air. You guys know I love this one. This was like leveraging systems and teams. I made my leadership team. I didn't make, I had our leadership team read this book. There was so much goodness with Come Up for Air that I loved. Systems and tools, we've implemented so many of the things from that book. Definitely is gonna be on my consistent books to read here over here.

Kiera Dent (02:23.552)

The next one, you can heal your life. This one was such a unique one of diving deep into our own personal lives and how can we heal ourselves and heal from the past and letting go of things that are holding us back. Your next five moves, looking at the business strategy and thinking of what do we need to do next and what are the next five moves in our business. Really incredible. Die with zero. I loved Die with Zero. Another book where you literally like live life now.

And it's such a controversial book compared to Profit First. I love the controversy. I love thinking of it, but really die with zero and how can we have more fun in life? The power of fun. you know, remember how to feel alive again and the different areas of how we can make fun and play more a part of our daily life. Who, not how. It's going back to buy back your time. Thinking of who can do this, not how can we do this? Who can we leverage? Consultants, team members.

Delegating collaborating all those different pieces and now today deep work This book to me is such an incredible Like I love it. I love it so much It was recommended to me by a doctor that I'm obsessed with and their team and he's just someone this doctor I feel is able to get so much done and I was like, what do you do? And he said deep work is one of my biggest things and he goes and hides in the library and he Will consistently like this doctor is someone that I feel is such a high

output constantly and just keeps doing it. like his secrets are he's great with time management. He has none of the apps on his phone. So there's no Slack, there's no text messages or excuse me, there's no emails. It's literally just used as a phone. And then he has, he blocks his time. He's very disciplined. He's disciplined with his spiritual life. He's disciplined with his kids life. He's disciplined with his physical life. He's disciplined with his work life. And I'm just so impressed by who he is. And he said deep work was one of his pieces.

So getting into deep work, are four rules. number one is work deeply. Number two is embrace the boredom. Three is quit social media and four is drain the shallows. And what I loved about this book is he really talks about like he, this guy, he was like in his room and he realized when he like locked himself in this room, he was able to like exponentially grow in his career and like what he was learning and realized.

Kiera Dent (04:41.464)

that the reason we don't grow as much as we could is because we're constantly distracted. so within Deep Work, it talks about, we blocking time? And you can call this CEO time, you can call this Deep Work time, but like, we blocking time, distraction free, to work on the biggest projects of our organization? And so Deep Work, like I said, you will see in every one of my calendars, blocking out two to four hours per week is what I recommend for doctors. And I'm really big on blocking it during your production time. So that way you actually...

are super focused and super intentional with no distractions. That does not mean you have to be in the office. I actually sometimes recommend not being in the office so you're not distracted, but it's really awesome. There's actually some really cool apps that you can do that lock everything. So when I go into deep work time, you can literally lock everything. So no email, you could set up the apps or the browsers that you're allowed to do. And then literally your whole computer locks out of everything else. So when we get bored, we want to go scroll social media. You can't do that.

And that's where it's like the embracing the boredom that I thought was so critical and so incredible is we embrace the boredom. We embrace these different things because when you embrace the boredom, you push through versus being distracted and wasting away our time. so during it, like literally you want to go check your email and it's shocking because you'll see how often you check your email, check your social media, do all these different things. But the answer is like, we're here to have deep work with no distractions and we're training ourselves.

to become so effective with our time when we're working on these projects that we actually move the needle forward exponentially. And I love this. I love this so much because we are in such a distracted society that we don't get deep work done. So many dentists are like, Kiera, like, I just can't get this done. I'm like, block the deep work, block the CEO time, office manager, same thing. Like this is, and it's not for us to do the little tasks, like the payroll that we know is going to get done or to check. It's like, no, we need to make a operations manual. We need to get that done.

We need to build out new job descriptions and tiers for our employees to move up from one position to the next. We need to go and figure out like it could be CE. For me, a lot of times it's like projections for the next year. It's looking at my PNLs. It's building out for us. Like I've been working, my deep work time has been so focused on building out content for next year's in-person events for our doctors that I hope that you're coming to. If you have not, please sign up. Prices do go up in January. We have promoted the prices through end of year for you guys.

Kiera Dent (07:04.42)

giving you, want people to have this be a no brainer. So you actually save exponentially thousands and it is a complete tax write off. You get to come be with us in person. You get to network with peers, but we're going to do, like I said, a strip down from top to bottom of your business. And you're going to have a plan every quarter of what to do plus one-on-one calls with the consultant. And you also get us to help with team implementation. So we're working with the doctor and the team. It's doctors and OMS in person. This has been my deep work. This is what I'm working on every single week. This is what's pushing the needle forward. This is how

as a CEO who's busy, I pushed the most important things forward. And it's crazy because this is, one of my favorite quotes from Jaco Willings is discipline equals freedom. And so having the discipline to do this deep work that Cal Newport talks about in there is just so incredible to me. because really we've got to be digging in, we've got to be working on the pieces that move us forward. We have to be able to focus without the distractions on these tasks. And so like,

It literally allows you to focus and to work without distractions. And they talk about in their like shallow work versus deep work and shallow work is non-cognitively demanding logistical style work often performed while distracted. So think about like how often we submitted payroll while distracted, how often we've answered emails while distracted. We've been slacking like in our company, I make it to where we're in meetings. We have no new standard that...

We are present and that means Slack is closed, phones are shut off, all of our emails are closed and we are present here because it's so easy to be distracted. Whereas Deep Work is like a superpower in our increasingly competitive 21st century economy. And so really it's like, in order to produce our absolute best stuff, we have to commit to Deep Work. This is where we have the creative spaces, this is where we have the very Deep Work. Like this doctor I was telling you about who recommended this to me, they have...

Six practices they have grown their practices exponentially their practices are producing Multi-millions they have a leadership team the doctors been able to remove themselves from the practice and it's because I believe this doctor has been working on deep work for years Also in deep work It's the ability to quickly master hard things and the ability to produce at an elite level for quality and speed two core abilities for thriving in today's economy because when we When we teach ourselves not to be distracted when we teach ourselves that we're here to work

Kiera Dent (09:22.99)

There's no distractions. Like it's literally incredible. If you guys didn't listen to my podcast with John Jackson from Defy Ventures, who was a prisoner. I hope you guys listened to that. He is someone who has inspired me in 2024, like top people that I've met this year. And I remember him saying like when he was in prison, there was nothing there for him to do other than learn. He was sitting in cinder block walls. There were no distractions he could have.

And he learned and he learned a lot. He learned how to run businesses. He taught himself that and that's why they do this for prisoners, but like, let's not be in prison to teach ourselves how to work without distraction. and in the book, one of the quotes is to learn hard things quickly. must focus intensely without distraction. So if you don't know how to do your numbers, well, are you spending the deep work time to learn how to read a PNL to learn how to do cashflow to learn and listen to different podcasts or books or have a coach or a mentor with you doing this with you.

But really it's there. And then they said, your work is craft. And if you hone your ability and apply it with respect and care, then like the skilled will write, you can generate meaning in the daily efforts of your professional life. So, and then I love, say the key to developing a deep work habit is to move beyond good intention and add routines and rituals to your working life designed to minimize the amount of your limited willpower. Nessa Nessa. Wow. Necessary to transition into and maintain a state of unbroken concentration.

And when you can master deep work, and I'm not going to say that I'm the best at it. I'm not here to tell you like, I'm incredible. I'm here to say like, I have learned a lot of this. have taken this on and it's true. Like we are so distracted. It's so easy to be distracted. There's even a company called The Brick. And what you do is you can literally brick your phone where like you can tap it and your whole phone shuts off. And it's just a phone like that you can call with. That's the only thing you can do with it. But just think of how much more in life you can achieve, how much more in life you can.

accomplish, how much further your business could grow, how much more you could invest in your relationships if we weren't distracted. And that's not to say there's not a place in time for social media and different things. Like, of course there is, but let's do that intentionally, not distractedly. Let's do that because we choose to, not because it's a habit that we haven't been able to break. Let's work on the big frogs of our business, right? They talk about eat the frog first in the morning, the thing you don't want to do. To me, that's the deep work. Like so much of what I put on deep work, I literally dread.

Kiera Dent (11:46.264)

But now with the use of chat GPT and other things, like you can actually move things in deep work so much faster than we've ever been able to do. And so really maximizing this. So like I allow it to be open, but like it's wild. When I lock everything out, I feel annoyed actually. I'm like, but I also am shocked at how fast my mind gets distracted. so to be able, it's like meditation, to be able to help ourselves be so like to me, deep work.

and meditation are training our minds rather than being like, I don't know, it's not manipulated, but guided by a wandering mind. Like I wanna focus and be intentional with my thoughts and with my life. And I'm creating it rather than being managed by it. And I think that that's deep work does is that to me, deep work is exercise for the mind. Meditation is exercise for the mind. It is being able to be this like pristine top performer.

for two to four hours a week and to get the big projects done. And just, want you to think about, let's just think about a practice, a doctor and an office manager who do deep work. I guarantee you like bonuses for your hygiene. So hygiene production and bonuses could get done. Operations manuals could get done. Protocols and reviews of the company could get done. The financial piece could get learned in one year's time doing deep work. It probably would be less than that. You could really go through and write protocols and...

have better onboarding systems. Think about an associate onboarding process. Think about being able to figure out a billing system and process. I mean, yes, of course you can hire us and we have most of that already for you, but just think of all the things you can move forward. Think of the new ideas you could create. Think of the ability to onboard an associate doctor better. Think of the ability to go and look through all of your exams that you did and figure out where did I not do as strong and how can I refine my presentation style.

Think about being able to go and observe your practice and see it in this zone. Like all these projects, think of everything that's big on your list. To be able to set aside two hours a week is just like mind boggling. And then to think if we're doing this consistently, how much more will you actually be able to get done? How much more time will you be able to have? Because you're gonna like check off your checklist pretty quickly and then you're gonna start to go into like new lessons. Like think if you spent two hours a week on chat GPT.

Kiera Dent (14:06.378)

learning it and how to use AI better in your practice. How much further ahead would that send you? This is the type of deep work and learning new skills and learning new insights that I think could be absolutely masterful for you. So I loved this book. I love helping offices set this into their schedules. I love helping office managers realize the practice will not burn down with you being gone for two hours. I love doctors realizing this is your CEO time. This is where you review your P &Ls. This is where you look at the numbers of your business. This is where you do your projections for the next year. This is where you do all the different pieces.

is during this deep work time, undistracted, very focused. So I hope you read it and I hope you love it. And I hope that you had a really fun year advancing yourself with professional development of reading these books and expanding your minds and expanding what you believe is possible and turning the impossible into possible. And I really hope that you've just realized how much you've invested in yourself and how beautiful it is to keep

growing and creating and evolving. Life is a journey. These things take time. Mastery is not done overnight. And so I just implore you as you go into 2025 that you truly, truly, truly set aside deep work time. Commit right now that you're going to do it you're going to see how much your practice will flourish. And I promise you will be life changing for you.

I hope that you choose to join us in person in 2025. I hope that you choose to not to keep thinking about consulting, but to execute on it. I hope that you decide to invest in yourself and your team this next year and that you just truly have the best year of your life. I will be getting you guys books to read and I just hope that you know your life is yours to create, not to manage. So let's start creating it through our deep work time. And I hope you guys loved it. I loved reading this, if you can't tell.

And as always, for all of you listening, thanks for listening. I'll catch you next time on the Dental A Team podcast.