This post is original content by Andriy Buday.

NOTE: I wanted to gather my thoughts on the topic of “deep work” before going through the book “Deep Work” which I just picked and started listening to.

When and where are you the most productive? Does it ever happen to you that in a few hyper-focused hours you can complete as much as in a few days of ordinary pace work? Do you think it is possible to make these hyper-focused hours happen regularly every day?

Shallow Work

In the past I could be really focused on simpler, somewhat repetitive work. I remember I once had to add some extra data to our database and pull it through all layers and get into the frontend. Typically in that project this would take a week or so, but because I did this so many times one evening of hyper-focused work was enough and the PM who requested this was super surprised “you are very quick” with big eyes. Occasionally this looked like I was an overly competitive person. I remember at my first job I got an assignment to create some medical forms. I was maybe 2-3x faster in creating them compared to a more tenured person. I didn’t compete, it was just focused and fun work to me. This type of work is something you can grind through if you have a looming deadline.

Deep Work

But what about the work when more deeper thinking is required? It’s normally harder or next to impossible to bluntly grind through. It’s different in a way that any distraction derails the train of thought. Imagine, you are writing a design document, and you need a bit of extra info, so you search for that info, and a few dozen browser tabs away you realize you no longer remember what you were looking for and what you are doing on this particular page and that now it’s time for your meeting on another topic. I see deep work as periods of intense uninterrupted focus when I can make major progress on something hard to do.

Ideal span of focused time

For me ideal stretches of focused time are always longer than 30min and shorter than 3 hours. I found that getting into the deep work requires “warming up”, pretty much like in sport activities. After that, maintaining intensity is easier but never lasts longer than 4 hours, after which productivity goes down rapidly.

Mental capacity

There is limited mental capacity available on any day for deep work. I imagine it as a capped reservoir. The only way to have it full is to be well rested (proper sleep night before, healthy body and mind). Working in focused mode is like directing the flow to harvest energy on what you need. Distractions are like huge leaks that take time to fix. The reservoir is very hard to expand, but you can train to make use of the flow much faster without the lag time, so instead of requiring 30 min to get into the focus you might train to shorten this time.

Environment

Another aspect of focused work for me is the surrounding environment. I am working on creating routines. Say, to write blog posts I decided to do them in a bubble tea place each time after dropping off my kids for karate classes. I know I have an hour of active work and there will be very little time during the week to get most of it done, and then one more stretch of work early on Saturday or Sunday morning. This post is written in three one hour sittings.

Distractions

Going through social media feeds on mobile phones is an obvious time and attention killer. But even something that is more important and you have to do has detrimental effects. For instance, just 4-5 meetings are normally enough to exhaust mental capacity for any deep work on that day, especially if they are spread throughout the day. Or, say, replying to messages from your boss is something important, but again if it comes in the middle of your deep work on, say, writing an important doc you lose your attention and will have to get into the flow of writing again. Small things often go a long way to reduce distractions, things like putting the phone away, having a clean work desk, using full screen mode, etc, whatever works for you.

Time of the day

A “cheat code” appears to get those 3 hours of work before any meetings. I know it is a cliche to say “wake up at 5AM and get most work done before others wake up”. I found this to be true, except it doesn’t work for me mainly because at 5AM I’m a zombie and not a human (maybe if I was a robot it would have worked ;) ). This works though if I go to bed at 9PM, which is super difficult as even my kids laugh at me when I mention going to bed this early.

Commitments

I mentioned deadlines at the beginning and I think they are a very important motivating aspect for actually getting into the deep work. A caveat that comes with deadlines is that often they are perceived as something far in the future so we tend to procrastinate until its too late. Thus, something that works better are shorter cycles. For me, weekly cadence seems to be the best, both in my personal life and at work. For projects that I drive at work I usually establish a weekly cadence of planning/commitments. I have written about setting up challenges with friends and I’ve been doing this in one or the other form since 2016.

Key contributors to focused work for me:

• Plenty of sleep the night before
• Distraction-less surrounding environment
• Very early hours (or very late hours)
• Dedicated spaces for specific types of work
• Having a goal for each session
• Commitment of some sort (work deadlines, self-goals, promises)