Career & Leadership › Junior Habits & First Job
Deep Work / Focus Time
Long, uninterrupted blocks for hard problems.
Also known as: focus time, deep work
Deep work is focused effort on a hard problem, without interruptions. For programming, that’s the work of understanding a tricky bug, designing a change, or learning a new library well enough to use it. Such work benefits from long stretches, because the thinking builds on itself over time.
Focus time is a practical way to protect that. Put a recurring block on your calendar, turn off notifications during it, and close the chat app. Tell your team when you’re heads-down, so they know when to expect a slower reply.
09:30-11:30 Focus: payment retry logic (no meetings, chat muted)
11:30-12:00 Messages and reviewsA block doesn’t need to be the whole morning. One unbroken hour on the hardest task can get further than the same time split into short pieces, though how much depends on the task.
The classic mistake is treating deep work as optional and filling every gap with small tasks. Those tasks are easy to finish, so the hard problem keeps getting postponed. Schedule the hard work first, and let the small tasks fill the time around it. The cost of switching in and out is covered in context switching cost.