[crdrost]

I like this idea of phrasing it as branding.

In my experience nobody sits in one place and works on one thing for 8 hours a day. I am tempted to say that it's not only rare but it's undesirable.

I can work for approximately 5 hours straight without needing any sort of break; but part of becoming a more senior developer was to realize that this is actually a really bad thing for me. The “sweet spot” for me appears to be either 1.5 or 2 hours long. If I have some urgency I will literally shut down my laptop and move to a coffee shop or some other physical context and spend at least 15 minutes taking in the new ambiance before opening up the laptop and resuming a separate 2-hour burst of focused work.

The reason is basically that the flow state is good for one very important parameter that we might call ‘grit,’ the actual overcoming of pain and moving a project to completion... but it fails of course at a whole range of metacognitive processes which I might imperfectly class along at least three separate axes as... well, the words are not great but ‘creativity’ and ‘organization’ and ’empathy’ work. Flow states are really good for when you know what needs to be done and how to do it because your project is well-organized. They can be poor for stepping back and thinking “is this really the best way to satisfy that person’s needs?” and for stepping back and thinking “is there some more powerful idea I could leverage here which would make all of these sorts of problems just go away, even if it is a little strange given how the system exists right now?” and for simply asking “how can I clean things up now to make my life easier in the future?”. Even if you have individuals who by their personalities simply exude grit and radiate it for everyone else, which is an absolute treasure to have, you may want to balance them out with people who have a sort of moralistic imperative of “this is how a system like this should be built.” I don’t want to work with just hackers—but with hackers, engineers, dreamers, and evangelists—on my dev team. Either as separate people or as separate hats which people take on over the course of the day.

[buffet_overflow]

>They can be poor for stepping back and thinking “is this really the best way to satisfy that person’s needs?”

This is something I stumbled onto recently. I've been hellbent on making sure I had no distractions and could hit that 5 hour flow state, only to find smaller chunks gave me more points to reflect on the state of the work and redirect it more effectively.

Thanks for capturing it into words.

[beart]

The article itself suggests breaking deep work sessions into no more than 4 hours at a time and suggests several "styles" of performing deep work in terms of fitting individual schedules and personality.