Not necessarily, it fluctuates between 8-10 hrs and doesn’t always equate to the job I’m on now. 

A focus week sounds lovely, but I’d also have to not be at home because: distractions. So, early mornings allow for bite size chunks of side hustles, deep learning, ideas.

I like the idea of developing regular rhythms for doing different types of thinking on specific days or chunk of times!

… I think this is called a habit? 😅

I like this a lot for “background thinking”! creating space to let our brains wander and form organic connections across all the bits of information feels esp important for more creative, generative thinking

Obviously sometimes there will be last minute things that will be more important 🫠 but usually I know that Fridays I’ll be quieter and allow me to put in a few hours of learning and writing undisturbed. This also helps with the context switching for me (I do it a lot at my job!)

I have this too and it’s a pretty mixed bag of results, it mostly becomes time to catch up rather than do deep work. Or another slot to be scheduled over 🙃

If you’re someone who has a busy schedule and does a lot of context switching, how do you carve out time for deep thinking?

I’d love to hear how you approach this or what strategies you’ve tried.

Before sleeping. If you step away from phones and screens you can put 30 minutes :-)

Mainly not listening to anything on walks — like dog walk or walking back from dropping our kid off at daycare — has helped give me some time to let my brain run free

true, I’ve found some of my best thinking or interesting connections formed come right before falling asleep or right after I wake up, away from distractions

Jogging sends me into a prolonged state of focus that I can’t seem to attain anywhere else in my life. It’s blissful, but fleeting.

ahhhh this is what hiking does for me too! sadly a weekend-only activity for me

rad that you were able to carve out focused space that worksfor you! that’s pretty dang early though 🫠

and noticeably not during your actual workday.

For me, starting my day at 5am, then slowly transitioning to 4am was the key. I can get 3-4 hours of solid focused deep thinking and work done before my actual workday starts.

I also set automatic blocks of focus time on specific week days that I really try to stick to… but that’s not available to everyone, really depends on your company and role.

So does that mean you’re working 12hrs a day?

Currently have a couple projects I could knock out with a solid block of focus time… fantasizing of just taking a “focus week” like PTO.

Yeah I get it, it’s difficult to stick to it! 🙈 I really do try to only use those for deep work 🙏🏻 a thing I’ve also started to do is setting “themes“ for each workday — my Fridays, for example, are focused on self-development / learning new things / writing blog posts / etc.

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