Empty your Workbench

Thu, 09 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

By now a lot of people would have heard about the book: “Deep Work” by Cal Newport¹.

This post will focus on one of the ideas I found very useful in the book - controlling your physical environment to support deep, focused hours of work.

Past

The first time I read the book around 2018 or 2019. It got me pretty excited and I tried to implement it in my daily routines, especially at work. I blocked time in calendar, turned off my Slack notifications, worked in meeting rooms when they were free. I communicated consistently to colleagues that I’d like to have at least 2h of uninterrupted focused work per day. Sadly, after months of experimentation I concluded, that it was not really possible in software engineering, or perhaps in modern office environment in general. Too many things demand your attention during the day, people reach out regularly and there is hardly an hour a day that I could focus intensively.

deep-work on Aleks Gorbenko

Empty your Workbench

Past