Next week would be my first working week after 4 months of parental leave. And I plan to take advantage of having a fresh start but in a familiar place - so since I’m already pretty well versed in my team’s fundamental processes and systems, I intend to try to allocate some of my energy to adopt a new work routine. This is heavily inspired by the book deep work by Cal Newport with my own attempt to adapt it to what makes sense for me at work.

Equipment I intend to use

• A simple lined notepad - for the daily time blocks allocation.
• Sticky notes - an offline place to keep a commitment to the distraction-free block. Or when the next “distractions” are “allowed”
• A pen or pencil - to write on the previous objects.
• TBD - A way to track the amount of deep work time accumulated so far so we can celebrate. The inspiration comes from Cal Newport’s blog here and here. I’ll come back with the solution that worked for me when I review how this routine worked in practice along the way.

Working day beginning ritual A.K.A morning

Allocating time blocks

The purpose of this exercise is to be intentional with the time you plan to spend today. Not to be a plan to which you should stick at any cost.
Using the lined notepad mentioned above, note every second line with an hour in your workday span. Every line would represent half an hour, the minimal time block. Consider meetings you have in your calendar, open tasks, deep or shallow, you have from yesterday’s daily summary, and new initiatives you are trying to kick off. Allocate some time also for lunch / breaks during the day. I lean towards scheduling the first 30 minutes block for emails & slack recap, daily summary recap and the scheduling process. In case the plan doesn’t go as expected it’s totally OK . We will improve with it as time goes, just reallocate the remainder of the day so you have a vision on how to spend the rest of your working day. Generally speaking try to allocate as much deep work time as you can during the day. If you feel this is not detailed enough I encourage you to read the full description in the above-mentioned book deep work p. 223. Or wait until I dedicate a full post to this part of the day.

Schedule next communications pause

On the sticky note write when would be the next break where you open your email, and slack to see if anything urgent pops. Also you should consider when would you check your phone next for messages from family and friends. My intuition is to schedule this every hour. Both for work related and private communications. I might as well experiment with separating the cycles in the future. Every time the cycle restarts - write when the next one is due so you have a good written commitment to remind you not to slide into a distracting spiral

Start your daily summary

using the template mentioned in shutdown I read what was open yesterday and move it to my TODOs section. This way I know what’s on my plate for today.

Shutdown the workday ritual

In order to clean up our mind and avoid mental overflow - it’s recommended to have all the ongoing tasks / activities you work on documented with clear next steps. This way our mind doesn’t go into loop of thinking about what we should do next tomorrow at work. I tend to go a bit further so I can also get back to work I’ve done in the past with search and find the relevant commit / PR, so I add some extra fields. The essence is to have a few sections in a template - mine consists of the following:

• TODOs (where I mark as done when completed during the day)
• Code for things I worked on
• Carry on collecting next days items during the day, knowing I won’t complete them today
• Documents links to different documents I’ve written
• Meetings I attended
• PRs I created or merged
• A blob section for how I felt during the day or anything special that happened.

Cal suggests also adding a sentence you say out loud to cement the habit and signal to your brain that today is over. Not sure I’ll start doing that, but I thought it’s worth mentioning.

Weekly rituals

Preferably at the end of the week, but it can also be in the beginning of the week. Review how much deep work you’ve managed to do in the past week. Celebrate it if it’s a good amount, or make plans on how to improve it next week if you are not satisfied.
Plan the amount of deep work for next week, and preferably try to schedule it. Freeing yourself to work deeply during the week.

How to maintain the focus

• My phone stays in my backpack during the day besides on scheduled distractions. This helps a lot.
• I plan to add a new focus mode for work were all notifications and calls are blocked besides my spouse and my children’s day care.
• Email tab is closed and slack is shutdown except when I’m actively communicating either if it’s a communications schedule or a time block allocated to communication / emails / respond to customers on slack. Or if I’m on-call.
• If the deep work you are focus on requires something from email / slack, and you are out of a communication window - wait 5 minutes before making an exception and fetching it. Avoiding sliding into the habit of constantly checking email / slack.
• Out of the scope of this post - but I would write on it sometimes - how we support the focus and deep work also outside the work day. Once it’s out I’ll add a link to it here.

Next steps

Well this one got a bit longer than I expected, and I couldn’t even fit everything into it. I plan to try and work like that starting next week. And I’ll come back with a report on how it goes, and what I feel I should tune to make it better. What worked, what failed and what changes did I make. Other than that other posts with thoughts and implementations of them are on their way.