Six months of deep work.
What happens when you schedule 90-minute blocks of focused work.
I read Deep Work in January and spent the following six months trying to implement it. Here is an honest account of what worked.
What changed
My mornings changed. I start work at 6am before the notifications begin, with no meetings scheduled before 10. I work on one thing. The output quality is noticeably higher than work done in the afternoon.
What didn’t change
Everything else. The afternoons are still fragmented. The Slack channel still demands attention. The context switches still happen. Newport’s framework is correct about the value of deep work; it is less useful about how to carve it out in an organisation that does not share your values.
The scarcest resource in knowledge work is not intelligence or effort. It is uninterrupted time.
What I’d tell someone starting
Protect one block, not the whole day. Two hours of genuine focus before 10am will outperform eight hours of fragmented attention. Start there. The rest is optimisation.