"When was the last time you had a good day of work? The kind where you got into flow and stayed there long enough to think deeply about a problem? Paul Graham wrote about this in 2009: a single meeting can wreck an entire half-day for someone who needs uninterrupted time to build something. Sixteen years later, we've added Slack, Teams, always-on video calls, and a culture of instant responsiveness."
"The problem has gotten worse, with the pandemic turning things to 11 but the conversation stays frustratingly vague. We know focus is dying. We can't say how bad it is or what would fix it. In this post, I'll show you what interruption-driven work looks like when you model it with math. Three simple parameters determine whether your day is productive or a write-off."
Workdays are visualized as timelines showing uninterrupted focus blocks, interruptions, and recovery. Frequent interruptions and lengthy recovery periods convert most of an eight-hour day into fragmented, non-productive time. Three parameters—interruption frequency, interruption duration, and recovery time—determine whether a day yields meaningful deep work or becomes a write-off. Simulating hundreds of days across parameter combinations produces a map of the parameter space that identifies regions of high and low productivity. Measuring and adjusting those parameters reveals how changes such as fewer meetings, reduced messaging, or protected focus blocks improve the amount of genuine uninterrupted work.
Read at Off by One
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