Deep work Nowadays, we are getting accustomed to working in a continuously interrupting environment. Smartphone notifications, hundreds of e-mails, open spaces, and meetings slicing our workday. We are feeling busy, and overworked, but are we more productive? If I am a salesman or project coordinator that way of working can bring good effects and even improve my skills. However, for Software Developers, Designers, and other professionals that need a quiet environment for creative effort, it can lead only to frustration and burnout. They need something that is called deep work. Deep work is a concept popularized by Cal Newport in his book under the same title published in 2016. The author divides mental activity into two categories: shallow work, that does not need intensive concentration like sending e-mails, formatting documents, chatting using communicators, etc. deep work, that demands distraction-free focus on one task like writing a document, learning a new skill, designing a software system, etc.
Finding Flow: Escaping Digital Distractions Through Deep Work and Slow Living
Learn how to achieve flow state and defeat digital distractions through environment design, mindful breaks, and deep work practices for a more focused life.
In 2026, I’m no longer interested in ‘working on myself’
We think of ourselves as full-time projects, but what if doing so much inner work does more harm than good?
Super Productivity – Open-Source Deep Work Task Manager
The open-source deep work task manager for developers. Plan tasks, track time & notes in a privacy-first workspace for Windows, macOS, Linux, Android & iOS.
Your Brain Can Only Take So Much Focus
Research has shed light on the power of focus and its role as a hidden driver of success. Yet as helpful as focus can be, research also shows there’s a downside to it: excessive focus exhausts the focus circuits in your brain. It can drain your energy, make you lose self-control, impair your decision-making, and make you less collaborative. The brain operates optimally when it toggles between focus and unfocus. When you unfocus, you engage a brain circuit called the default mode network (DMN). The DMN activates old memories, goes back and forth between the past, present, and future, and recombines different ideas. Using this new and previously inaccessible data, you can imagine creative solutions or predict the future, and more. There are many simple and effective ways to activate this circuit in the course of a day, such as positive constructive daydreaming, napping, and consciously thinking from another person’s perspective.
Is full-time work bad for our brains?
If you’re over 40, working more than 25 hours a week could be affecting your intelligence, new research suggests
Doing nothing at work
Many engineers should be doing less work. I don’t necessarily mean producing less code or fewer changes, but literally working fewer hours in the day. When they do work, they should be working at a slower pace. I like to aim to be running at 80% utilization by default: unless I have a high-pressure project going on, I spend 20% of my workday away from the computer.
Why Your Brain Needs More Downtime
Research on naps, meditation, nature walks and the habits of exceptional artists and athletes reveals how mental breaks increase productivity, replenish attention, solidify memories and encourage creativity
How to balance full-time work with creative projects – The Creative Independent
A guide to finding the right day job, protecting your time, and building creative habits by Jeffrey Silverstein. Illustrated by Sunny Eckerle.
AI Doesn’t Reduce Work—It Intensifies It
One of the promises of AI is that it can reduce workloads so employees can focus more on higher-value and more engaging tasks. But according to new research, AI tools don’t reduce work, they consistently intensify it: In the study, employees worked at a faster pace, took on a broader scope of tasks, and extended work into more hours of the day, often without being asked to do so. That may sound like a win, but it’s not quite so simple. These changes can be unsustainable, leading to workload creep, cognitive fatigue, burnout, and weakened decision-making. The productivity surge enjoyed at the beginning can give way to lower quality work, turnover, and other problems. To correct for this, companies need to adopt an “AI practice,” or a set of norms and standards around AI use that can include intentional pauses, sequencing work, and adding more human grounding.
Less stress, more productivity: why working fewer hours is better for you and your employer
There’s always too much work to be done on software projects, too many features to implement, too many bugs to fix. Some days you’re just not going through the backlog fast enough, you’re not producing enough code, and it’s taking too long to fix a seemingly-impossible bug. And to make things worse you’re wasting time in pointless meetings instead of getting work done. Once it gets bad enough you can find yourself always scrambling, working overtime just to keep up. Pretty soon it’s just expected, and you need to be available to answer emails at all hours even when there are no emergencies. You’re tired and burnt out and there’s still just as much work as before. The real solution is not working even harder or even longer, but rather the complete opposite: working fewer hours.
AI Isn’t Lightening Workloads. It’s Making Them More Intense.
The technology is increasing the speed, density and complexity of work rather than reducing it, a new analysis of 164,000 people’s work activity shows.
AI-Generated “Workslop” Is Destroying Productivity
Despite a surge in generative AI use across workplaces, most companies are seeing little measurable ROI. One possible reason is because AI tools are being used to produce “workslop”—content that appears polished but lacks real substance, offloading cognitive labor onto coworkers. Research from BetterUp Labs and Stanford found that 41% of workers have encountered such AI-generated output, costing nearly two hours of rework per instance and creating downstream productivity, trust, and collaboration issues. Leaders need to consider how they may be encouraging indiscriminate organizational mandates and offering too little guidance on quality standards. To counteract workslop, leaders should model purposeful AI use, establish clear norms, and encourage a “pilot mindset” that combines high agency with optimism—promoting AI as a collaborative tool, not a shortcut.
Work Smarter: The Cocktail of Simplicity, Manageable Adversity, and Muntzing
Sometimes deliberate roadblocks can be a good thing to get more efficient and effective products and workflow. Here's how.
Writing Is Thinking
When you write about your work, it makes all of us smarter for the effort, including you. Done well, this kind of sharing means you’re contributing signal, instead of noise. But writers are made, n…
Cultivating a state of mind where new ideas are born
Solitary work, creativity and larval ideas
Heavy multitaskers have reduced memory
People who frequently engage with multiple types of media at once performed worse on simple memory tasks, according to the last decade of research. However, it’s still too soon to determine cause and effect, says psychology Professor Anthony Wagner.
