Serguey Asael Shinder – IT Professional

My workday used to be a blender. Deep work and shallow work spun together all day long — I’d be mid-way into something hard, an email would land, I’d answer it, then a message, then a small task, and by the time I turned back to the hard thing I’d lost the thread and had to climb all the way back up. I was busy from morning to night and the important work barely moved.

What finally fixed it was realizing these are two completely different kinds of work that should never share the same time. Deep work needs a long, quiet, uninterrupted runway. Shallow work — the emails, the replies, the little errands — needs almost nothing, but it’s constant and loud, and if you let it interleave with the deep work, the shallow always wins. It’s easier and more immediate, and every time you service it mid-flow you pay the full cost of rebuilding your focus.

So I stopped blending. Now I batch the shallow work into a couple of defined windows a day — I let the small stuff pile up, then clear all of it at once, and close it. And I guard the deep work in an unbroken block, usually the morning, where nothing shallow is allowed in. No email, no chat, no “quick” anything until the block is done.

The change was immediate and almost embarrassing in its simplicity. My mornings came back. The hard work that used to leak away in fragments now got a clean, protected runway, and the small tasks still got handled — just corralled instead of constant.

I didn’t have a productivity problem, it turned out. I had a blending problem. Batch the small, guard the deep, and stop letting the two spin together.

– Serguey Asael Shinder