How I Improved My Work Focus In Times Of Covid #developer

So here's my story.

Year 2020, Covi era began and I start working completely remotely as a developer. As the boundary between work and family depletes, neither my workplace nor my family is happy with my habit of being tied up all the time. Although I am spending more time but not enough quality time.

I read many productivity books, notably Deep Work (By Cal Newport) and it inspires me to get more quality work done in less time and cut off from the work after 5 PM. Easy, right? I apply those ideas for a week, once the initial motivation drains, I start doing things the old way.

What could be better than procrastinating on 1 project, starting another side project :)

I build a simple desktop app with the purpose to delegate the goal of getting better at deep work to this app. Few iterations and it starts to work out well for me. Friends start asking for the app, the team starts using it and the app keeps getting better with the feedback.

Fast forward 6 months I have changed my 8-12 hrs of distracted work-days to 4-5 hr focused work-days. I produce better quality code in less time than ever before. Since Covid19, I have made this app my main project.

This is how the app works.

1. Gives me insights on my work habits such as when do I do Deep Work vs Shallow Work, how much of my time is spent on creative stuff (coding, research) vs managerial stuff (email, chat, meetings, planning, etc.), etc.

2. Gives me a sense of progress in the ability to do deep work

3. Builds and maintains my good work habits with the help of non-intrusive nudges and little rewards

4. With the years of research, trials, and the efforts of marvelous team members, we have made it completely automated and privacy-focused

5. It has been dogfooded heavily and continues to

All in all, good productive procrastination turned into a highly useful project. After 100 positive feedbacks by private beta users, we are releasing the next major upgrade in public beta mode.

Opening up access to 1000 more people to try it out for free (we expect you'd provide us feedback to improve it further and once you become the master of deep work, help others do the same). Limiting to 1000 so we can provide prompt support and make sure some of your feature requests make their way to our biweekly release cycle.

Try it yourself to delegate your goal of getting better at Deep Work (or just check out my deep work analytics here). Feel free to reach me out(pradeep at invidelabs.com), I'd be happy to share my learning on productivity or software engineering.