In today’s “ping culture” of frequent Slack messages and impromptu huddles, uninterrupted focus time can seem like an elusive dream, rather than a typical workday.

Deep Work is counted as two or more hours of meeting-free, uninterrupted time to truly focus on work. (This may be a scheduled event called Deep Work, or it may simply be an open window on your calendar.) This is when we get the opportunity to dive below the surface for creative problem-solving. We deduct time spent responding to messages on Slack or Teams during that time, because context switching takes away from the focus value of Deep Work. Additionally, if you’re in a Deep Work block, and you update a Jira Ticket or open a Pull Request, then we determine that pulls you out of your flow, so we’d put a few minutes of time into Short Fragments.

These factors affect how we categorize time spent in a day:

• Short Fragments are defined as blocks of meeting-free time that are shorter than two hours, typically used for conversations and surface-level tasks
• Meetings are defined as events on your calendar that have at least two attendees
• Busy/Blocked is defined as events on your calendar that have no other attendees, like lunch, appointments, and other non-meetings on the calendar
• Interruptions represent the cumulative time spent responding to incoming messages on Slack or Teams during Deep Work time

More Deep Work is associated with a lower in Always On risk—showing that, when engineers have sufficient time to focus, they have less of a need to work more than eight hours in a day. One way we have heard this manifest for developers is that they get caught up in meetings and short work blocks all day, and then need to catch up on the day’s pull requests and Slack messages in the evening or weekend to unblock their teammates.

We maintain that Deep Work is a cornerstone of engineering effectiveness.

For ideas on how to protect time for Deep Work for your teams, read more here: Protecting time for Deep Work