Deep work is the key to success, in my opinion, and getting the most out of your deep work is dependent on good routines and habits.

With this in mind, I recently conducted an experiment to find what daily work structure helps me achieve my best work. What time of day should I do my deep work? How long should my work blocks be?

To answer these questions, I used two tools:

• Rize - an app that tracks your work activity. Rize monitors what you do on your computer so you know how you spend your work time.

• Pylot - the first productivity wearable measures flow and fatigue to provide feedback on cognitive performance.

The Baseline

Over two weeks, I tracked my computer activity and cognitive performance as I undertook a normal work routine.

My Rize data showed a busy couple of weeks. The image below provides a summary of one of these weeks. It is worth noting that this is only the work on my desktop machine, and 'browsing' includes everything I do in the browser, which is basically all my work.

While the week felt busy, it was also all over the place. I set myself the goal of 4 hours of focused work each day. As the image below shows, I did not achieve this much during this period. Rize automatically categorizes time as focused if you spend 75% of your time in focus categories over a minimum 15-minute period. In short, I had too many distractions and switched tasks frequently.— busy work, not deep work.

When it comes to cognitive performance, my optimal state is when flow is high, and fatigue isn't. The graph below shows my data against the time of day. Sometimes I forget to put the wearable on, mainly at night, so I miss some data. Despite this, it seems clear that mornings are my optimal time for deep work. Then, as the afternoon goes on, my flow drops and fatigue increases.

Looking at the length of my work blocks, we can see that my flow takes a nosedive and fatigue increases after about 90 minutes. I need to schedule 90min work blocks in the morning to get the most out of my deep work sessions.

Changes

Based on the findings above, I decided to double down on work in the morning. Although I am generally at the desk by 7 am, I decided to resume my old work habits and be at the desk by 5:45 am. So an early start and straight into it.

Looking at my cognitive performance, the schedule change definitely had an impact.

• I had high flow early in the morning, meaning my first work block at ~6 am was well timed

• But this also led to an earlier spike in fatigue mid-morning

• A mid-morning break (or exercise) countered this cognitive fatigue, and I got into another flow block before lunch.

• But come 2:30 pm, it was a downhill slide

Overall, the early start meant I managed to get more time in flow in the morning and have more successful deep work sessions. But it also meant I died off in the afternoon earlier, and anything after 3 pm was for shallow tasks only.

Rize also showed the impact of this change. My working hours (on the desktop machine) increased by ~10%, which isn't surprising given the earlier start. But my goal isn't to work more, it is to get more deep work (or what Rize categorizes as Focus). Fortunately, this focus time increased by 3 hours for the week.

So I worked three more hours for the week, and achieved three more deep work hours. I would consider that a win. I think the next goal should be to achieve that same amount of deep work, but in fewer total hours.

Using the Tools

I love capturing data and trying new apps. There are hundreds of options, but I consistently use Rize and Pylot as they offer real value. Pylot tracks my cognitive performance to provide me with recommendations on scheduling my deep work. While Rize is then the perfect companion, as it tracks my computer activity so I can see the outcome of this deep work.