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Deep Work When You Have Kids and a Job

Cal Newport’s Deep Work changed how I think about productivity. But when I first read it, I was a single guy with infinite evenings and no one tugging at my sleeve asking for Bluey. The monastic approach — locking yourself in a cabin for weeks of uninterrupted focus — is a fantasy for parents. I have two kids, Aadhya and Arjun. I’m a staff engineer at Weel. I ship side projects on the margins. And I’ve somehow averaged 12-15 hours of deep work per week for the past two years. Not by being a monk. By being rhythmic. This is the realistic guide to deep work when your life has constraints — the kind Newport doesn’t fully address because, respectfully, he doesn’t have a toddler throwing Lego at his monitor during standup.

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The Four Philosophies, and Why Only One Works for Parents

Newport outlines four deep work philosophies:

1. Monastic — eliminate all shallow work, focus only on deep work (Donald Knuth)
2. Bimodal — alternate between long stretches of deep and shallow (Carl Jung)
3. Rhythmic — schedule deep work at the same time every day, like a habit
4. Journalistic — fit deep work into any available gap (Walter Isaacson)

If you have kids and a job, rhythmic is the only sustainable option. Monastic is impossible — you have meetings, school pickups, and a Slack channel that won’t mute itself. Bimodal requires multi-day stretches of isolation you don’t have. Journalistic sounds flexible, but in practice it requires elite-level context switching that burns through your willpower before lunch. Rhythmic works because it piggybacks on routine. Same time, same place, same ritual. Your brain learns: oh, it’s 5:30 AM and the coffee is brewing — we’re going deep now.

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The Morning Block: Before the House Wakes Up

My deep work day starts at 5:15 AM. Not because I’m a masochist, but because it’s the only time the house is genuinely quiet.

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My Morning Ritual

That’s roughly 105 minutes of deep work before anyone needs me. Five days a week, that’s over 8 hours — more deep work than most engineers get in a full week of “office hours.”

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Making the Early Start Sustainable

Waking up at 5:15 only works if you protect your sleep. I’m in bed by 9:30 PM. That means saying no to late-night Netflix, skipping the “one more episode” trap, and accepting that my social life happens on weekends, not weeknights. Non-negotiable rules:

• No screens after 9 PM (Kindle is the exception)
• Bedroom is cold and dark
• Same wake time on weekdays, even when I’m tired — consistency trains the circadian rhythm
• Weekend mornings are flexible — I might start at 6:30 instead

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Protecting the 2-Hour Block at Work

The morning pre-dawn session handles side projects and learning. But I also need deep work during actual work hours for Weel. That means protecting at least one 2-hour block during the workday.

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How I Defend It

Calendar blocking — I have a recurring “Maker Time” block from 9:30-11:30 AM every day. It shows as busy. It has a description: “Focus block — please use async communication. I’ll respond after 11:30.” Slack boundaries — During maker time, Slack is closed. Not minimized — closed. I have a status that says “Deep work until 11:30” with a 🔇 emoji. My team knows this means: unless something is on fire, it can wait. Meeting audit — Every quarter I review my recurring meetings. If a meeting doesn’t have a clear agenda and decision to be made, I decline or propose an async alternative. I’ve cut my meeting load by about 40% over two years using this approach. The 30-minute buffer — I never schedule anything in the 30 minutes before or after a deep work block. The ramp-up and ramp-down cost of context switching is real. Going from a strategy meeting straight into coding is like trying to sprint immediately after sitting in a car for two hours.

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The Context Switching Tax

Context switching isn’t just annoying — it’s cognitively expensive. Research from Gloria Mark at UC Irvine shows it takes an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to return to a task after an interruption. For engineers doing complex work, I’d argue it’s worse. When I’m deep in a system design and get pulled into a Slack thread about a CI failure, I don’t just lose the time of the interruption. I lose the mental model I was holding in working memory — the three-layer architecture, the edge cases, the data flow. Rebuilding that model takes real cognitive effort.

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How I Minimize It

• Batch communication — I check Slack and email at 8:30 AM, 12 PM, and 4 PM. Three times a day, not thirty.
• Async by default — anything that can be a Linear comment, a PR review note, or a Loom video is better than a synchronous conversation.
• Context notes — when I have to interrupt deep work, I spend 60 seconds writing where I left off and what I was about to do next. This saves 15+ minutes of “where was I?” when I return.
• Single-tasking — one browser tab for the task. One IDE window. One problem. The temptation to “quickly check” something else is the gateway to an hour-long tangent.

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Saying No to Meetings

This is the hardest skill for engineers who want to be seen as collaborative. But every unnecessary meeting is stolen deep work time. My meeting philosophy:

1. Does this meeting need me specifically, or just “someone from the team”? If the latter, rotate attendance.
2. Could this be a 5-minute Loom video instead? Status updates almost always can.
3. Is there a written agenda? No agenda, no attendance. I’ll read the notes after.
4. Am I a decision-maker or an observer? If observer, I’ll read the doc async.

I’ve developed a polite but firm template:

“Thanks for the invite. I’ve reviewed the agenda and I think I can contribute more effectively by reviewing the doc async and adding comments by EOD. Happy to join if you feel synchronous discussion would be more valuable.”

Nine times out of ten, async works fine and I’ve saved 30-60 minutes.

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Deep Work Scoring

What gets measured gets managed. I track deep work hours weekly using a dead-simple system in Notion.

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The Scoring System

Each day, I log:

• Deep work hours — uninterrupted blocks of 45+ minutes on cognitively demanding work
• Quality score (1-5) — how focused did I actually feel during those hours?
• Primary output — what did I produce? (a PR, a design doc, a prototype, etc.)

At the end of the week, I calculate:

• Total deep work hours (target: 12-15)
• Average quality score (target: 3.5+)
• Number of tangible outputs

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What Counts as Deep Work for Engineers

Not everything that feels hard is deep work. Here’s my classification: The test: Does this require sustained concentration and produce something that didn’t exist before? If yes, it’s deep work.

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Energy Management, Not Just Time Management

A two-hour deep work block at 6 AM when you’re rested is worth more than four hours at 3 PM when you’re running on caffeine fumes after back-to-back meetings. I’ve learned to map my energy, not just my calendar:

• 5-8 AM: Peak cognitive energy. Complex problems, creative work, architecture decisions.
• 9-12 PM: High energy but interruptible. Pairing, code reviews, mentoring.
• 1-3 PM: Post-lunch dip. Admin tasks, emails, routine PRs.
• 3-5 PM: Second wind. Planning, writing, lighter creative work.
• 8-9:30 PM: Low energy. Reading, journaling, next-day prep. Never coding.

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Weekend Deep Work Ethics

This is where I differ from the productivity purists. Some people say weekends should be sacred — no work, ever. I disagree, with a caveat. My rule: weekends are for chosen work, not assigned work. I don’t do Weel work on weekends (except genuine emergencies). But I do work on side projects — Thinki.sh, PromptLib, MetaLabs — because that work energizes me. It’s play disguised as work. The ethical framework I use:

1. Family first — no deep work during family activities. If we’re at the park, I’m at the park.
2. One block, not all day — Saturday or Sunday morning, 2 hours max. Not both days.
3. Check with your partner — my wife knows about and supports the Saturday morning block. We negotiated it. She gets Sunday morning to herself in return.
4. Stop when it stops being fun — if I’m forcing myself to work on a side project, something is wrong with the project, not my discipline.

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Real Schedule: A Wednesday in My Life

Here’s an actual Wednesday, to show how this all fits together: Total deep work: ~3.75 hours. Over a 5-day week, that’s 18+ hours. More than enough to ship meaningful work at a high level.

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The Honest Truth

Deep work with kids isn’t about optimization hacks or life hacks or clever productivity apps. It’s about accepting constraints and designing within them. You won’t have 8-hour uninterrupted coding marathons anymore. Grieve that and move on. What you will have is something better: a forcing function that makes every hour count. Parents who do deep work are, in my experience, more productive per hour than their childless peers — because we have no time to waste. The system isn’t perfect. Some mornings Arjun wakes up at 5:20 with a nightmare and my deep work block evaporates. Some weeks are meeting-heavy and I barely hit 8 hours. The point isn’t perfection — it’s consistency over time. Protect the rhythm. Trust the compound effect. And remember: the goal of deep work isn’t to produce more. It’s to produce what matters — and then be fully present for the people who matter more.

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