Work is a mixture of thinking through problems, writing down the answer, debugging systems, talking to stakeholders, writing prose for engineers or management.

Work is a mixture of thinking through problems, writing down the answer, debugging systems, talking to stakeholders, writing prose for engineers or management. An idea from the creative artist world is to consciously divide the tasks into creative and other. Game plan goes: Wake up. Do not read email. Or slack. Breakfast then walk, thinking about things. Write down the ideas you want to come back to. Then lunch. Then take a look at email, slack. Do the traditional fire fighting while trying to write code simultaneously game until the evening. Spend the evening socialising, reading, generally taking in new information, probably in the hope that it gets sorted while you sleep and takes your mind off the fires of the afternoon. That's not a path to three hours a day of work. But it probably is a way to make progress on hard problems despite a software dev day job that applies pressure against that, via cultural firefighting.