A lot of the commenters are understanding this post as the author putting down unbreakable commandments and then demonstrating that there are exceptions to the

A lot of the commenters are understanding this post as the author putting down unbreakable commandments and then demonstrating that there are exceptions to the rules, and thus the author is wrong, or bad at his job, or whatever. We programmers have really got to learn to take stuff less rigidly. OP can correct me if I'm wrong, but I read this more as "here's the ideal I'm working towards, and I follow it as much as I can unless there's a good reason to break it." Read it that way, and there's actually a lot of good advice in there. I've never met a programmer that didn't need to be in the zone to get big projects done well, and everything mentioned here is good advice towards finding time to get into the zone more often. As a start-up founder, I have a ton of little things I constantly need to do, and following advice like this to get those little things into manageable clusters that allow for less context-switching has been incredibly helpful in getting stuff done. I'd never heard of some of the tools the author mentioned, and I sometimes forget some of the strategies, and a refresher is always nice. Thanks for the post!