Today—Sunday—I sat down at my desk with two computers in reach. Four hours later, I looked up. It hadn’t occurred to me to take a break prior to that.
In that time, I made several tweaks to this blog that had been floating in the back of my mind. I organized two ongoing lines of work into GitHub repositories, the way I manage all my notes now . I thought through things that hadn’t previously been organized, and which I’d need to be taking further action on this week.
None of this would have happened on a Tuesday.
The Weekday Reality
I’m an IT Director with a healthy dose of individual contributor work mixed in. During business hours, I often describe particularly busy days as something like working Air Traffic Control at LaGuardia. Everything is important. Everything is happening now. I shift focus from one thing to the next, managing what’s in front of me, keeping planes from colliding.
The work that happens in those hours comes in 5 to 15 minute bursts between half-hour and hour-long meetings. That’s not a complaint—it’s the nature of the job. When you lead a technology team supporting healthcare operations across multiple sites, a lot of people need assistance and information. My customers tend to be the CEO, various directors, and physicians—people accustomed to making their own decisions, but who want to do so based on accurate information. As the most visible member of the team, I routinely receive calls and texts from these same people requesting direct, real-time assistance rather than going through our IT helpdesk. Sometimes I’m using my cell phone as the hub of an impromptu conference call between multiple parties, troubleshooting something live while my desktop sits open to whatever I was working on before the phone rang. And when you’re still hands-on with the technical work yourself, you’re context-switching between leadership and execution all day.
But it’s a fundamentally different kind of work than what I accomplished today.
The Research Confirms It
Paul Graham captured this distinction in his 2009 essay “Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule .” Managers operate in one-hour blocks; their days are built around meetings. Makers—programmers, writers, anyone building something—need half-day minimums to do real work.
“A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon,” Graham wrote, “by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in.”
The research on context switching is brutal. A University of California, Irvine study found it takes an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to fully regain focus after a significant interruption. Psychologist David E. Meyer’s research suggests that shifting between tasks can reduce productivity by 40% .
One study tracking 50 developers over two weeks found they averaged 47 interruptions per day—and only 2.3 hours of actual deep work out of an 8-hour day.
Cal Newport calls this the difference between deep work and shallow work. In his book Deep Work , he cites research by Sophie Leroy on “attention residue”—the fragments of previous tasks that linger in your mind after switching, making it harder to concentrate on what’s in front of you.
What Gets Done When
During the week, I’m effective at a certain kind of work: quick decisions, maintaining situational awareness, handling whatever lands in front of me. The meetings aren’t the problem—they’re often how problems get solved when multiple stakeholders are involved.
But the work that requires sustained thought? The kind where you hold an entire project in your head while you reason through it? That happens on weekends. Early mornings. After hours.
Not because I’m working overtime. Because that’s when my brain finally gets the uninterrupted space it needs.
Today, I worked on one thing until my brain felt like it was complete, then moved to the next. No Teams notifications. No “quick questions.” No meetings in 20 minutes that make it challenging to start anything substantial.
The Uncomfortable Implication
I don’t have a solution here. I’m not going to declare meeting-free days—the operational reality doesn’t allow it. I’m not going to complain about my calendar—those meetings exist because the work requires coordination.
But I’ve stopped pretending that my “real work” happens during business hours. The deep thinking happens on the margins. The weekdays are for execution, communication, and keeping the planes in the air.
The weekends are when I actually get to land something.