Will this make me more productive?

Not directly, and any claim that it will is overstating the evidence. What it does is protect the entry into focus and the recovery afterwards. Fewer wasted re-entries and better sleep is a real effect; a higher ceiling is not.

I do not have a quiet room. Does that matter?

No. Every session here works at a desk, on a walk, or in a stairwell, and the longest one is ten minutes. It is designed around a day that has no quiet room in it.

What if I only do one thing?

The eight minutes at the end of the workday, after writing down the open loops. It is the detachment signal, and it is the one people report as the turning point.

Senior and staff engineers

For senior engineers: protecting the transition into deep work

You have four hours of calendar and one hour of thinking to do in it. The context switch costs more than the work. By six you are wired, by eleven you are still debugging in your head, and the morning starts with a review queue.

The day

Where the sessions go

6 sessions · 30 minutes across a working day

On waking
Coherent Breathing
Before the phone. It sets the baseline the day's spikes are measured from, and it is the session people skip.
6 min
Before the first deep block
Box Breathing
Steady rather than sedated — even counts, so you enter the block alert. Phone in another room first; the breathing does not fix a fragmented desk.
4 min
Between contexts
Physiological Sigh
Four rounds after a review, a thread or a call. It is the cheapest way to stop residue accumulating across eight switches.
1 min
When the incident lands
Physiological Sigh
Two inhales, one long exhale, before you type. It buys the two seconds in which most bad production decisions are avoided.
1 min
End of workday
Extended Exhale
After the open loops are written down and before anything else. This is the detachment signal, and it is the highest-value eight minutes on the list.
8 min
Before sleep
Pre-Sleep Breathing
Long exhales, no screen. Debugging in bed is what turns one bad day into a bad week.
10 min

The cost is in the switches, not the hours

Switching tasks leaves attention residue: measurable degradation on the task you return to, because part of your attention is still on the previous one. An engineer's day is mostly switches — review, thread, incident, standup, back to the problem — so the total cost is not the sum of the work but the sum of the re-entries. That is the thing worth defending, and it is defended at the boundaries rather than in the middle.

Screen breathing is doing quiet damage

Long stretches at a terminal produce upper-chest breathing and stretches of holding the breath entirely while reading — the pattern observed and named as email apnoea. It lowers carbon dioxide via the large recovery breaths that follow, and low CO₂ narrows cerebral vessels, which is exactly the woolly late-afternoon state engineers answer with a fourth coffee.

Why the exit matters more than the entry

The thing that most reliably predicts whether you recover overnight is psychological detachment — genuinely being off, not merely away from the laptop. Engineering work is unusually good at preventing it, because an unsolved problem stays cognitively active until it has a plan. Writing the next step down releases it; closing the laptop does not.

What this will not do

None of this adds cognitive capacity, and nothing here will make you a better engineer. It protects recovery and the transitions, which is where the evidence actually is. It also does not fix an on-call rota that never lets you sleep, or a team that has four people doing six people's work — those are structural and they need a different conversation.

The full protocol

14-Day Deep Work Day

14 days, written day by day with what to measure. It is inside the app, and the free Control Pause test is the number it starts from.

Take the free test Open the programme

Questions people in this role ask

Will this make me more productive?: Not directly, and any claim that it will is overstating the evidence. What it does is protect the entry into focus and the recovery afterwards. Fewer wasted re-entries and better sleep is a real effect; a higher ceiling is not.
I do not have a quiet room. Does that matter?: No. Every session here works at a desk, on a walk, or in a stairwell, and the longest one is ten minutes. It is designed around a day that has no quiet room in it.
What if I only do one thing?: The eight minutes at the end of the workday, after writing down the open loops. It is the detachment signal, and it is the one people report as the turning point.

What this page is built on

— Leroy, 2009, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes — attention residue after task switching
— Balban et al., 2023, Cell Reports Medicine — five minutes a day of cyclic sighing, randomised over one month
— Sonnentag & Fritz, 2015, Journal of Organizational Behavior — psychological detachment and overnight recovery
— Ma et al., 2017, Frontiers in Psychology — eight weeks of diaphragmatic breathing, cortisol and sustained attention