Last Tuesday, I sat at my desk in my apartment in South Philly for exactly four hours and twelve minutes and produced absolutely nothing. I had my phone in the other room. I had my noise-canceling headphones on. I had a glass of water. I was doing everything Cal Newport told me to do in his book, but instead of ‘producing at an elite level,’ I just stared at a flickering pixel on the left side of my monitor and wondered if I should buy a new rug. I felt like a massive failure because the ‘Deep Work’ gospel says if you just eliminate distractions, the magic happens. It doesn’t. Not usually.
Most of the advice on the internet about deep work versus flow state is written by people who don’t actually do hard things for a living; they write about people who do hard things. There is a massive difference. I’ve spent the last six years trying to balance a full-time operations job with this blog and some freelance coding, and I’ve realized that the neurochemistry of these two states is almost diametrically opposed. One is a grueling uphill climb that makes you want to quit, and the other is a chemical bribe your brain gives you to keep doing something you’re already good at.
Deep work is supposed to hurt
People get confused because they think ‘Deep Work’ and ‘Flow’ are the same thing. They aren’t. Deep work is a deliberate, high-effort cognitive state. When you are doing it, your brain is burning through glucose like a wildfire. You are engaging the prefrontal cortex—the part of your brain that is evolutionarily newest and most expensive to run. What I mean is—actually, let me put it differently. Deep work is the act of forcing your brain to build new neural pathways. That process involves a chemical called glutamate, and when too much of it builds up in your synapses, you start to feel a literal sense of cognitive fatigue. You feel ‘fried.’
I used to think that if I felt tired after two hours of work, I was doing it wrong. I was completely wrong. If you don’t feel a little bit of a headache or a desperate urge to check Instagram, you probably aren’t doing deep work. You’re just ‘working.’ Real deep work is about norepinephrine and acetylcholine. It’s about high-alert focus. It’s uncomfortable. It’s like dragging a heavy sled through wet sand. You’re pushing against the resistance of your own laziness. I know people will disagree, but I think most ‘Deep Work’ advocates are lying about how much of it they actually do. They say they do four hours a day. I tracked my actual ‘hard focus’ time for 14 days using a physical stopwatch—not an app, a real Casio—and I averaged 74 minutes before my brain literally started to protest. Anyone claiming four hours of pure, high-intensity cognitive output every single day is either a freak of nature or lying to sell a course.
Deep work is not a ‘vibe.’ It is a metabolic tax you pay to get better at something hard.
The part nobody talks about: Flow is a trap
Now, let’s talk about flow. Everyone wants to be in ‘the zone.’ It’s that state where time disappears, you feel great, and the work just pours out of you. This is technically called transient hypofrontality. Basically, your prefrontal cortex—the logical, self-critical part of your brain—shuts up and lets your basal ganglia take over. It’s a cocktail of dopamine, endorphins, and anandamide. It feels amazing.
But here’s my risky take: Flow state is actually kind of dangerous for high-quality work. Because the ‘self-critic’ part of your brain is offline, you lose the ability to tell if what you’re doing is actually good. I’ve had ‘flow’ sessions where I wrote 3,000 words in two hours, felt like a god, and then woke up the next morning to realize I’d written absolute gibberish that belonged in a trash can. Flow is great for repetitive tasks or things you’ve already mastered—like playing a sport or coding a routine UI—but for solving a truly new, complex problem? Flow makes you sloppy. You’re too high on your own dopamine to notice the logic gaps.
I actively tell my friends to avoid seeking ‘flow’ when they are doing something new. If it feels easy, you probably aren’t learning anything. You’re just executing. That’s fine for some jobs, but if you’re trying to move the needle, ‘easy’ is the enemy.
Anyway, I once spent an entire Saturday in a ‘flow state’ designing a layout for a client. I thought it was a masterpiece. I didn’t eat, didn’t pee, just sat there for six hours. When I looked at it on Monday, it was hideous. The colors were vibrating against each other in a way that made my eyes hurt. I had lost the ‘editor’ in my head. Total disaster.
I hate productivity tools (specifically Notion)
I have to get this off my chest: I hate Notion. I hate Obsidian. I hate all these ‘second brain’ tools that people use to prepare for work. I know some of you live and die by your databases, but for me, these tools are the ultimate form of ‘productivity theater.’ You spend three hours setting up a workspace with the perfect aesthetic widgets and custom icons, and you feel like you’ve done deep work. You haven’t. You’ve just played a digital version of The Sims.
I refuse to use Notion because it makes the ‘preparation’ for work feel more rewarding than the work itself. Your brain gets a hit of dopamine for organizing a list, which then drains the motivation you needed to actually execute the items on that list. It’s a parasitic relationship. I use a yellow legal pad and a pen I found in a hotel drawer. It’s ugly, it doesn’t sync to the cloud, and it works.
The 37-minute rule and the neurochemistry of the ‘Click’
Through my own trial and error, I found this weird threshold. It takes me exactly 20 minutes to even start focusing. This is the ‘ramp-up’ phase where your brain is trying to suppress the urge to do anything else. Then, from minute 20 to minute 37, I’m in the danger zone. This is where most people quit. This is where the glutamate is building up and your brain is screaming for a distraction.
- Minute 0-20: The Struggle. Pure willpower.
- Minute 20-37: The Wall. This is where the real work happens.
- Minute 37+: The Click. If you make it past 37 minutes, your neurochemistry shifts.
At around the 37-minute mark, the norepinephrine levels stabilize, and you enter a state that isn’t quite ‘flow’ (because you’re still critical) but isn’t ‘struggle’ anymore. It’s just steady, high-output work. I call it ‘The Click.’ If I don’t hit that click by minute 40, I usually just give up and go for a walk because I know my brain isn’t going to cooperate that day. It’s better to admit defeat than to sit there and build up a resentment for your own desk.
I might be wrong about the exact timing for everyone else—maybe your ‘click’ is at 15 minutes or 50—but the point is that there is a physiological barrier you have to break through. Most people think they can’t focus, but they just haven’t waited long enough for the chemicals to balance out.
One more thing: stop drinking coffee right when you wake up. If you spike your adenosine receptors with caffeine before your natural cortisol levels have peaked, you’re going to crash right when you need to be doing your deep work. I wait until 10:30 AM. It sucks for the first hour of the day, but it’s the only way to make the ’37-minute rule’ actually work.
I often wonder if we’re all just over-complicating this because we’re bored. We want there to be a ‘hack’ or a ‘state’ we can enter so that the work doesn’t feel like work. But the neurochemistry is pretty clear: your brain wants to conserve energy. It doesn’t want to think hard. It wants to find a pattern and repeat it (flow) or find a distraction and take it. Everything else is just us fighting against millions of years of evolution.
Maybe the trick isn’t finding the right state, but just getting used to the feeling of your brain being tired.
Anyway, go buy a physical stopwatch. Stop using your phone. It helps.