Forem: Tirth Doshi

It's My Birthday And I Finally Understood What Was Slowing Me Down

Tirth Doshi — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 16:15:56 +0000

This one's a little personal. Bear with me. There's a lesson in here for every developer.

Today is my birthday. And instead of just eating cake and calling it a day, I found myself reflecting on something uncomfortable: I've been working wrong.

Not inefficiently. Not lazily. Wrong in a way that quietly erodes everything around the work itself.

The Real Problem Wasn't Overworking. It Was Being Online While Working.

I used to think the enemy was long hours. But I've realized the bigger culprit is context-switching disguised as collaboration. The back-and-forth Slack messages, the quick "got a sec?" pings, the notification that pulls you out of flow right when things are clicking.

My personal success metric has always been simple: sit in one place for one focused hour. That's it. Review PRs, write code, think deeply, but for one unbroken hour.

When I overwork, I blow past that hour. And the message that sends to my brain is: "time doesn't matter, anything can interrupt anything." That's the real damage.

The 60-Minute Rule

If you work for four uninterrupted hours without context-switching, you can build extraordinary things. But when you're in "always-on" mode, you never really start. You're perpetually warming up.

The 60-minute rule in practice:

No context switching for one hour. Silence is not a problem to solve. Back-and-forth messages are a tax on your thinking. Batch them, don't react to them.

Slow Down to Ship Better

I've been re-reading Cal Newport's Slow Productivity, and it reframed how I think about velocity. The argument isn't "work less." It's expand your time horizon.

Most of us think in days or weeks. What if you thought in 90-day windows instead?

When nothing feels urgent over a 90-day scale, you make better architectural decisions. You write more maintainable code. You mentor more. You think before you type.

The irony of AI-accelerated development is that we're shipping faster but sometimes thinking shallower. The antidote isn't slowing your hands. It's slowing your assumptions.

Reading Is Not a Luxury. It's Leverage.

When I'm overworked, reading is the first thing to go. That's backwards.

Books like Slow Productivity and Ultralearning have made me a meaningfully better developer, not by teaching me syntax, but by teaching me how to think about learning and systems. Right now I'm reading a book on Tesla. Not the car company. The man.

If you're not reading outside your stack, you're optimizing inside a box you can't see.

The Pause Is the Strategy

Leaders in tech love talking about velocity. But the best ones I've watched are masters of the pause. The deliberate moment where you stop, look at the trajectory, and ask: is this the right direction?

The pause isn't laziness. It's steering.

Without pausing, you get fast. Without direction, fast just means you arrive at the wrong place sooner.

Gym. Yoga. Breathe.

I know this feels off-topic for a dev blog. Stay with me.

Going to the gym consistently, even when it's inconvenient, builds an identity: I do hard things even when they're hard. That identity doesn't stay in the gym. It shows up when you're debugging at hour three, when you're refactoring code you hate, when you're in a meeting that's going sideways.

Deep breathing and deep thinking are more correlated than we give credit for. When your breath is shallow and reactive, so is your thinking. When you breathe deliberately, you pause deliberately.

Practical tip: 4-7-8 breathing before your focused hour. Inhale 4 counts, hold 7, exhale 8. It sounds small. It isn't.

It's Not Hardwork. It's Respect.

The most underrated skill in a dev team isn't technical. It's knowing when to speak and when to listen.

Let product managers do their job. Let managers manage. Trust the people around you to play their roles. When you stop trying to fill every gap, you free up your best thinking for the work only you can do.

Speak less. Listen more. Do your work well in the time you have.

A Birthday Checklist (For Myself, and Maybe You)

Limit deep work to 60-minute blocks and protect them fiercely. Think in 90-day windows, not today's fire. Read one non-technical book per month. Build a habit stack, like going to the gym or reading after an existing trigger such as brushing your teeth. Practice the pause before reacting. Breathe deeper, it really does help. Don't break the 60-minute rule.

Final Thought

Atomic habits. Slow productivity. Deep breathing. These aren't self-help clichés. They're systems for staying human while doing technical work that constantly tempts you toward urgency.

Make 1% improvements. Stack them. Trust the 90-day window.

And if it's your birthday too, happy birthday. Slow down. You've got time.

Thanks for reading

Why Senior Devs Do One Thing at a Time (And You Should Too)

Tirth Doshi — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 00:29:25 +0000

You have a PR open. Slack is pinging. Your manager wants a status update. You're halfway through debugging a gnarly race condition. And somehow you're supposed to do all of it at once.

Most developers work this way every single day. And most developers wonder why they feel exhausted but under-accomplished.

The answer isn't better tooling or a smarter task manager. It's simpler: do one thing at a time.

Context Switching Has a Real Cost

There's a reason your IDE warns you about unsaved state. Your brain works the same way.

Every time you switch from debugging to Slack to a PR review and back, you're not multitasking. You're reloading. You're paying the cost of context restoration every single time. Studies put this cost at 20+ minutes of recovery per interruption. In a day with five context switches, you may have lost over an hour of deep work before you wrote a single line.

The damage compounds. Context switching doesn't just slow you down in the moment. It trains your brain to expect interruptions, making it harder to reach deep focus even when you have uninterrupted time.

What Deep Focus Actually Looks Like in Code

You know that state where the code just flows? Where you're holding the entire system in your head, tracing data through layers, and the solution becomes obvious?

That's not talent. That's depth. And depth only comes from sustained, uninterrupted focus on one problem.

When you commit to one thing at a time:

You stop writing shallow fixes and start understanding root causes
You read the entire stack trace instead of Googling the first error
You catch the edge case before it becomes an incident
You write code that the next developer can actually follow

One focused hour of real problem-solving beats three fragmented hours of half-attention every time.

Code Reviews Are Not a Background Task

One of the most common ways developers lose quality is by treating code reviews as something to do between other things.

A review done in two minutes between meetings isn't a review. It's a rubber stamp.

When you give a PR your full attention, you're not just checking syntax. You're thinking about:

Does this change fit the architecture?
What breaks if this assumption is wrong?
Is there a simpler way to solve this?
What will this look like to maintain in six months?

That kind of thinking requires being fully present. Treat every review as its own focused session, not a notification to clear.

Silence Is Where Architecture Happens

The best technical decisions rarely come from a rushed Slack thread. They come from thinking.

Real thinking requires silence. It requires sitting with a problem long enough to understand it from multiple angles, to see the tradeoffs, to imagine the failure modes.

If you're always reacting, always in a meeting, always half-engaged, you're making decisions with a fraction of your mental capacity. The result is code and systems that work today but create pain next quarter.

Block time for silence. Not for meetings. Not for "async communication." For thinking.

Four Hours of Deep Work Is Enough

You don't need to be in the zone for eight hours. That's not realistic, and chasing it leads to burnout.

Four hours of genuinely focused engineering work, where you're fully present on one problem, is enough to move almost any project forward meaningfully. The rest of your time can go to meetings, reviews, collaboration, and recovery.

The goal isn't to maximize hours. It's to protect the hours that actually matter.

Direction Over Busyness

Being busy is easy. Git log full, Jira tickets moving, PRs flying. But are you actually building toward something?

The developers who grow fast aren't the ones doing the most. They're the ones who know where they're going and make deliberate choices about what to work on deeply.

Define your technical goals. What do you want to understand better in the next 90 days? What system do you want to have a genuine mental model of? What skill gap is holding you back?

Then protect time for those things. Don't let the reactive work crowd out the work that builds you.

Build the Muscle of Sitting With Hard Problems

The instinct to reach for Stack Overflow, to ask a colleague, to move on to an easier ticket when things get hard, that instinct is worth fighting.

The developers who become invaluable are the ones who can sit with ambiguity. Who can stare at a problem that doesn't make sense, stay with it, and eventually find the thread that unravels it.

That's a muscle. You build it by not running from discomfort. By spending one more hour with the problem before asking for help. By reading the source code instead of just the docs.

One focused hour a day on something genuinely hard, a new concept, a difficult refactor, understanding a system you don't know yet, compounds faster than you'd expect.

The Practical Version

Here's what this looks like day to day:

Before you start: Pick the one thing that actually matters today. Not the most urgent. The most important.

During deep work: Close Slack. Close your email tab. Put on headphones. Give the problem your full brain.

For code reviews: Schedule them as their own block. Don't review between other things.

For career growth: Protect one hour a day for depth. Reading, building, learning something that makes you a better engineer long-term.

When things get chaotic: Slow down. Seriously. The instinct under pressure is to speed up and scatter. The move that actually works is to pick one thing, do it well, and then pick the next.

The irony of software engineering is that we build systems to handle complexity, but then we try to run ourselves like multithreaded processes without any of the synchronization.

You're not a thread pool. Pick one thing. Go deep. Ship it. Repeat.

That's how the best engineers work.

The Art of Hard Choices: A Developer's Guide to Building a Life Worth Living

Tirth Doshi — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 20:55:35 +0000

We live in a world that's basically optimized to make us comfortable. Every app, every algorithm, every "one-click checkout" is designed to make life easier right now.

But here's something I've learned after years of coding: the easiest choices rarely lead to anywhere interesting.

A weird cricket analogy that actually makes sense

So I was watching cricket the other day (stay with me, I promise this is relevant). Sanju Samson was having a terrible game while Ishan Kishan was absolutely crushing it. Everyone watching was like "dude, just swap them already!"

But the team didn't. They stuck with Samson. And at first I thought they were being stubborn, but then I realized - they're playing a completely different game than what we're watching. They're thinking about team chemistry, long-term strategy, player confidence. All the stuff that doesn't show up on the scoreboard today but matters a ton six months from now.

And that's basically every important choice in software development too.

Like when you're deciding whether to:

Actually refactor that mess or just ship it and "deal with it later" (we never do)
Write tests or just pray it works in prod
Read the docs or copy-paste from Stack Overflow and hope for the best
Use TypeScript or stay in JavaScript land (yeah I said it)

The first option always feels slower in the moment. But six months later? You're either grateful or cursing past-you.

Let's talk about developer dopamine addiction

Okay so this is something nobody really talks about but we're all guilty of it.

We're addicted to quick hits:

Refreshing GitHub stars on our repos every 10 minutes
Checking if that Stack Overflow answer got upvoted
Opening Twitter between compiles (or is it X now? I can't keep up)
Starting new side projects instead of finishing the seven we already have
Tutorial hell - just ONE more course and then I'll definitely build something
Getting lost in HackerNews at 3pm when we should be debugging

Here's the uncomfortable truth: most of us have completely lost the ability to sit with one hard problem for an hour straight.

We can't deep dive into a gnarly bug when Slack is going off. We can't think through a system design when we're checking our phone every 5 minutes. We've turned into consumers of code instead of creators.

And look, I'm not judging. I'm literally describing myself six months ago.

The fix isn't what you think

You can't just willpower your way out of dopamine addiction. Trust me, I tried. What actually works is getting addicted to better things.

Instead of being addicted to social media, get addicted to solving hard problems. Instead of chasing GitHub stars, get addicted to writing code that makes you proud. Instead of hoarding tutorials, get addicted to actually shipping stuff.

The beautiful part? Good habits compound just like bad ones. Except in the right direction.

When I started spending my mornings solving LeetCode problems instead of scrolling Twitter, I didn't magically become a 10x developer overnight. But after three months? I was noticeably better at thinking through algorithms. After six months? I was helping other people solve problems I used to struggle with.

The real secret of "10x developers"

Hot take: 10x developers aren't actually 10 times smarter than everyone else.

They just have better systems.

Every truly productive developer I know has some version of this:

Morning: Hit the gym (because sitting at a desk for 8 hours is terrible for you)

Early work block: Deep work, no Slack, no meetings, just code

Mid-day: Code reviews, helping teammates, actually being human

Afternoon: Another focused block for hard problems

Late afternoon: Learning new stuff, reading docs, staying current

Evening: Plan tomorrow, write down what went well and what didn't

Notice what's not there? Deciding whether to work out. Debating whether to learn today. Wondering if they should check social media "real quick."

The decisions are already made. They just execute.

Structure isn't boring. Structure is how you free up mental energy for the things that actually matter.

When everything breaks (because it will)

Real talk: your code will break. Your PR will get rejected. You'll ship a bug that costs the company money. You'll have days where you feel like you have no idea what you're doing.

I once deployed on a Friday at 4:30pm. I know, I know. It broke production. I spent my entire weekend fixing it while my friends were out having fun. Not my finest moment.

But here's what I learned: you can't control outcomes. You can only control what you do every day.

The Bhagavad Gita has this idea (bear with me): "You're not entitled to the fruits of your actions, only the actions themselves."

For developers, this means:

You control:

Writing clean code
Learning every day
Helping your teammates
Showing up consistently

You don't control:

Getting promoted
Your project getting approved
Your PR getting merged quickly
Getting recognized for your work

Focus on what you control. Let go of what you can't. Seriously, this mindset shift changed my entire career.

Seven things that actually work

Forget motivation. Build systems. Here's what's worked for me:

1. Define your actual process

Bad goal: "I want to get better at system design"

Good system: Every day for 30 days, read one chapter of "Designing Data-Intensive Applications," implement one small piece of what you learned, write a short explanation in your own words.

See the difference? One is vague hope. The other is a recipe.

2. Ask yourself one question before every choice

"Is this good for the next hour or good for the next year?"

That's it. That's the whole framework.

Scrolling Reddit? Good for the next hour (if that).

Reading PostgreSQL docs? Boring now, powerful forever.

Another YouTube tutorial? Feels productive, isn't.

Actually building that side project? Hard now, portfolio forever.

3. Keep a mistakes log (not for bugs, for life)

I have a notes file where I write down every time I make a choice that I know isn't serving me:

"Watched coding tutorials for 3 hours instead of coding - felt productive but built literally nothing"

"Stayed up until 2am scrolling - next day was useless, wrote terrible code"

"Said yes to a meeting during my deep work block - destroyed my flow, shipped nothing"

I review this every Sunday. Patterns become obvious real quick.

4. Get obsessive about filling knowledge gaps

Everyone sucks at something. The difference between junior and senior isn't talent - it's whether you systematically fix your weak spots.

Bad at algorithms? Do one LeetCode problem every morning for 90 days.

Weak on system design? Read one architecture blog post daily.

Don't understand Docker? Build three projects using it.

Knowledge compounds faster than you think.

5. Teach everything you learn

Want to really understand something? Try explaining it to someone else.

Write blog posts. Review junior dev PRs with real feedback. Answer Stack Overflow questions. Give talks at meetups.

Teaching forces you to understand things deeply. Plus you build a reputation and network at the same time. Win-win-win.

6. Your thoughts matter more than you think

When production breaks at 2am, your internal dialogue matters.

Instead of: "I'm so stupid, I always mess things up"

Try: "Okay, this is a tough problem, but I can figure it out"

Instead of: "Everyone else is so much better than me"

Try: "I'm competing with yesterday's version of me, not them"

Instead of: "My code got rejected, I must suck"

Try: "Feedback is how I get better"

This isn't toxic positivity. It's choosing useful thoughts over useless ones.

7. Keep your routine when life gets hard

Anyone can be disciplined when they're motivated and things are going well.

The real test is keeping your routine when:

Production is on fire
You got a bad performance review
Your PR was rejected for the third time
You're dealing with imposter syndrome
Life is just hard

This is when your structure saves you. You don't have to decide whether to work out or learn or sleep properly. You just do it because that's what you do.

The compound effect that changes everything

Here's some napkin math that blew my mind:

If you get just 1% better at something every day, after a year you're not 365% better. You're 37x better. That's how compounding works.

One LeetCode problem won't make you an algorithms expert. But 200 will.

One blog post won't build your personal brand. But 50 will.

One day of focused work won't make you senior. But 1,000 will.

The hard choices feel tiny in the moment. That's exactly why most people don't make them.

Everyone wants the senior title NOW. The big salary NOW. The respect NOW.

But that's not how any of this works. Real growth is slow, quiet, and built from thousands of small decisions that don't feel like they matter.

Who are you becoming?

Five years from now you'll be a completely different engineer. The only question is: what kind?

The developer who chose comfort is comfortable but stagnant. Same skills, same salary range, same problems.

The developer who chose growth is constantly evolving, valuable, and solving interesting problems.

You choose. Every day. In every small decision.

Just start

Look, I could write another 5000 words but at some point you just gotta do something.

Pick ONE thing:

Block 2 hours tomorrow for deep work, no Slack, no phone
Sign up for the gym (seriously, your back will thank you)
Start that side project you've been thinking about
Write your first blog post
Delete social media apps from your phone for one week
Do one LeetCode problem before work tomorrow

Do it now. Not tomorrow. Not next week. Now.

Your future self - the one making good money, working on cool stuff, respected by their team - that person is built from the choices you make today.

Don't let them down.

Real talk in the comments

What's the hardest choice you made as a developer that actually paid off later? Or what habit are you trying to build right now?

I'll go first: deleting Twitter from my phone was SO hard but my productivity literally doubled. No cap.

Your turn 👇

30 Minutes Daily: The Only Learning Strategy You Need in 2026

Tirth Doshi — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 19:10:57 +0000

Yesterday I lost several ping-pong games to a friend. I was frustrated, not because I wasn't trying, but because my fundamentals were wrong. My stance was off, my footwork sloppy, and I didn't understand spin. That moment cut through the noise: when you're stuck, more effort rarely helps. Better practice does.

This is the lesson I keep relearning: defeats are data. They tell you what to fix.

Learning Through Defeat

Losing felt personal, but quitting would guarantee I never improved. Instead of grinding more matches, I needed to step back: study stance, practice controlled drills, and isolate the one thing I didn't understand: spin. Playing more without fixing technique would only reinforce bad habits.

This applies to everything: debugging a system, preparing for a promotion, or learning a new language. When progress stalls, the answer is rarely more hours. It's better structure, clearer feedback, and deliberate practice.

When I lost at ping pong yesterday, it was emotionally difficult. The losses were hard to digest, but giving up would mean never coming back stronger. This time, instead of just grinding through more games, I need to step back, learn the correct stance, practice the proper shots, and truly master the technical skills. Simply playing more won't fix what's broken. The flaw is in my technique, not my competitive spirit.

The same principle applies everywhere. In software engineering, in career growth, in life. When we're in the game, we need to keep learning and adapting. Learning isn't optional. It's essential.

I've noticed this pattern in my career too. I've been developing software well recently, yet I'm "still L61" while some friends got promoted faster. That's tough to hear. But I'm learning that others might have a steeper growth curve than mine, while I can have a longer one than theirs. Your path to success can look completely different from others, and that's okay.

The Three Pillars of Continuous Learning

1. Patience: Trust the Process

Being patient is crucial when dealing with any learning process. When you're patient, you can focus on the journey, and the results will naturally follow. Our tendency to rush everything often sends us in the wrong direction.

Think about the Chinese bamboo tree. It doesn't grow at all during the first five years, then suddenly in the sixth year, it erupts. You cannot compete with someone who has learned for two hours every day for 365 days. The gap will keep widening until it becomes insurmountable. The key is doing your best during this time, trusting that consistent effort will compound.

A Vivid Example of Invisible Progress

A friend of mine learned conversational Spanish by doing 30 minutes a day for 90 days. At day 30 she felt like nothing had changed. At day 60 she could follow short videos. By day 90 she was holding 10-minute conversations. The progress looked invisible until it wasn't, then it felt exponential.

That's the pattern: small daily inputs, delayed visible outputs, then sudden, compounding gains.

2. Discipline: Maintain Your Structure

I've recently discovered a problem in my routine: late-night cooking and being overly active on Teams messages. When I'm too engaged on Teams, I lose hours of structure. I love working with structure, going to the gym at 6:00, finishing by 7:30 so I can meal prep properly. When my structure broke down, my cooking suffered. I've been eating mostly pasta for weeks now.

Here's what I've learned: once structure is broken, it's incredibly difficult to rebuild. A structured life means dedicating time to what matters: future family, meaningful work, community. The fruits of discipline are sweet, but they require constant tending.

3. Focus: Eliminate Distractions

Distractions are everywhere in today's society. Our brains are constantly stimulated by external noise and unhelpful environments. For me, TV is a personal weakness. When I watch too much, I get lost in it, and my brain starts craving more distraction.

Here's the key insight: if you enhance focus in your life, your brain will naturally crave more focus. If you enhance distraction, it will crave distraction. To produce valuable work, we need to stop context-switching constantly.

The best way to avoid distractions? Embrace silence. Be silent. Be with your thoughts. Be bored.

What Should You Learn?

I'm going to ask something hard from you: spend less time on Instagram and your phone. "Oh no, I can't live without it!" I bet you can. No one has just taught you how. The central idea is redirecting your time toward meaningful activities: meditation, writing, reading, playing sports, anything that doesn't involve scrolling.

Learning keeps you mentally young, sharpens your thinking, expands your knowledge, and makes you a better communicator. When you understand things deeply, you speak with confidence and clarity.

Outside of Work

Don't just learn technical skills. To grow in all areas of life, diversify your learning:

Physical & Practical Skills

Fitness & Nutrition: Learn proper exercise form and diet basics. Start with a single YouTube channel like AthleanX or Jeff Nippard.
Cooking: One of the most important life skills. Begin with mastering 3 to 5 healthy recipes you can rotate. Learning to cook good food means maintaining a healthy diet and lifestyle.

Mental Enrichment

History: If you're interested, take a single course on Coursera or read one acclaimed history book per quarter.
Mathematics or Physics: I sometimes open MIT OpenCourseWare lectures and spend an hour learning. It's genuinely refreshing.
Finance: Understanding how money and the economy work is crucial for software engineers who often neglect this. Start with "The Psychology of Money" by Morgan Housel.

Personal Goals

My Goal: Ping Pong: Over the next two months, I'm focusing on fundamentals. I have decent hand-eye coordination, but I don't understand spins. That's my gap to close.
Your Goal: Pick one skill you've always wanted to develop and commit to 30 minutes daily for 60 days.

Within Work: Software Engineering

The biggest mistake a software engineer can make is thinking they know everything. Software engineering is a continuous learning process. Pick one area per quarter:

Networks and distributed systems
Security fundamentals
AI and machine learning
DevOps and deployment pipelines
AI-first development approaches

Excelling at software engineering provides the income to live comfortably and invest in quality learning resources.

How to Learn Effectively

Four Primary Sources:

YouTube: Free tutorials and lectures (MIT OpenCourseWare, 3Blue1Brown for math, Fireship for tech)
Books: Deep, focused learning that sticks (aim for one book per month)
Online Courses: Structured paths with expert guidance (Coursera, Udemy, Udacity)
Mentorship: Ask questions to friends and colleagues who excel in areas you want to grow

My Challenge to You:

Choose ONE area from the list above
Dedicate 30 minutes daily for the next 30 days
Track your progress in a simple journal
Share what you learned with someone else

Quotes to Remember

"Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young." — Henry Ford

"The beautiful thing about learning is that no one can take it away from you." — B.B. King

"Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn." — Benjamin Franklin

"We overestimate what we can do in a day and underestimate what we can do in a year." — Bill Gates

"Small disciplines repeated with consistency every day lead to great achievements." — John C. Maxwell

Conclusion: Your Move

Learning is not a destination. It's a lifelong journey that shapes who we become. My defeats on the ping pong table yesterday weren't setbacks; they were invitations to learn, to improve, and to become better.

In a world filled with distractions and instant gratification, choosing to learn is an act of rebellion. It's choosing depth over superficiality, growth over stagnation, and long-term fulfillment over short-term pleasure.

You don't need to learn everything at once. Start small. Pick one area from above. Dedicate just 30 minutes daily. Trust the process, be patient like the Chinese bamboo tree, and maintain the discipline to show up even when progress feels invisible.

The gap between who you are today and who you could be a year from now is filled with one simple practice: consistent, intentional learning.

So here's your first step: close this tab after reading. Don't scroll to the next article. Instead, open YouTube or grab a book on something you've always wanted to learn. Spend just 30 minutes on it today. Then do it again tomorrow.

Your future self is counting on the learning you choose to do today. After all, the beautiful thing about learning is that no one can take it away from you. It's yours to keep, to grow, and to share with the world.

What will you learn today?

What's your 30-minute learning goal for 2026? Drop it in the comments below! 👇

The One-Hour Habit That Quietly Fixed My Focus as a Software Developer

Tirth Doshi — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 02:17:14 +0000

Today was off. Nothing catastrophic, just... off. Back-to-back meetings, a restless mind, and when I finally got home, I did what I always do when I'm avoiding myself: I turned on the TV.

The noise filled the room. Not just sound, but the specific kind of noise that masquerades as relaxation while actually preventing rest. I sat there, eating dinner in front of the screen, and realized something I'd been avoiding for months: I wasn't watching TV because I enjoyed it. I was watching it because I couldn't sit with myself.

That's when I remembered my one-hour test.

The Test That Changed Everything

I measure my success by a simple metric: can I sit in one place, doing one meaningful thing, for one hour?

Not scrolling. Not multitasking. Not half-present while my mind runs elsewhere. Just one hour of complete focus on something that matters, writing, reading, thinking, creating.

It sounds absurdly simple. It's brutally hard.

When you're not used to it, sitting still feels impossible. Your brain screams for distraction. Your body fidgets. Every notification, every potential escape route calls to you like a siren. But here's what I've learned: that discomfort is the point. The moment you can stay with discomfort instead of numbing it is the moment everything changes.

TV was my numbing mechanism. Yours might be different.

The Anatomy of Numbing

Numbing isn't just about television. It's any behavior that helps you avoid feeling what you need to feel, thinking what you need to think, or doing what you need to do.

Cigarettes are numbing - they give you a chemical pause from underlying anxiety. Overworking is numbing - it lets you hide from emotional voids behind the respectable mask of productivity. Endlessly chasing romantic validation is numbing - it replaces the harder work of building genuine self-worth.

The common thread? All these behaviors keep you in your head, disconnected from your body, running from the present moment.

I realized I wasn't really living. I was managing discomfort.

Don't Eliminate the Negative. Replace It With the Positive

Here's the trap most people fall into: they try to quit bad habits through sheer willpower. "I'm going to stop watching TV." "I'm going to stop wasting time." "I'm going to stop being distracted."

This almost never works. You can't just remove something without replacing it. Nature abhors a vacuum, and so does your daily routine.

Instead, I started filling those hours with things that actually mattered. Not as punishment or forced discipline, but as genuine alternatives that gave me what TV never could: growth, presence, and real satisfaction.

Here's what worked for me.

Reading: The Gateway to Presence

When you pick up a book instead of the remote, something shifts. The act of reading demands presence in a way that passive watching never does. Your mind has to engage. You have to slow down. You enter a state of focused attention that's become rare in modern life.

The benefits compound: better vocabulary, deeper thinking, exposure to ideas that actually challenge you. But the real gift is simpler - reading taught me I could enjoy being still. That an hour spent absorbed in words could be more satisfying than three hours of numbed-out channel surfing.

Start with twenty minutes. Build from there. Let yourself be surprised by how much you actually enjoy it.

Writing: Thinking Made Visible

This piece you're reading? It's therapy. When I write, I'm forced to think clearly. Vague anxieties become concrete problems. Circular thoughts find resolution. The chaos in my head organizes itself into something I can actually work with.

Writing isn't about being good at it. It's about externalizing what's internal, about making the invisible visible. It's about sitting with your own thoughts long enough to understand them.

Some days the words flow. Other days I stare at a blank screen for thirty minutes before typing a single sentence. Both days matter. Both days are practice in staying present.

The Gym: Where Discomfort Becomes Strength

The gym is where I learned that discomfort isn't the enemy, it's the teacher.

When you're under a heavy weight, you can't numb out. You can't distract yourself. You have to be completely present with the sensation of difficulty, stay with it, and push through. Your nervous system learns a crucial lesson: discomfort won't kill you. In fact, it's exactly what makes you stronger.

This transfers to everything else. The ability to sit with a difficult emotion. To have a hard conversation. To do the work that matters even when it's uncomfortable. The gym is just the training ground.

Not every session will be great. Some days you'll be weaker, slower, less motivated. That's when the real training happens - when you show up anyway and teach your body that consistency matters more than performance.

Learning: The Antidote to Stagnation

I've discovered something strange: binge watching educational tutorials on YouTube scratches the same itch as binge watching TV, but leaves me energized instead of depleted.

The format is familiar enough to feel easy, but the content is challenging enough to create growth. I'm still "watching something," but I'm learning Blender, or understanding philosophy, or improving my craft.

The more you learn, the more you realize how much you don't know. This isn't discouraging. It's liberating. It means growth is infinite. Boredom becomes impossible.

Movement With Purpose: The Podcast Walk

A friend introduced me to this: walk for 30 to 60 minutes while listening to a podcast that teaches you something.

I'll admit, I'm not naturally drawn to this. I prefer either pure movement or pure learning. But I can't deny the elegance: you're training your body and feeding your mind simultaneously. You're getting sunlight, steps, and education in one compact practice.

It's especially useful for those days when you feel too restless to sit still but too mentally tired for intense focus. The movement settles your nervous system while the content engages your mind.

Horse Stance: Befriending Discomfort

There's a martial arts pose called horse stance: basically a deep squat hold that becomes agonizing after about ninety seconds.

I practice it because it teaches one lesson with crystal clarity: you can stay with discomfort. Your mind will scream at you to stop. Your legs will shake. Everything in you will want to quit. But if you breathe, stay present, and choose to remain, you discover something profound: discomfort is just sensation. It can't actually harm you.

This is physical grounding in its purest form. You're not in your head. You're in your body, feeling everything, staying anyway.

Life gets a lot easier when discomfort becomes your friend.

Travel: Expanding Beyond Yourself

When possible, go somewhere new. Not to escape, but to expand.

Travel forces you out of your routines and assumptions. You see how other people live. You encounter beauty and strangeness in equal measure. You remember that your problems are not the entire universe.

This isn't about expensive trips or Instagram aesthetics. It's about exposing yourself to novelty, to the discomfort of not knowing, to the humility of being a beginner in an unfamiliar place.

Even a day trip to a nearby town counts. The point is breaking the pattern.

Self-Care: Respect Made Tangible

On busy days (especially on busy days) you need time alone. Not to zone out, but to actually care for yourself.

This might mean a long shower. A skincare routine. Cooking a real meal. Stretching. Whatever makes you feel like you're treating yourself with the respect you deserve.

Self-care isn't selfish. It's the foundation. When you respect yourself enough to take care of yourself, everything else gets easier. You show up better for others because you're not running on empty.

The busier life gets, the more essential this becomes.

Meditation: The Practice of Self-Control

Breathe in. Breathe out. Sit with what arises. Don't react.

Meditation is simple and impossibly difficult. Try sitting still for an hour and you'll understand why most people never build a practice.

But here's what I've learned: meditation is where consciousness and self-control meet. It's where you learn to pause between stimulus and response. It's where the gap that creates freedom lives.

I remember John Wineland talking about the masculine and feminine polarities: how women thrive in expression and speaking their truth, while men need self control and presence. Not as a rigid rule, but as a useful framework.

Self-control is the highest form of power. Without it, you're at the mercy of every impulse, every distraction, every fear. With it, you can choose your response to life instead of merely reacting.

The more structure you build through practices like meditation, the more you can relax into autopilot when it counts. Discipline creates freedom.

The Long Game

None of this matters if you're thinking short-term.

Short-term, watching TV is easier than reading. Scrolling is easier than writing. Staying comfortable is easier than going to the gym.

But long-term? The person who can sit for one hour and do meaningful work compounds that advantage day after day, year after year. They become someone entirely different. Someone who creates instead of consumes. Someone who builds instead of distracts.

Think in decades, not days.

The Path Forward

Don't try to eliminate TV, or social media, or whatever your numbing mechanism is. That's playing defense, and defense alone never wins.

Instead, add the positive. Fill your life with reading, movement, learning, creation, discomfort, growth. Do it not because you "should," but because these things actually make you feel alive.

The negative will disappear on its own. Not through force, but through replacement. You won't need to numb yourself when you're actually present for your life.

Start with one hour. One practice. One day of choosing presence over numbness.

The rest will follow.

What's your one-hour test? Share in the comments below.

The Practice of Inner Stillness: Listening More Than We Speak

Tirth Doshi — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 00:23:56 +0000

Today, I'm sitting at a Starbucks not because it's quiet, but because it isn't. I wanted to think in the presence of noise and see whether something meaningful could still emerge. The theme I want to explore today is simple, yet difficult to practice: listening more than we speak.

The reflection began with a line inspired by the Bhagavad Gita:

"When your intellect is no longer disturbed by the noise of opinions and remains steady in inner stillness, then you will attain true wisdom."

There is something deeply grounding about this quote. It immediately forces a question: how much of my thinking is actually mine?

Noise and Opinions

Most of our judgments are not born in silence. They are shaped by what people say, what trends reward, and what opinions are repeated often enough to feel like truth.

We live in a world powered by Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok—platforms built on opinions. This is good. That is bad. You should read this. You should watch that. The volume never drops. And slowly, without realizing it, our intellect becomes reactive rather than reflective.

The real danger is not disagreement. It is disturbance.

When the intellect is constantly disturbed by opinions, it loses its ability to see clearly. We start asking, "what will people think?" or "how will this be perceived?" instead of asking what we actually believe.

Wisdom does not disappear in such moments. It simply gets drowned out.

Remaining Steady in Inner Stillness

"Remains steady in inner stillness."

What a rare and beautiful state.

Inner stillness is not accidental. It is practiced. It is the ability to sit with yourself without needing stimulation, validation, or approval. It is the discipline to work for an hour without checking what the world thinks of you.

Stillness can look like:

Focused work
Watching your breath
Being alone and being content

The paradox is this: the more you want attention, the more noise controls you. We live in an attention-driven economy, and craving validation pulls us directly into the chaos of opinions. Inner stillness begins the moment you want nothing from the world and choose to give instead.

Stillness Is a Way of Being

Stillness is not silence you announce. It is silence you embody.

It means becoming steady enough that praise does not inflate you and criticism does not break you. People will advise you. People will judge you. Some will be jealous. Some will misunderstand you. None of that needs to disturb your inner balance.

Being still does not mean being passive. It means being rooted.

You continue walking your path, guided by your values and your intellect, not by the loudest voice in the room.

Even here, sitting in a Starbucks, surrounded by movement and distraction, I notice how difficult this is. The temptation to observe others, to break focus, to drift is constant. And that's precisely why stillness matters. It is not proven in quiet rooms. It is proven in noisy ones.

What the Bhagavad Gita Teaches Us Here

The Bhagavad Gita makes a clear distinction between noise and knowing.

Opinions are not truth. They are echoes of restless minds. When we allow them to dominate us, we give away our inner authority. We outsource our thinking, our values, and eventually our sense of self.

Inner stillness is not indifference. It is clarity.

A steady intellect listens without being possessed. It observes without immediately agreeing or resisting. In that space, understanding arises naturally.

True wisdom, the Gita suggests, is not accumulated by collecting more viewpoints. It emerges when the mind becomes calm enough to see reality as it is. Just as muddy water clears when left undisturbed, the intellect reveals truth when it stops churning.

Clarity Is the Goal, Not Building Walls

The goal of stillness is not withdrawal from the world. It is clarity.

When we lack clarity, we build walls: defensiveness, rigidity, emotional reactions. When we have clarity, we don't need walls. We move with direction. We respond instead of react.

Clarity begins with knowing what matters. Clear goals create direction. Direction quiets the mind. And a quiet mind naturally becomes still.

One of the simplest ways to experience this is through physical grounding. When your feet are firmly planted on the ground, your body sends a signal of stability to the mind. It is difficult to be restless when the body feels rooted. There will be moments when stillness feels impossible. Those are precisely the moments where grounding matters most.

Stillness does not mean life will stop testing you. It means you stop being pulled apart by every test.

Listen to Listen, Not to Plan a Response

Most people are not listening. They are waiting.

Waiting to respond
Waiting to correct
Waiting to impress

While someone is speaking, we are already rehearsing our reply. In doing so, we miss the essence of what is being said.

Listening, in its truest form, requires restraint. It asks you to be comfortable with silence, with pauses, with not immediately asserting yourself. Often, the wisest thing you can do while someone is speaking is nothing. Just listen.

You don't always need to respond. You don't always need to add value verbally. Sometimes presence itself is enough.

A simple practice:

When someone speaks, let your only job be to understand them. Nod if needed. Maintain eye contact. Allow silence after they finish. Speak only when clarity, not impulse, calls for it.

This kind of listening builds trust, deepens understanding, and most importantly, strengthens your inner stillness.

Because when you stop rushing to speak, the mind learns to rest.

10 Practical Tips to Listen More and Stay Still

1. Pause Before You Speak (3-second rule)

When someone finishes speaking, pause for three seconds before responding.

This:

Prevents reactive replies
Forces real listening
Signals calm confidence

Stillness begins in the pause.

2. Listen to Understand, Not to Win

While listening, ask yourself:

"What is this person really trying to say?"

Not:

How do I respond?
How do I sound smart?

Understanding dissolves noise.

3. One Opinion Fast

Pick one day a week where you:

Avoid social media opinions
Don't read hot takes
Don't argue mentally with strangers

Notice how quickly the intellect settles when opinion intake drops.

4. Silence Block (Daily)

Schedule 15–30 minutes of intentional silence:

No phone
No music
No podcasts

Just sit, walk, or breathe.

This trains the intellect to remain steady without stimulation.

5. Speak Only If You Add Value

Before speaking, mentally check:

Is it true?
Is it necessary?
Is it kind or useful?

If not, silence is wiser.

6. Anchor in Values, Not Validation

Write down:

3 values you will not compromise
1 direction you are committed to

When opinions come, ask:

"Does this align with my values?"

If not, let it pass.

7. Absorb Praise and Criticism the Same Way

Treat both as data, not identity.

Praise → don't inflate
Criticism → don't collapse

Stillness is emotional neutrality with awareness.

8. Deep Work = Listening to Yourself

Block 60 minutes where:

You work on one thing
No switching
No checking

This is listening inward instead of outward.

9. Reduce Verbal Output

Try this experiment:

Speak 10–20% less in meetings or conversations
Observe more
Intervene only when necessary

People often respect the quietest person in the room.

10. End the Day With One Question

Before sleep, ask:

"Where did I react instead of listen today?"

No judgment. Just awareness.

Final Reminder

Stillness is not weakness.

Listening is not passivity.

The calmest intellect in the room often sees the farthest.

What practices have helped you cultivate inner stillness? I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments below. 👇

How I Stopped Wasting Weekends: A Blueprint for Structure Without Sacrifice

Tirth Doshi — Sun, 18 Jan 2026 18:52:43 +0000

Yesterday I caught myself four hours deep into a TV binge I didn't even enjoy. My weekend had evaporated into a blur of scrolling, mindless entertainment, and that familiar Sunday night dread. Again.

Here's what nobody tells you about weekends: the same freedom that makes them refreshing can make them destructive.

Without the structure of your workweek (the office environment, the meetings, the deadlines), it's remarkably easy to drift into chaos. I'd lose myself for 40-60 minutes in distraction, then spend another hour just trying to get back on track. The problem wasn't laziness. It was lack of design.

I used to read books on weekends. I'd hit the gym consistently. I felt energized and intentional. Then gradually, without noticing, I'd replaced depth with distraction.

So I decided to solve this. Here's the framework that transformed my weekends from wasted time into my most valuable 48 hours.

The Core Problem: Environmental Vacuum

During the week, your environment does half the work for you. You're in an office surrounded by people working, you're not going to binge Netflix at your desk. The environment creates natural guardrails.

At home on weekends? Those guardrails disappear.

The solution isn't willpower. It's intentional environmental design. You need to recreate structure, but in a way that still feels like rest.

The Weekend Structure Framework

1. Get Out of Your House

This is non-negotiable. Even on weekends, I need to be in places where people exist.

Go to the library to read
Work on personal projects at a coffee shop
Take your laptop to a coworking space
Walk to a park instead of sitting on your couch

The presence of others keeps you accountable without requiring anyone to actually hold you accountable. It's environmental discipline.

2. Pre-Commit With Money

Here's a psychological hack I learned: spending money in advance creates commitment.

If you buy movie tickets for Saturday at 6 PM, you've just structured 3 hours of your weekend. Book a pickleball court for Sunday morning? That's another 2 hours locked in.

This works for:

Fitness classes (yoga, spin, climbing)
Sports leagues (pickleball, basketball, softball)
Concerts, comedy shows, theater
Cooking classes or workshops

The financial commitment transforms a vague intention into a scheduled event.

3. Time Block + Lists = Clarity

I used to keep everything in my head. "I should return those Nike clothes" would float around for weeks, creating background anxiety but never getting done.

Now I externalize everything:

Create specific lists for different categories:

Errands: Return Nike items, pick up dry cleaning, mail package
Groceries: Tomatoes, onions, garlic, bell peppers
Personal projects: Update resume, organize photos, research investments
Social: Call Mom, text Alex about dinner, schedule coffee with Sarah

Then time-block these on your weekend calendar. "Saturday 10 AM - 11:30 AM: Grocery shopping at Patel Brothers."

When you arrive at the store with a list, you're efficient. You don't forget items. You don't wander aimlessly.

4. Anchor With Non-Negotiables

I have two daily non-negotiables that consume 2 hours: reading and gym. These happen whether it's Tuesday or Saturday.

Your non-negotiables might be:

Morning journaling and coffee
One hour of learning (language, instrument, coding)
Exercise (gym, run, yoga)
Meal prep for the week

These anchors create rhythm. Everything else can be flexible, but these stay fixed.

5. Design Social Structure

One of my brother's friends, Monil, kept a list of people to call during weekends. Every Saturday and Sunday, he'd work through his list, catching up with friends and family.

Brilliant. Social connection as a ritual, not an afterthought.

Other structured social options:

Weekly brunch with rotating friends
Game nights (board games, cards, video games)
Join Meetup.com groups for hiking, book clubs, or hobbies
Volunteer regularly (animal shelter, food bank)
Language exchange meetups

I used to be socially anxious. Meditation over the past few months has helped tremendously. Now I'm selective in my speech, present in conversations, and genuinely enjoy connecting with people. But the structure helps: knowing "Sunday afternoon is for meeting new people" removes the friction of deciding.

6. Learn Something Unrelated to Work

Weekends are perfect for learning things your job doesn't require.

I'm learning Spanish. When I meet Spanish speakers in the US (and there are many), I can actually have conversations now. It's rewarding in a way work skills aren't.

Other learning options:

Finance and investing (YouTube, books, podcasts)
Cooking new cuisines
Music (guitar, piano, singing)
Photography or videography
Body language and confidence
Online courses (Coursera, Udemy, Udacity)

The key: make it enjoyable. If you're forcing yourself, you won't sustain it.

7. Move Your Body

Sports aren't just exercise: they're social, competitive, and structured.

Schedule your weekend sports:

Pickleball leagues
Pickup basketball
Badminton with friends
Cricket or football
Rock climbing
Hiking new trails

There's something primal about competition. You want to win. That engagement pulls you fully into the present moment, away from the digital noise.

8. Podcast Walks = Thinking Time

During my master's degree, I'd take walks after every hour of studying. It gave my brain time to process, reset, and often come up with better solutions than I'd found sitting at my desk.

Now I combine walks with podcasts. Cal Newport's podcast, in particular, has shaped how I think about deep work and intentional living. (His upcoming book The Deep Life is something I'm eagerly waiting for, though honestly, I probably already know most of what he'll say just from following his work.)

Why podcast walks work:

You're physically active
You're learning or being inspired
Your brain makes connections it wouldn't while sitting
Many valuable podcasts are 1+ hours, walking makes the time investment easy

9. Create an Adventure List

Keep a running list of things you want to experience:

Museums you haven't visited
New restaurants to try monthly
Day trips to nearby cities
Live events (comedy shows, concerts, theater)
New parks or hiking trails

Each weekend, pick one. This transforms "what should I do?" into "which adventure today?"

10. Sunday Reset Ritual

Sunday evening is for preparation. This isn't work: it's setting yourself up to win.

Clean your space (laundry, dishes, organize desk)
Meal prep basics for the week
Review your calendar for the upcoming week
Plan your top 3 priorities
Lay out gym clothes for Monday morning

This 60-90 minute investment prevents Monday morning chaos and gives you a sense of control heading into the week.

The Philosophy: Depth Over Distraction

I'm heavily influenced by Cal Newport's work on living deeply. Structure isn't about rigidity: it's about creating space for what matters.

When your weekend has structure, you paradoxically feel more free. You're not anxiously wondering if you're wasting time. You're not defaulting to the easiest dopamine hit. You're living intentionally.

The difference between structured and unstructured weekends:

Unstructured: You're reactive, pulled by whatever grabs your attention
Structured: You're proactive, directing your energy toward what you value

I'm not saying never watch TV. I'm saying: decide when, what, and for how long. Make it a choice, not a default.

Your Action Plan (Start This Weekend)

Don't try to implement everything at once. Start with these three:

Schedule one activity that requires leaving your house (coffee shop reading, gym class, social meetup)
Make one list (errands, groceries, or projects) and time-block when you'll complete it
Set one non-negotiable (reading, exercise, learning) and protect that time

That's it. Three things. Once these become automatic, layer in more structure.

The Payoff

Since implementing this framework, my weekends feel longer. I accomplish more but feel less rushed. I'm reading again. I'm learning Spanish. I'm meeting new people. I'm playing sports.

Most importantly: I no longer dread Sunday nights.

Monday morning doesn't feel like a crash back to reality. It feels like a continuation of an intentional life.

Your weekends are 104 days per year: 28% of your entire life. That's too much time to waste on autopilot.

Design them. Structure them. Live them deeply.

What strategies work for you? Drop a comment below. I'd love to hear what resonates and what you discover along the way.

Have a wonderful, intentional weekend. 🌟

I Checked My Phone 47 Times Yesterday. Here's What I'm Building Instead.

Tirth Doshi — Sat, 17 Jan 2026 18:17:07 +0000

I checked my phone 47 times yesterday. Gained nothing. Lost everything. Cal Newport calls social media 'the new cigarettes.' He's right. And like any addiction, the first step is admitting you have a problem.

I came across this idea when I was reading Cal Newport's Digital Minimalism and how it argued that the social media apps in the world are engineered so that we disrupt our attention and go into a highly frenzied extremely connected information state and we go back and forth in that. There were 2 principles he mentioned that are important: the positive reinforcement of dopamine and the social validation.

As humans, we crave social validation - our ancestors needed it for survival. Today, we don't. But the craving remains. In 2009, Facebook engineered the famous like button, the like button served exactly these 2 things. First, it gave you a dopamine hit when somebody liked your photo, or when someone commented the photo looks great. Second, it gave you social validation and thus possibly feeling confident about yourself.

My Thoughts on Digital Attention

I do agree that the industry is engineered for attention. I do agree that there is a great amount of positive reinforcement engineered for social media companies to do so. Moreover, life can be a lot better in terms of lifestyle itself, that if we focus on fewer but highly valuable things in life. If we take the time out of our phone and utilise in activities that really generate value to the world, naturally we will be way ahead of the curve. We won't need to check our social media apps in a chaotic way after every 10 minutes. Moreover, we will find the solitude to think. To truly think what is important in our lives and what is not.

Solitude personally to me is a beautiful state. It's not disconnection. It's rather a connection with yourself.

Cal also mentioned in the book that social media are the new cigarettes. You might get short term validation, short term happiness, but long term happiness is not within that. Long term happiness comes when we create something meaningful, meet people in person and truly connect. Social media on the other hand, like YouTube, can be a great source of knowledge. I believe that the YouTubers who create content about software understand software better than most of the people. They teach for their passion. Yes they also earn money, but the way they gain subscribers is through their ability to teach so that folks can understand.

Purpose Over Impulse

As a man, I've noticed that when I'm caught up in impulse, I lose the self-control to think long term. I enter reactive mode, and that's devastating. Many of my male friends describe the same pattern: scrolling replaces purpose, validation-seeking replaces building. When you become reactive, you lose your purpose. Your purpose in life should be to elevate and make the world a better place before you leave.

Moreover, once you have purpose, and once you truly live with purpose, the distractions will automatically decrease. Making a good software product for the welfare of the world will become the purpose. For example, I am creating a deployment experience that's easy for software developers. This will greatly improve their productivity and their ability to test a product.

So reading the book, digital minimalism, can also help me loop back into the purpose thought. Having a purpose that's higher than yourself is quite an important thing to discover. If we discover that early in life, the better. We need to find more ways to contribute in our lives. We as men need direction and if we get caught up in the scattered social media, there will never be enough attention for us to focus on what truly matters.

What truly matters are smaller things in life. Our friends, the close ones, the family, the close knit bonds and our work and how we contribute in the world. I'd tell you that if you center yourself in contribution, everything else can become much easier. You will learn things faster, you will have a greater satisfaction in life and your presence will be undiminished all the time.

The 80/20 Rule in Practice

Now let me share some practicalities. I want to tell you how less is more. According to the Pareto principle, 20% of the activities bring about 80% of the results and same is true in life. Less is more. Out of all your activities that you do, only 20% truly generate value and satisfaction in your life.

My Activities:

Traveling
Cricket
Community Service - Going to Derasar and serving food
Reading
Duolingo
Working hard at your job
YouTube - Either creating videos or consuming software related content
Gym
Meeting friends and hanging out

I asked ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude to identify my vital 20%. Each gave different answers, but Gemini's resonated most:

According to Gemini, the 20% of the activities that will give me 80% of my results are:

A. Working hard at my job - 2-4 hours of intentional deep work

B. Gym - This will improve my discipline and confidence

C. Reading - This will improve my mindset

The rest of the things it said are also very good. For example, community service, meeting friends, etc can be treated as rewards rather than direct engagements.

ChatGPT's response:

Deep work at your job
Gym
Reading
Creating content (YouTube)

ChatGPT's response was similar but added "Creating content (YouTube)" - recognizing that content creation compounds my learning.

Claude offered the most pragmatic insight:

"Community service, friends, hobbies, and travel are deeply meaningful, but they depend on having the financial resources, energy, and health that come from the first two."

This clicked. Everything else in life flows from health and focused work.

I didn't list writing, but to me that's equally important. So my proposal or thought is to reduce our cognitive load towards these 2-3 things in life. If we develop the required skills to make a great product there's nothing more powerful than that. Your skills can translate into real value in the world and that can give you a competitive edge in the world. Building skills are the first step towards getting a good output in life.

5 Practical Tips to Reclaim Your Focus

1. The "Deep Work" Morning Fortress

Since you've identified 2–4 hours of intentional work as your primary 80/20 driver, you must protect this time ruthlessly.

The Action: Block out your first 4 hours of the workday for "Deep Work" only. No emails, no Slack, and absolutely no social media checking.

The Tactic: Use a physical "Deep Work" signal (like noise-canceling headphones or a specific desk lamp). When that signal is on, you are in the state of solitude you mentioned—connecting with your ability to solve the deployment experience problem.

2. Execute a "Digital Declutter"

Cal Newport suggests a 30-day break from optional technologies to "reset" your dopamine receptors.

The Action: Remove all social media apps from your phone that aren't essential for your YouTube creation.

The Tactic: If you need to consume software content on YouTube, do it on a desktop at a scheduled time. This moves you from reactive (scrolling) to proactive (researching).

3. The "Physical Anchor" Protocol

You mentioned the gym improves discipline and confidence. This shouldn't be a "when I have time" activity.

The Action: Schedule your gym sessions as non-negotiable appointments in your calendar, ideally immediately after your Deep Work or before your day starts.

The Tactic: On days you feel "reactive" or distracted, use the gym as a manual reset. The physical strain forces you out of the "information frenzy" and back into your body.

4. Bridge Purpose with Contribution (YouTube)

You mentioned that creating software products for the welfare of the world is your purpose. Your YouTube channel should be the "build in public" log for your deployment project.

The Action: Shift your YouTube activity from 80% consumption to 80% creation.

The Tactic: Every time you solve a difficult bug in your deployment tool, record a 5-minute video explaining it. This compounds your learning, builds your authority, and fulfills your desire to contribute.

5. Reframe Hobbies as "Active Leisure"

Instead of doing everything every week, treat your secondary activities (Cricket, Duolingo, Travel) as Active Leisure that earns its place through your hard work.

The Action: Use your Friday evenings or weekends for Derasar (Community Service) and meeting friends.

The Tactic: View these not as "tasks to get done," but as the results of your 80/20 effort. You go to the Derasar with a clear mind because your work is done and your body is healthy.

The "Less is More" Mental Shift

You mentioned that a lack of self-control is the first sign of losing. To maintain that control, you need a "Shutdown Ritual." At the end of your workday, physically close your laptop and say, "Schedule complete." This gives your brain permission to stop the "reactive information state" and transition into the solitude and social connection you value.

Conclusion

I checked my phone 47 times yesterday. Tomorrow, I'm checking it zero times during my deep work hours. Not because I've solved the dopamine problem, but because I've found something stronger: purpose.

Building a deployment tool that helps developers ship faster isn't just my job. It's my contribution. And contribution, I'm learning, is the only antidote to distraction.

Cal Newport was right. Social media is the new cigarettes. But unlike cigarettes, you can't quit cold turkey and walk away. You have to replace the habit with something better. For me, that's 4 hours of deep work, the gym, and the quiet solitude where real thinking happens.

Less is more. Not because doing less is easy, but because doing less of what doesn't matter gives you everything you need to do more of what does.

What's your deployment tool? What's the one thing you're building that matters more than the dopamine hit?

Find it. Protect it. Build it.

The world is waiting.

What's your vital 20%? How are you protecting your deep work time? Let me know in the comments below. 👇