From Slack Pings to Agent Prompts: How Focus Got Harder

For a while, one of the best things I did for myself was stop treating notifications like a live feed.

I would check PR reviews at fixed times, usually around 9 AM, 1 PM, and 4 PM. And I tried to protect two two-hour focus blocks every day.

Was that ever fully real? Not really. Something urgent always slipped through. But even a messy version of that setup helped to get things done.

And I believe that was the point behind all the old context switching talk. If you’re in the middle of a hard problem, interruptions take you out of the zone as an engineer.

If I’m tracing a bug through three services, trying to understand why something only breaks in production, or working through a design decision I still don’t trust, a random Slack ping doesn’t just “take a minute.” It breaks the flow entirely. Then I get to spend the next twenty minutes rebuilding the model in my head.

I used to describe it as being in “the zone,” and I always told people how hard it was to get back into the zone. Not to push people away, but to let people realize that each interruption had a price, and I believe this is becoming more prominent now.

What used to work

Back then, most of the interruptions came from outside the work.

• Slack
• meetings
• PR reviews
• incident noise
• somebody with a “quick question”

Part of the job, yes, but at least the source was clear.

This made me think batch processing these should help here. And in a way it did for a while, since it at least gave enough room to process both the interruptions and the work.

What changed

Currently, the old interruptions are still there, but we added a new category on top of them.

Agents.

And I don’t mean that in some dramatic anti-AI way. I use them constantly, and that’s exactly why I am writing this. I’ve been experiencing it first-hand.

If I have a few agents running in parallel, my day starts looking different fast. One is exploring the next task. One is exploring a refactor. One is looking at the latest tech updates (because who can keep up manually nowadays). Then one of them finishes. Another needs clarification. Another wants me to choose between two directions. Another comes back with a wall of questions because my prompt was missing one detail that suddenly matters a lot.

So now the interruptions don’t just come from Slack and meetings. The work itself keeps interrupting me.

That’s the part that feels different.

In the past, context switching mostly came from other people pulling you away from the task. Today, a lot of it comes from managing the task through multiple half-finished threads at the same time.

Why it feels heavier

What makes this harder for me is that it all feels productive.

Slack is obviously an interruption. A meeting is obviously an interruption. But when an agent finishes a task or asks for clarification, it doesn’t feel like an interruption in the same way. It feels like progress, and often it is progress, but sometimes it’s just another thing that wants a piece of your attention NOW.

That is how I end up with days where a lot happened, and I feel tired by the end of it. Not necessarily in a bad way, but in a different way than I am used to.

When you spend the whole day switching between sessions, reviewing outputs, answering follow-up questions, checking Slack, doing PR reviews, deploying services, and moving tickets, you realize how easy it is to forget or miss things. Not because you’re not trying your best, but mainly because of the constant focus you have to keep up.

That’s why this feels heavier to me now. The old interruptions never left. We just layered more on top.

Deep work still matters

If anything, I think it matters more now.

Agents don’t remove the need to think clearly at all. If anything, we need to think more about how we approach problems, handle evaluation, and make sure we protect our focus.

The focus is required to make sure that we understand what we’re trying to deliver, that we keep critically evaluating changes and requests, and that we break down the work effectively.

What I’m trying now

I don’t have a good solution for this yet. If you do, please feel free to share it with me. But a few things seem to help.

Breaking down your work ahead of time helps. A clear plan for the day helps. Fewer active (meaning executors that need instant feedback) agents help. Batching reviews still helps when I can get away with it, although this one is especially tricky with the current rate of change.

Mostly though, I think the big shift is just understanding that the job changed.

We didn’t make context switching disappear. We found a much more productive-looking version of it, and it’s here to stay.

Some will thrive, others will realize it might not be for them. The only thing you can do to deal with this is adapt and overcome.