For small tasks, a 15-minute timer works great. Decide what you're going to do with the 15 minutes, commit to finishing it in that window, and you knock it out.

That method falls apart for real deep work. I recently spent three hours on one task, start to finish, no restarts. It felt different than usual, mostly because it's rare now. I'm convinced I was more effective working it straight through than I would have been picking it up and putting it down five separate times.

AI makes this harder to protect. Jumping between AI tools and tasks all day is genuinely useful for a lot of work, but some work still needs a long, uninterrupted block of human focus, and that kind of block is exactly what a day full of quick AI exchanges tends to erode.