Deep Work · the 100-day experiment

Protect the hours that move your work.

Set a few weekly targets, show up for 100 days, and watch focused work become a habit. Zaphiri tracks the days, the hours and how it felt.

This week Targets 3 days · 5 hours · flow 3
3/3 Days of 3 days
5h30 Hours of 5 hours
4.3 Flow of 3, 3 rated
Your 100 days Day 56 of 100
94 Good 4 perfect weeks in a row

Why it slips

Focus is scarce. And it breaks easily.

You only get a few hours of truly deep work a day, and every interruption costs more than it looks. Without a plan to protect those hours, the urgent work takes them.

≈4hrs a day is the practical limit for deep, deliberate work Ericsson, Krampe and Tesch-Römer, 1993
23min on average to get back to interrupted work Gloria Mark, University of California, Irvine
60% of the workday lost to work about work, not skilled work Asana Anatomy of Work Index 2021

What a focus habit needs

Four things that make deep work stick.

  1. 01 Targets you can actually repeat. Ambitious goals for one week tend to collapse by the next. In Zaphiri: Pick Gentle, Steady or Serious, or set your own. Changes start next Monday and never rewrite past weeks.
  2. 02 A defined experiment, not a vague resolution. "Do more deep work" has no start, no finish and no review. In Zaphiri: The 100-day experiment starts on a Monday, tracks whether you show up, and on day 100 shows what you achieved, asks what you will try next, and starts the next round in one tap.
  3. 03 Feedback on days, hours and how it felt. Hours alone miss whether the focus was real. In Zaphiri: Three weekly rings: Days, Hours, and Flow from a quick 1 to 5 rating after each session.
  4. 04 One change at a time. Changing everything at once tells you nothing. In Zaphiri: Optimize my Deep Work shows how to arrange your week from your own sessions, then offers one earned step with a check-in four weeks later.

The ideas behind it

Built on two books we use ourselves.

“A deep life is a good life.”
Cal Newport Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

What we took from it: deep work is a skill you train on purpose, in protected blocks. So Zaphiri flags your Deep Work tasks, protects the time and counts the hours.

“I will [action] for [duration].”
Anne-Laure Le Cunff The pact, from Tiny Experiments

What we took from it: treat change as an experiment with an end date, not a resolution. Your pact in Zaphiri: I will do Deep Work for 100 days.

The 100-day experiment

Pick a level, then show up.

Judged on showing up, not a perfect score. It starts the following Monday, so you begin with a clean week.

Gentle ≈ 144 h a year Two days a week 2 days · 3 hours · flow 3
Steady ≈ 240 h a year Most weeks, a solid block 3 days · 5 hours · flow 3
Serious ≈ 384 h a year Deep Work most days 4 days · 8 hours · flow 3
  1. Day 1 Flag your Deep Work tasks and track them
  2. Week 1 Your first weekly score
  3. Week 4 Your first earned step up
  4. Day 100 Plus, Minus, Next: keep, raise, or go again

Day by day

See when it really happened.

A quarter of Deep Work at a glance, shaded by how much. Open any day to see its sessions and rate the ones you missed.

Optimize my Deep Work

Shape your week. The targets follow.

Zaphiri looks at when your Deep Work really happens and tells you what to change: start your Peak window earlier, tighten it, or add a second one on the days it runs late. Each idea comes with the evidence from your own sessions.

When a week like that keeps working, Zaphiri offers the next step: raise one target by a notch. Nothing changes until you choose it, and it checks in four weeks later.

On your phone

Your week, back every week.

Review shows your Deep Work, finished tasks and best days in one place. The weekly recap arrives as a short push on the day you review your week, so you see where your focus went before you plan the next one.

App Store screenshot: See where your focus really goes. Review on iPhone App Store screenshot: A weekly recap worth reading. The weekly recap on iPhone

A year of Deep Work

Small weeks add up to a big year.

Try your own numbers. A few protected hours a week turns into weeks of focused work by the end of the year.

Your week
Days with a Deep Work session 3 days
Hours of Deep Work in total 5 hours
That is about 1 hour 40 minutes per session.
240 hours a year The same as 30 full eight-hour days of focused work, spread across your year.
Each dot is a Deep Work day: 144 days a year at 1 hour 40 minutes each.
Your targets One more hour a week Past 100 hours Week 148 working weeks One more hour a week makes it 288 hours. That is the kind of step the optimizer offers once a week like this keeps working.

Only you can see it

Your Deep Work report, targets and experiments are private, even inside a team. Your organisation agreement confirms what administrators can see. Turn private insights off at any time and delete everything derived from your data.

In Solo Pro and Team Pro

Deep Work reports come with Solo Pro, and with Team Pro for every full member, alongside energy-aware planning.

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Give your best work 100 days.

Day one is next Monday.