Feras Alhlou walks through his daily routine: waking 1.5 hours before sunrise, spending the first hour reading and on spiritual practice with no devices, then checking email and Slack for urgent items only. He keeps a strict calendar, disables notifications, and works in 30-minute focused batches with quick communication breaks between them.
Here is my actual routine. I get up an hour and a half before sunrise, summer, winter, doesn't matter. Now, the first hour, no phones, no devices. I do 2 things, some reading and then my spiritual practice. And then work starts. I do a quick check on email, on Slack, to see if there's anything that requires a quick response or something that is time sensitive. And then I follow my calendar religiously. Everything that I do throughout the day is on my calendar, personal and work-related. And I don't have any notifications turned on. Instead, when I'm focusing on something, I focus on work in 30-minute batches. So I work for about 30 minutes and then I go and check my email, my Slack, because I also want to be responsive to my colleagues. And then I go back and focus on the task at hand.
