My attention is the only tool I own

Servers get rebuilt, laptops get replaced, software gets swapped. The one thing I cannot restore from a backup is the ability to hold a complicated problem in my head for two hours without flinching.

So I treat it like equipment. Mornings are for the hard thing, phone in another room, no dashboards. Everything reactive waits until after lunch, when I am worse at thinking anyway.

It is not productivity theatre. It is the difference between finding the actual cause and finding something plausible.