I think the important thing is to focus on the long term. Pacing yourself.
My ability to focus used to be terrible. But as with a lot of things, what you practise you get better at. Meditation can help you practise this, and also give you a reset when you're running low on focus.
I recommend being preemptive, and getting in mental shape, getting in shape, and not over extending yourself.
I can easily focus for 2-3 hours, but then I will be trashed, instead I pace myself and work for 45 minutes then enforce a 15 minute meditation session. If I'm feeling burnt out, I might go outside or take a longer meditation session.
My meditation style is: I focus on moving my attention back to my breath every time it wanders off, while listening to white noise.
I can still "see" it if I pay attention to it or don't have anything to actively attend to, but there's a higher level focus which I'm in strong control of. Since then, a 10-minute meditation in the morning leaves me in near-total control of my attention for most of the working day.
This is just from a couple of months' regular practice, so this just goes to show you can achieve revolutionary as well as evolutionary progress from meditative practice.
- General internet/news consumption patterns
- Availability of social/news apps on my phone + computer
- Sleeping at least 8.5 hours a night
- Exercising at least every few days
- Meditating for a few minutes in the morning
- Level of burnout eg. have I been overworked or working on unrewarding things for long periods of time
If I do all of these consistently my ability to do deep work increases notably. If I slack in any area it reduces my capacity by some degree. Sleep and burnout are probably the largest contributing factors here. I've found that I just can't cheat on sleep long term without negative consequences, and that if I'm burnt out the only fix is to basically stop working/pushing myself for at least a week until I feel recovered.
I find also that having intention to my day rather than starting out in a reactive mode is key to getting deep work done. If I spend most of my day reacting to things I have trouble doing deep work later in the day, but if I start out with deep work it comes naturally throughout the day.