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What are you doing for the first 5 hours? I typically find that if I'm actually working and not in too many meetings I'm basically checked out after 5 straight hours if I haven't wandered off already.

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Generally firefighting, dealing with emails and various minor requests that all take less than half an hour but involve a lot of task switching.

I do a lot of this too. The worst is when the company I work for tries to prevent this from happening. I seem to -need- that time to "gear up" as you say. I also find it very rewarding to help my colleagues with these types of quick issues, as it often prevents issues from ballooning, encourages collaboration and builds trust.

When they force me into "developer timeout" and effectively isolate me, I just sit there struggling for the first half of the day anyway.

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