Deep Work vs. Ping-Pong Day Design
Split every day into deep work and reactive time, and refuse to open Slack before noon.
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 90%
To own large scope as a single IC, Raviv rigidly partitions his days into two modes: deep work (thinking, strategy, reading) and 'ping-pong' (reactive Slack back-and-forth that turns your brain to scrambled eggs). The keystone rule is not opening Slack before noon, protecting the morning entirely. Non-urgent messages get queued rather than sent on impulse.
Origin
Tal Raviv's personal system, practiced for eight years; he frames the deep-work/reactive split as aligned with advice Lenny Rachitsky has written about on actively designing your days.
Core principles
- 01Constant Slack pinging makes deep thinking, reading, and strategy impossible.
- 02Just because you thought of a message at 11am doesn't mean it needs to be sent at 11am — there is almost never urgency at that level.
- 03The PM role is far less urgently needed than it feels; truly urgent interruptions happen roughly twice a year.
- 04People come to respect a known, consistent work rhythm rather than resent it.
How to run it
- 1
Partition the day into two modes
Explicitly block deep-work time versus reactive/ping-pong time instead of letting them interleave. Raviv, a morning person, protects mornings for deep work and clusters meetings there too.
- 2
Don't open Slack before noon
Keep the communication tool fully closed during the deep-work block. Notifications don't fire, so they can't scramble your focus.
Pro tip If you're not a morning person, invert the block — the rule is 'protect one contiguous deep block from the pinging tool,' not literally 'noon.'
- 3
Queue outbound messages instead of sending them
Keep a to-do list section titled 'when I open Slack.' Write each message as if you're about to hit enter, then leave it in the list until your reactive block.
Pro tip Most queued messages turn out not to need sending at all once you revisit them.
- 4
Route true emergencies around the wall
Give key collaborators your phone/WhatsApp for genuine emergencies. The friction of a call means only real urgencies get through; if you must peek, ask a neighbor to read you the one thing.
Watch out You will occasionally have to violate the rule — that's fine precisely because it's so rare.
In the wild
Raviv has kept Slack closed until noon for eight years. In the rare emergency (about twice a year) his manager or team lead WhatsApps him 'something urgent is happening in slack, we really need you,' and he opens it — otherwise the wall holds.
→ Sustained large IC scope without being a reactive bottleneck; colleagues learned to respect the rhythm.
Common mistakes
Treating every thought as an immediate send
Firing off messages the moment you think of them manufactures fake urgency for everyone and destroys your own deep-work block. Queue instead.
Is it for you?
Best for
A senior IC PM or knowledge worker who needs long uninterrupted thinking blocks but is drowning in chat interruptions.
Not ideal for
On-call, incident-response, or support-frontline roles where sub-hour responsiveness is the actual job.
From the transcript
“I really strictly split my days between deep work and what I call pingpong”
“I don't open Slack before noon I've been doing this for eight years”
“just because I thought it at 11: am doesn't mean I need to send it at 11: am there's no urgency at that level”
“I actually keep a section of my to-do list which is when I open Slack here are the messages I'm going to send and write…”
From the episode
Becoming a super IC: Lessons from 12 years as a PM individual contributor
Tal Raviv (Product Lead at Riverside)