Deep work, context switches & productivity

Categorization

Magicflow categories each activity (time spent on an app or website) into a category.

Those categories are things like Coding, Design, Communication, or Project Management.

A context is a period of time spent doing activities that are all in a particular category.

Context Switches

A context switch is when you switch from one context to another for enough time that you lose the context you built up while working.

We have this set to 30 seconds, so when you switch from e.g. Writing to Coding for more than 30 seconds, we log a context switch.

Deep work

Deep work is measured when you spend more than 5 minutes in a particular context. We think that spending at least 5 minutes working in one type of work is important for building up the

Custom contexts

Productivity

We use the % of time you spent working, how much your context switching, and your session length to calculate a productivity score. This is a rough estimate, but it’s a good way to see how you’re doing over time.

Session Length

Session length is the average length of your active sessions using your computer. We track this because short sessions give you a lot less chance to get into flow and do deep work! Longer sessions give you more time to build up momentum.