In this episode of the Build Your Business Podcast, Matt and Chris Reynolds unpack what may be the most important skill for any entrepreneur: deep work for founders. They reveal how to build rituals that trigger flow, how to design your day around peak focus hours, and why eliminating distractions is the first step toward real freedom in your business. Whether you’re running a growing team or just getting started, this episode delivers the tools to win back your time, focus your mind, and get high-leverage work done.

Why Deep Work for Founders Matters More Than Ever

Deep work for founders isn’t just a productivity hack—it’s a survival skill. With every ping, Slack message, and calendar invite, you risk falling into a reactive loop that kills momentum. Matt and Chris argue that founders don’t just need to protect time—they need to protect mental energy by eliminating context switches and shallow work. Deep work helps you do what no one else can do in your business: make high-leverage decisions, build strategy, and create long-term value.

The conversation kicks off with a look at how even third graders doing homeschool flourish when taught how to enter a deep focus mode—because the ability to focus is human, not just professional. They draw from decades of entrepreneurial experience, showing how this skill transformed both their businesses and their lives.

Designing a Distraction-Free Work Environment

Phones buzzing, Slack chiming, emails flowing—distractions are everywhere, and they destroy momentum. The brothers outline exactly how to eliminate noise, starting with keeping your phone on Do Not Disturb and muting computer notifications during your peak hours. You’ll learn the mindset shift required to stop “checking in” every 30 seconds and start trusting that 99.9% of interruptions can wait.

They also discuss founder anxiety—specifically, the fear that if you’re not constantly available, the business will implode. Chris challenges this head-on by encouraging you to “test” the assumption: do a 25-minute Pomodoro, then check if the sky actually fell. It didn’t. And that small test unlocks massive freedom.

How to Build a Deep Work Routine

Both Matt and Chris share their daily rituals for entering deep work. For Matt, the day begins at 4 a.m. with caffeine and a specific chair. For Chris, it starts with a nose strip and headphones. These repeatable routines, no matter how quirky, act like Pavlovian triggers that tell your brain: it’s go time.

They break their day into zones—early mornings for deep work, mid-mornings for exercise and recovery, and mid-day for shallow work and staff interaction. Founders rarely get eight straight hours of focus, but even three Pomodoros can add up to more true output than an entire distracted day.

The “One Thing” and Scheduled Thinking Time

You can’t do deep work if you don’t know what to work deeply on. This is why scheduled “thinking time” is so powerful. Whether on a weekend walk, vacation beach chair, or plane ride, founders need space to identify the one thing that will move the business forward. Without that clarity, you risk doing second-tier work with top-tier effort.

Drawing from The One Thing, Deep Work, and Hyperfocus, they emphasize: if you want outsized results, you have to go deeper than your competitors and stay there longer. That only happens when you stop reacting and start prioritizing.

Scaling Chaos and Leading Through Sprints

Not all work is deep. Sometimes chaos wins the day, and emergencies require 18-hour sprints. Matt and Chris recount moments where urgency galvanized their teams and produced results that now live in company lore. But they warn: that mode can’t be the norm. You need structure, rest, and intentional energy management to avoid burnout.

Founders must learn to toggle between chaos and focus. Deep work for founders means knowing when to push hard and when to recover—when to take a nap, when to power through, and when to shift into CEO-mode thinking that defines vision and strategy.