How to protect focus time when your calendar is full of meetings

Your calendar is full from nine to five. The actual work, writing the proposal, reviewing the numbers or thinking about strategy, happens at night or not at all. For many managers and professionals, this is simply what a normal week looks like.

It doesn’t have to be. A few deliberate changes can give you back several hours a week without cancelling anything important.

Why the gaps don’t work

A 30-minute gap between two meetings looks like free time, but it’s rarely useful for focused work. By the time you’ve switched into a task, it’s time to switch out again. Research on interrupted work suggests that frequent interruptions make people work faster but with more stress (Mark, Gudith and Klocke, 2008), and switching between tasks leaves part of your attention behind on the previous one (Leroy, 2009).

Real work needs long, protected blocks, usually 90 minutes or more.

Evidence that protected time helps

In a well-known field study at a software company, Leslie Perlow (1999) introduced agreed “quiet time” when engineers weren’t interrupted. During those periods, engineers reported getting much more of their individual work done. The lesson isn’t that every team needs quiet hours, but that focus time works better when it’s agreed and visible, not just hoped for.

Practical ways to protect focus time

Block it before the week fills up

On Friday or Monday morning, put two or three 90-minute focus blocks on next week’s calendar, before anyone else books those slots. Treat them like meetings with yourself.

Batch your meetings

Cluster meetings together, for example all on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, or every morning until 12:00. Fewer, larger meeting blocks leave larger gaps.

Shorten meetings by default

Make 25 or 50 minutes the default instead of 30 or 60. The five or ten minutes between meetings become a buffer for notes and follow-ups.

Use booking rules

If people book you through a link, limit which hours they can book, set a daily maximum and add buffers before and after. The rules protect your time without you having to say no every time.

Mark focus blocks as busy

A focus block that shows as free gets booked over. Make sure it appears as busy in the calendar other people see.

Decide what goes in each block

A focus block without a task gets eaten by email. Before the block starts, choose the one task it’s for and write the first step.

A sample week

Here is one way a busy manager might shape a week:

• Monday: focus block 9:00–11:00, meetings from 11:30.
• Tuesday: meetings all day, clustered with 10-minute buffers.
• Wednesday: focus block 9:00–11:00, one-to-ones in the afternoon.
• Thursday: meetings all day.
• Friday: focus block 9:00–10:30, then the weekly review and lighter work.

Three protected blocks add up to about six hours of focused work, with meetings still filling most of the week.

When the week still gets away from you

Some weeks, meetings will win. Move the focus block rather than deleting it, and at the end of the week look at where the hours went. If one project or company keeps eating your focus time, that’s useful information for your next planning session.

Doing this in Thendoo

On Thendoo’s Today timeline, meetings from every connected Google calendar sit next to your time blocks, and free stretches are marked, so you can see where focus fits. Block time creates a focus block in two taps, and blocks can appear in a separate “Thendoo” calendar in Google so colleagues see you as busy. Booking links let you set the hours people can book, buffers and a daily limit, and Insights shows time per Space and meetings per day, so you can see where the week really went.

Sources

• Leroy, S. (2009). Why is it so hard to do my work? The challenge of attention residue when switching between work tasks. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 109(2), 168–181.
• Mark, G., Gudith, D., & Klocke, U. (2008). The cost of interrupted work: More speed and stress. Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’08), 107–110.
• Perlow, L. A. (1999). The time famine: Toward a sociology of work time. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(1), 57–81.