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following out of interest! i find it hard to do deep thinking during work hours because inevitably something urgent pops up and my attention is split in many directions and i get anxious about having to put out fires. i've only successfully managed to do this at the very start of the day before most people log on.
One of my biggest pet hate, urgent/fire drills to me that is bad planning and not great risk management your emergency isn’t my emergency, it cause unnecessary stress and burnout eventually. Anyone that says they thrive on fire drills I find are insane.
Mentor
I prefer my focus time in the morning if you can choose. Amount varies by week and by project but in my current engagement, I start the day in meetings and then get my team focused before I go heads down late morning early afternoon before more afternoon meetings.
Extra tip: group topics to minimize context switching for your brain. I can’t always control my calendar but I can try to organize touch bases to match the deep thinking or worktime of the same project/workstream. It takes 20-25 min for your brain to fulling move in to a new topic so back to back 30’s are like an all day HIIT class and you’ll be exhausted. Defending your calendar is defending your sanity
Expanding on the topic of back to back 30s, if I see a section of those on my calendar I will block 30 minutes afterward as a break. It helps me decompress and reprioritize.
Not a judgment (but commentary on our work culture) but 2-4 hours a week doesn’t seem right! That is less than 10% of your work week spent working
This was me today. I generally block chunks of three hours for x3 days in the week. I tell my team how I work best, which for me, is mornings. I need that time as focus time. Then I’m happy to do meetings around lunchtime and just after. I also feel like on the commute home to daycare I’m responding to emails and doing a bunch of light touch admin. But you have to protect your focus time. You have to.
Week one down.
What worked- making sure I only accepted 4hours of meetings a day I felt way less miserable at the end of the day.
What didn’t work- cobbling together 4 hours of work time each day was hard, 30 minutes here and there while it was a total of 4 hours it just wasn’t enough to ramp up for quality thinking work time and I still ended up working late
I use Microsoft’s focus time to block out 4 hours; it does so two weeks out and around existing appointments. I still end up with weeks where I am bouncing from meeting to meeting and putting out fires in between.
I have two 2-4 hour sessions blocked a week on average. It helps my sanity even if the block gets repurposed for an emergency. I also block off lunch for 30 minutes and I meal prep to have one less decision to make.