How much time during the week do you have for deep thinking work time? (That happens during work hours) I’m going to experiment this week and try to reserve 4 hours of working time (vs meetings) a day on my calendar. Thoughts and wins or tips on this time management topic?

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.

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

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.