Schedule a meeting during my Focus Time and this is what you’ll see
The first time I put up a “do not disturb” sign on my work desk, I was a Junior Analyst working in a big corporation for the first time. My supervisor quickly approached me and said that she understood how interruptions could get in the way of my productivity but my sign made people see me as arrogant, like I needed time to focus and they did not. I put the sign down. And started to wear headphones to work when I needed to focus.
10 years later a lot has happened. I moved away from traditional companies and large corporations to smaller, fast-paced ones and joined the tech industry, where every company is desperately trying to keep up with market changes, collaboration and teamwork are kings and employees feel like they are always trying to drink water directly from the fire hydrant. All of a sudden my calendar was filled with numerous, endless meetings. At first, I felt so important for being invited to these exclusive forums, but it wasn’t long before I realized that having meetings as a primary occupation made my real work — solving problems, coming up with solutions, documenting things, thinking decisions through — fall in the cracks between meetings. The cost: I did not deliver all the value I could. I spent too little time on Work Itself.
So in 2016 I started to block 2-hour slots in my calendar to, guess what, work. It soon evolved to entire no meetings days in addition to smaller slots spread throughout the week. My teams back then used to say that the day after my “Focus Day” were the most exciting ones because I would for sure show up at the office full of energy, having figured out patterns, problems, solutions to the challenges we faced. Focus Time brought back Flow to my work experience.
Keeping Flow to myself was not enough, though, so I started to sponsor and advocate for focused work in all organizations I worked with ever since, asking them to be intentional about building cultures that allow it. The people who work with me usually adopt No Meetings Days and Focus Time as well and report great increase in productivity, creativity and job satisfaction.
But how does one go about building awareness of the importance of promoting focus and deep-thinking at work? There are several ways. In this story, I will share one simple thing I did that generated light and insightful conversations about the topic: my calendar can be seen by anyone in the company and the titles of my No Meetings blocks are “Do not schedule before you read the text in the invite”.
Here is what is in the invite:
“What is stopping you from doing the best work of your life?”. I read this question in a book 4 years ago and it stuck with me. “I have a career I am passionate about, I work for a company I believe in, I give my best to my job every day — still I know that I am not delivering the best work of my life, at least not career wise”, I thought. I could not tell what was wrong.
The best work of my life for sure requires that I work on something I either love or learned to — check! -, for an organization I believe in with people from whom I can learn — check, check! But the more I paid attention to my routine, the more I realized that these factors are only my environmental personal preferences, not my work itself.
Work Itself is about the smart efforts I made and the results I delivered. About the impact of what I did and the consistency of my performance. How I grew as I did what I did. How I stretched my cognitive abilities and my professional repertoire and increased my proficiency in handling more complex situations. I realized that the greatest contributions I made, both as an individual contributor and as a leader, were the ones that had been thought through, the ones when I did not settle for the solution that first came to mind but put instead my efforts on finding the best one to the problem at hand.
Looking back to my routine, it became clear to me that one of the biggest obstacles to the best work of my life was finding room for it. My calendar was packed with back to back meetings from 8 am to 7pm and often beyond. I was mismanaging my time as a result of mistaking meetings for occasions when work gets done instead of seeing it as only one of the possibilities to share and discuss ideas, coordinate efforts and listen to others.
Meetings are not Work Itself. They are a communication channel that may enable work, and definitely not the only one. Making meetings my primary occupation as a matter of fact left no room available for Work Itself. As a result, I was always either behind in my deliveries or working to “close tickets”, often at the expense of high quality, meaningful, impactful work. Insights, analysis and decision-making are a big part of my job; rushing them, making them fall in the cracks of meeting slots is the ultimate recipe for me to settle for the first potential answer to a problem instead of finding the best one. The alternative — working after the last meeting of the day or before the first one — was my choice for a couple of years. It led me to burnout and family/parenthood decisions I regret and will not repeat in this lifetime, no matter how much I genuinely enjoy my work and my job.
So I started to block time in my schedule for Work Itself. Those are the 2 to 8-hour “Focus Time” slots you see in my calendar. No, they are not placeholders for last minute meetings — although I definitely make exceptions when needed. These are the times when I am generating the most value to the company, to my teams, to our community. These are the times when I am focused at one thing at a time (no multitasking) and all notifications are turned off. I am creating for myself the appropriate environment for deep thought, for insights, for research and data analysis, for planning and sometimes — I am only human — for catching up with all the mandatory tasks I have to perform but that fell into No-Time Land and are probably blocking the works of others. Finally, one thing that I particularly like about our culture is that we expect leaders, no matter how senior, to be on the playing field with their teams, to be technical as opposed to mere people and project managers. There is a lot of hands-on work that I do during Focus Time.
Do not get me wrong. Meetings are important when their goals are clear, when attendees are well chosen and prepared for it (and preparation takes time) and when we use it to identify great ideas among multiple alternatives that have been somewhat thought through instead of using it to brainstorm shallow alternatives to poorly defined problems. Our colleague [hidden name] put together a great set of tips for meetings on page 3 of this document [link hidden].
The amount of focus time each person needs also varies as a function of their temperaments, the nature of their work and how senior they are (entry-level professionals need guidance and reviews more often than experienced ones).
So, if you got here, this is my proposal: with the arguments above in mind, feel free to go ahead and schedule a meeting during my Focus Time without asking for my permission. I will assume you are certain that my participation in it is necessary.
Paula
The conversations created by this initiative are a topic for another story. For now, I hope this one helps those who would like to foster cultures of focus, value generation and deep work to promote conversations in their organizations too.
