Protect your team's focus time

Why this works, and where it comes from

Managers and the people they manage often work on different clocks without noticing. A manager's work is largely made of conversations, so a day full of meetings can be a productive one. For someone whose work is making something, a report, a design, a piece of code, the same day can produce very little, because each meeting breaks up the time around it as well as taking its own slot. A half hour between two calls feels useful from the manager's side and is often too short to get properly started from theirs. Paul Graham made more or less this point in his essay on what he called the maker's schedule and the manager's schedule.

Cal Newport's Deep Work argues that the ability to concentrate without distraction on demanding work is both increasingly valuable and increasingly rare, and that it needs deliberately protected time. Steven Rogelberg's research on meetings, gathered in The Surprising Science of Meetings, comes at it from the other side: meetings take up a large share of the working week for modest returns, and many would work better shorter and better designed. Shared focus blocks put both ideas to work at once.

Your team usually can't do this for themselves. Declining a meeting from another team, or from a senior leader, can feel risky for one person. When the manager says the team keeps these hours free, a personal boundary becomes a team norm, which is far easier to hold. It also means being honest with yourself first. The meetings that break up your team's week are often ones you called, for good reasons, and nobody else is going to point that out.

This is the wrong move for a team whose work is live coordination, like a support desk at peak hours or an on-call incident rotation, where being reachable is the job. And if the real problem is that the team simply has too much to do, blocks won't fix it. That's a conversation about priorities, and focus time can't make there be less work.