Structure and protect your days

As a developer or maker of any kind, swiss cheese days are the worst. Those are the days where you have just enough meetings or calls to leave holes in your days, but not big enough holes to make any meaningful progress on your work. It’s not just meetings or calls, though. Swiss cheese days can be the result of juggling multiple projects or even juggling different types of work for the same project.

If you leave your days and weeks to the whims of others, you won’t have any time left. You have to take control of your schedule. If you work at a company where your availability is public, block your time to give yourself extended periods for focus work so people can’t insert meetings into your day on a whim. Otherwise, you only have to defend your calendar from yourself.

For some folks, this means blocking off every minute of the day. Others might block off four hours in the morning for their most important work. Either way, try explicitly making appointments with yourself for time dedicated to deep work, and stick to it just as you would with any other meeting. It also helps protect your day so that others can’t insert meetings in your day during your time for deep work.

Your strategy for protecting your days and weeks may vary. Maybe you save Fridays for meetings. Or maybe you save afternoons for meetings. Wrap up your day with administrative tasks. Or you could block 15 minutes at the end of your day to wrap up your day’s work and plan for your next day.

Start and stop at the same time every day. That way, there’s a line in the sand about when you’re working and when you’re not. The consistency helps build habits and can make it easier to focus and get down to work, but it also helps you with a clear point at which you turn off your work brain. If you never fully turn off at night because there’s no hard stop, you don’t get any of the benefits of restoration.

You can also start your day with “distraction mitigation mornings.” As you start each day planning out your time and tasks, think through anything that might serve as a distraction for the day and see if you can nip it in the bud before starting deep work. This can require some discipline to avoid getting sucked in, but you can skim your inbox looking for anything urgent that you can handle quickly. Or, hop into your team chat room to let folks know you’re going offline for a couple of hours to focus and see if there’s anything you can knock out for them real quick before you do.

Depending on your work, time zone, and the rest of your team, try designing a daily schedule that flows with your peak focus. If possible, front-load the mornings. Schedule restorative breaks for the afternoon and finish your day with low-focus tasks. Block off half of your day for focus work or split your day around some afternoon exercise. If you pay close attention to understanding your peaks and valleys, you can organize your days to maximize your productivity. The more deliberate you are about planning your time, the more easily you’ll be able to stick with it.

It’s important to plan your days, sure, but you also have to plan them in the larger context of your work. Maybe it makes more sense to plan a week of mess earlier in a project and then free up the next weeks to reduce overhead tasks. Then you can start big tasks with a clean slate and avoid the distraction of a bevy of smaller lingering tasks.

Group fragmented work or meetings into days that free up your other days. Save a day for spontaneous meetings and calls, and save all of your non-primary work to fill the gaps in those days.

So much of focus work depends on taking control of your time rather than letting time and tasks be dictated by the work itself. The best way to take control is to start planning your days and weeks ahead of time and designing them primarily around focus work and then letting the less important work fill in the gaps instead of the other way around.

Your next steps

1. Block off time for focus work on your calendar just like you would for meetings and other appointments.
2. Strive to create a consistent weekly schedule with time commitments for various types of tasks during dedicate days during the week.
3. Practice “distraction mitigation mornings” where you quickly address any potential interruptions/distractions that might otherwise pop up during the day.
4. Try to implement themed days where you dedicate each day to a single focus to reduce task-switching within days.