🎒 Microlesson
🪞 Reflect
Is it hard to find enough time to grapple with the big issues and projects on your to-do list?
💡 Concept
In virtual work cultures that default to synchronous communication, your calendar can easily be swallowed up by back-to-back meetings. Often, unblocked time on your calendar is seen as an open invitation to schedule a meeting. Before you know it—poof!—the day you had been hoping to knock out that big project is now going to be spent in meetings.
How can you keep this from happening?
Previous lessons have already covered the concept of using the Placeless Taxonomy to be more selective about which tasks become synchronous meetings. But how do you protect your time from others who still default to meetings for everything?
If you want to protect your time for focused work, you have to proactively block it off. Find times that you currently don’t have meetings and schedule an appointment or event, marking yourself as “unavailable.” It’s not like you’re not working—you are. You’re just unavailable for meetings.
You may not be able to immediately change others’ mindsets and practices when it comes to meetings, but you can take ownership of your own time. By proactively blocking off time for focused work, you’re helping to balance synchronous and asynchronous communication for yourself, and modeling effective async-first practices for your team.
🎬 Take Action
Block off chunks of time in your calendar for deep work. If it makes you uncomfortable to block off hours at a time, start small. Start by setting aside just 30 or 45 minutes and make sure you monotask during that time.
Share with your team that you block off time for deep work, which you use to focus on tasks that require your full attention. Invite them to do the same.
Share the positive productivity results of blocking off time with your team and supervisor.
✅ Check In
🧠 Keep Learning
Learn how to design a deep work session in our Hybrid Team Success Toolkit.
🎁 Learn with your team!
Refer our weekly microlessons to your team members to learn as a group! Just follow the instructions in the section below to get started.
