Focus time
- mayadolgin
- Jul 25
- 4 min read
(July 22, 2025 Newsletter)
I opened my computer to write this newsletter 40 minutes ago. I have an hour-long train ride and thought – this is the perfect time to focus!
Except…
When I opened my computer, I saw a draft email I started last night but didn’t finish. Let me just do that quickly and get it off my mind.
Then…
After I sent that email, my inbox was open and I saw something else that was just a quick response. Let me just do that and get it off my mind.
And then…
I remembered that last night I told my family I’d fix the permissions on a shared calendar I own. Let me just do that and get it off my mind.
But wait…
When I finally got back to Word, I saw a draft document that reminded me of an email I sent yesterday and wanted to see if the person responded. Back to my inbox for just a second.
And here we are, with 20 minutes left in the train ride, feeling bad that I wasted time while my mind is fresh doing a bunch of small things that add up.
So, while it wasn’t what I thought I’d write about, we’ll turn it into the topic of the newsletter because I know this happens to you all the time, doesn’t it? I hear the complaints from my clients on a regular basis – how hard it is to get focus time and how easy it is to use it for the wrong things.
Why it matters
Your focus time is invaluable, not just to you but to your organization. But the paradox is that all those little tasks… while some might feel like a waste of time, others are related to your core work, as well.
You don’t want to be a bottleneck, right? You don’t want to get the reputation of being inaccessible or unhelpful, right?
But it comes at a price. You’re being driven by agendas set by others, unable to discern if your work is moving the needle. You get to the end of the day or week, exhausted, with the most important to-do still on the list. And it’s often related to your unique value-add, meaning it’s the last thing you’d give anyone else to do.
How to get the big things done
Look ahead at your calendar and block off time before it fills up. If you’ve never heard of the Big Rocks parable, you can read or watch it here. If necessary, cancel, reschedule, or shorten meetings that are in your way. (See my previous post about getting out of low value meetings.)
Give Focus Time a more specific name. When you look at the week or month ahead, change the name of the calendar blocks to items you’ll actually do during that time and make sure there’s a verb in there! “Strategic planning” doesn’t give you direction as well as “Review draft of SP and send back comments.”
Balance consistency with freshness. One mistake I’ve had to learn to correct is leaving a recurring invite static for too many months, to the point that it gets easy to ignore. If it’s not working for you, change its position on your calendar, your location for completing that task, or send a calendar invite to someone who can check in with you to make sure you’re doing what you said you’d be doing.
Put the phone away! Keep the source of so many of our distractions out of sight and reach. And if you need to close tabs, notifications, or other blinging distractions on your computer, do that too.
See the distractions as tests. By viewing the distractions as opportunities to rise to the challenge, we can flip the narrative.
Block off time for all the little things. I recognize that the original challenge – being overwhelmed with a million little tasks – doesn’t get solved by making time to do the biggest and most important items. So reserve time each day or week for clearing the cache and evaluate what they are. Can AI help? Can an assistant do some? Can you teach a colleague?
Help each other. Within your team, it’s best to try and coordinate. Alone time can happen at the same time and meetings can happen at the same time, even if it means doing a coordinated reset of calendars or choosing a date at which a scheduling change is going into effect.
Final thought: Let your system evolve. Note what works and what doesn’t and optimize toward more of what does. And as something that worked stops being effective, go with the flow toward the next iteration.
The Coaching Corner
“And what else?”
What else do you think it could be?
What else could you try?
What else do you want to accomplish?
The first answer isn’t always the best one, as Michael Bungay Stanier says. Push your team to go deeper, think bigger, try harder with this one simple question.
Recommendations
“I’ve learned” by Maya Angelou – thanks to Jean who brought this nice video with a reading of Maya Angelou’s poem to my attention. The last line is the best well known, but the rest is just as beautiful.
The Science of Emotional Intelligence – a conversation between Dan Harris, founder of 10% Happier, with Daniel Goleman, father of the field of emotional intelligence (excuse the slightly outdated COVID talk. 95% of the episode holds up all these years later).
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