What’s your optimum time of day and week where you feel most energised or in the flow for deep work? The other way of looking at it is this: when do you not like being interrupted during the day?
For me, it’s early mornings, before 10.30 am and Fridays where I prefer to have no meetings (read: boring/non-important ones).
It may take a bit of experimenting to figure it out, especially if you’re juggling a number of responsibilities across multiple teams, work and life.
This is how I approached it during a time looking after an international creative team, dealing with the demands of a young kid on top of several different time zones. But I gradually sussed out what worked for me with little experiments, and managed to protect two working mornings per week, blocking out my calendar to ensure no meetings before 10:30 am. This allowed me to work on projects which creatively sparked or energised me. A key distraction is the inbox. So, whatever you do, do not tackle emails first thing – except for a quick scan to see if anything important happened overnight. And remember, if its that important, someone will tell you.
As a team, we also created a pact together: never schedule a Friday meeting. This gave everyone permission to politely reschedule a non-time-sensitive meeting to another day. It was an effective move that gave everyone sanity and respect, not just for our personal energy, but for our own creativity. My boss didn’t even realise we did this until a year later, proving that it did not impact the quality of our work or productivity. In fact, it made us all better and less cranky for it.
So identify two to three chunks across the week where you can protect and nourish yourself with work that is meaningful to you. When you fill your own cup with what gives you energy, it always puts you in a better frame of mind, ready to deal with any business-as-usual projects and demands you need to respond to.