How to (really) protect your focused work time

7 ways to make space for getting in the flow

A few weeks ago I wanted to spend some days truly focused on a work project. It wasn’t in the cards to get away for a heads-down writing retreat, and indeed, the family schedule was a bit complicated. There was back-up childcare, camp drop offs, and my husband was traveling. But I did manage to mostly protect big chunks of time — enough to make serious progress.

Here are some tactics that worked for me, and that might for you too.

1. Have work you want to do. Unless you have managed to escape to a cabin in the woods with no other responsibilities, you’re probably not going to regularly manage a lot of focused hours as a percent of your schedule. And that’s OK. Not all work demands your best! If you’re going to carve out time for focused work, it’s best to assign yourself work you are truly excited about during this time. What drew you to your job in the first place? What part of your job do you tell people about at parties? That’s going to be the most motivational thing to attempt if you’re going to bother trying to shut out the world for a bit.

2. Map out your focused hours. Look at your schedule for the week. Write down what hours are reasonably available for focused work. I found this exercise incredibly helpful. On the week when I was planning to dive deep into my project, I realized that Monday was chopped up, as was Friday, but with a little triaging, Tuesday through Thursday could be mostly open during the day. Of course it’s summer, kids are around, and we aren’t talking 7:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. — I was on the hook for some driving. However, with that in mind, I could still see that Tuesday I could block out 7:45 a.m. to 3:45 p.m. if I wanted, Wednesday I could get 9:15 a.m. to 2:45 p.m., and Thursday I could get 8:15 a.m. to 2:45 p.m. (I could work outside those hours too, but it would be for shorter stretches that might be more interrupted.)Those chunks are actually a lot of time, and certainly in the middle of Tuesday’s 8-hour stretch I could get that somewhat languorous sense of being awash in time and not needing to rush. Going to sit in a cabin in the woods for 3 months would give me more of that sense, but hey. I’ll take what I can get.

Seeing the hours marked out makes them feel real. It also helped me feel a little less whiny about having driving/kid responsibilities on Wednesday morning (hence the later start) and Wednesday/Thursday afternoon (hence the earlier ending). Absent the list of my focused hours I might have decided that those bits of evidence meant I had no chance for long stretches of space. But desires can exist alongside responsibilities.