Time-blocking is awesome for deep work. But as a leader, you need to balance deep work and collaboration. Here are some tips.
Time-blocking or not?
Notifications on or off?
Make yourself available for every request of your team or not?
As usual in entrepreneurship, there isn’t black or white. There is always a sensation or a distraction for an entrepreneur to attend to, so you will need to find a way to resist the temptation of all the distractions.
It’s good to be helpful for your team and your customers. At the same time, precious little gets done when you are distracted all the time by team members asking if you have a minute, customers calling with something that could have waited for the next regular meeting, or random people still doing cold calling marketing.
Here is an analogy: Parkinson’s Law says that administration fills the room you give it: If you allow your day to be eaten by administrative tasks, they will fill your whole day. If you dedicate only one hour to those same tasks, you’ll get all of them done in just one hour.
It’s the same when you are available for your team all day. Then you will be taken hostage by whatever urgency the team brings to you, and you won’t be able to work on the tasks an entrepreneur has to work on.
Conversely, if you are never available for your team, you might get your work done, but lose your team. So you end up being a solopreneur, not an entrepreneur.
I’ve been at Yonder’s helm since its very first day. In the beginning, being available for the team and still getting work done was easy — heck, in the very early days, I shared the office with just two other people. Now we have a 25-person team spread across 15 time zones, and somebody always wants to talk.
The time-blockers amongst you will argue that time-blocking is a productivity technique that helps people get lots of stuff done. This is true in crisis — it helped me cope with an extremely intense period of time during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic.
On the other hand, time-blocking makes you inaccessible to your team. In our company, all calendars are visible by default. My co-founders and our first employees know me well enough to overbook my calendar when I blocked some time to get stuff done, so using time blocking didn’t encourage them to interact with me whenever it was necessary. However, nowadays, not everybody knows me well enough to feel comfortable overbooking my calendar. This is problematic when you have a packed schedule all the time — some people will then never get the opportunity to speak to you.
In my time-blocking days during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, I would typically get impatient towards the end of the meeting — the next meeting or task was waiting. So I would often wrap up a discussion before a real solution was found, just because I had to rush off.
Our best ideas all appeared during creative discussions with my coworkers, either in impromptu discussions or on a walk in the mountains. This is true for technical, commercial, and organizational topics. How would you possibly find time for impromptu discussions or walks in the mountains when time-blocking defines your day?
You see, it’s not just about pro or contra time-blocking. Like so many productivity fads, it ain’t that simple.
Here is how I try to balance the team and my work.
Beehive Days
I typically spend Monday to Wednesday in our Zurich office. Arriving early, holding regular meetings, having informal chats at the coffee maker, placing phone calls with customers and prospects, and getting lots of unforeseen tasks done. These are my beehive days, and I don’t even aspire to get any work done that requires clear thinking or full concentration.
I end my beehive days being dead tired, and it’s not uncommon for me to fall asleep earlier than the kids.
Concentration Days
On most Thursdays and Fridays, I work from home. Those days are quieter than the first half of the week, plus I have added an extra layer of security: I block my calendar so that Hubspot and Calendly don’t fill up my day. In this way, I can work on tasks that require clear thinking or full concentration.
For me, that’s typically product work — writing specifications, working on the roadmap, clustering bugs, and planning sprints.
Travel Days
So much for the theory. Enter travel. Business travel is usually short notice, no matter how far you have to travel. In my career, I had to attend an RFP presentation during the Easter holidays in Southeast Asia, fly to the Middle East multiple times on Saturdays as they start the work week on Sunday, or learn upon my landing from the United States that my on-site presence was needed again the following week.
Travel days require extra planning efforts because the regular meetings won’t go away just because you travel. Furthermore, according to my experience, there is always something that goes wrong during travel, so be prepared to replan your travel days multiple times. Canceled meetings, delayed flights, traffic jams in a foreign city, you name it.
Conclusion: From Concentration to Travel Day
Sometimes, my Concentration Days suddenly feel like Travel Days or Beehive Days, because a single phone call changes everything:
New RFP being published.
So when that happens, I always remind myself that changes of plan are part of the game on Travel Days, and then I declare the day a Travel Day.
