No matter how good you are at asynchronous working it can still be hard to find long stretches of uninterrupted time in your calendar. Even two short meetings a few hours apart can make it impossible to focus on deep work for the day. This is especially true for managers, who often have more meetings than individual contributors.
One way to tackle this is to declare every Friday a Focus Friday. The rules are simple…
1️⃣ No internal meetings on Fridays, except for pairing, unblock me sessions or impromptu social calls.
2️⃣ Everyone can ignore requests for these 👆 until Monday.
Fridays are for focussed work. Pairing and Unblock Me Sessions are okay because they’re sometimes the best way to do focussed work (see & Unblock Me Sessions). Impromptu social calls are fine because sometimes people need a chat.
Crucially though, everyone has permission to ignore any requests for these if they don't want to be interrupted.
Pro Tips
If you start doing Focus Fridays….
- Encourage managers to pick one thing to focus on each Friday (if you’re used to constant meetings & context switching it’s often hard to actually focus on something when suddenly given the chance).
- If folks have a great uninterrupted flow-state day, encourage them to share what they got done in Slack before they sign off for the weekend.
- Encourage everyone to move external meetings to Mon-Fri wherever possible too. And remind folks to block their calendars so they don’t fill up via Calendly.
- If you do synchronous daily standups, try doing them async on Fridays. (If you really need them keep them <10 mins.)
Why does this work?
- Everybody knows that Fridays are off-limits without asking. It’s a group norm.
- It forces people to squash their calls Mon-Wed, which often makes them reflect on how valuable they are in the first place.
- It encourages people to communicate only asynchronously once a week, which leads to better habits in general.
- It guarantees a solid 6-7 hour stretch of focussed work once a week for everybody in the firm, which is a hell of a drug once you get used to it.
- It’s a great way to have everyone start their weekend feeling like they had a productive week.
Why Friday?
Because alliteration 🤷♂️. Friday has the disadvantage that people are tired and might not squeeze maximum value out of a focus day. But having tried this on Monday’s and Wednesdays, neither worked as well.
For a lot of people, Mondays involve planning, firefighting and getting aligned for the week – all of which is super collaborative. And Focus Wednesdays felt like it broke the week up in a weird way.
Do whatever works for you though.