Create blocks for focus time and collaboration on your calendar
10 min
Beginner
By the end of this lesson, you'll be able to:
- Schedule blocks of focus time to do deep work without distraction
- Allocate blocks of time for open collaboration
Schedule focus time
What is focus time?
According to research, it takes about 20 minutes to get into a flow state to do focused work, so it’s important that your calendar is set up with big enough blocks of time to enable this! This is especially important for distributed teams in order to do async work well. Focus time is time you specifically set aside for your deep thinking tasks, where you need to concentrate without distractions. You can use this time for creating or to consume information on your own without interruptions.
How to schedule focus time
You should aim to spend about 30-40% of your work week in focus time. Once you’ve edited and consolidated your existing meetings, block off 12 to 15 hours for focus time in your calendar. You can allocate the time evenly across five days or assign more hours on focus days - whatever works for you! Just make sure that your blocks are at least 90-minutes to account for the 20 minutes you’ll spend in the beginning getting into the flow. Once you set the time aside for yourself, try not to let people book over it!
👉 For example: Claudia, a designer, finds her afternoons filled with scattered meetings, disrupting her creative flow. She decides to reschedule her meetings to the mornings and blocks off her afternoons for uninterrupted focus time. This change allows her to dive deeper into her design work without constant interruptions, enhancing her productivity and creativity.
👇 Click the tabs below to explore tips to get the most out of focus time.
One tip for guarding your focus time is to set up your calendar to automatically decline a meeting request when you have scheduled focus time.
👉 For example: Here’s how you could set up auto-decline in Google calendar.
- Click Create and select the Focus time event type.
- Check the box to Automatically decline meetings.
- Under Message, add a note to let people know why you declined and how they can reach you if it’s urgent and you need to attend.
- Click Save.
Sometimes making space in your calendar for focus time means declining lower-priority meetings that fall during the block of time you want to use for deep work.
👇 Click the box below to see an example note to send with your decline.
Aim to spend about 30-40% of your week in focus time (that’s about 12 to 15 hours).
Schedule open collaboration time
Have you ever worked on a project where you needed to chat or work with your team but couldn’t find a time in common? Open collaboration time (sometimes called ‘jam time’ or ‘open hours’) is blocked time when you and your main collaborators mutually agree to be online and not in other meetings so that you can work together in real-time. Open collaboration time can be used for things like:
- Chat conversations
- Writing or creating together
- Talking through a complex problem live
- Paired programming
- Office hours
How to schedule open collaboration time
You should aim to spend about 10-20% of your work week in open collaboration time, or about 4-8 hours. First, work with your core collaborators to find overlapping time that you can commit to being online and available to work together. Then, schedule collaboration time holds in your calendar to keep those times meeting-free.
👇 Click the tabs below to explore a couple examples.
👉 For example: Half of Nathan’s team is on the West Coast in the United States, while the other half is in Australia. They often struggle to find common time to collaborate with so few overlapping work hours.
They decide to block 1.5 hours of open collaboration time 2 days per week at 8:30 AM Australia time, and 3:30 PM Pacific time.
They give the event a clear title and description so everyone knows the intended use of the time, and set it to show as ‘free’.
Use your judgement and only use the blocks when you need them! These holds give you the flexibility to quickly collaborate on high-priority work with your team as it comes up over the week, rather than searching your calendars for free time a week or more away. But if you have nothing to collaborate on that day, skip it and use the block for focus time instead!
Aim to spend about 10-20% of your week in open collaboration time (that’s about 4 to 8 hours).
👇 Watch this video to hear tips and tricks from Atlassians who have already done this exercise.
How was this lesson?
next lesson
Maximize productivity by scheduling time to respond to messages
- Block time to respond to your messages
- How to schedule time to respond to messages?
- What if you need to check notifications during focus time?
- Try it yourself
- What does your ideal calendar look like?