Focus days

Focus days and meeting days: a guide to boost your productivity.

 How we organize our time. 

Have you ever felt frustrated due to a huge load of pending communications and meetings that bog you down so you can’t focus on important projects and objectives? Or how about the need for more hours in the day so you’re able to attend all the meetings, reply to emails, and/or messages in the different communication tools? 

Well, you are not alone; these were both frequent and exhausting occurrences for us! Back in 2017, many of our team members were struggling with the cognitive load generated by Slack messages, having to attend constant video meetings, and so on. The cognitive load was disrupting the execution of critical tasks and consuming their productivity. As a result, we started experimenting with a ‘focus day’ framework. We attempted various iterations until we found one that we adapted until it perfectly suited our needs. Here are our conclusions and recommendations.

First, however, let’s just define what we mean by a ‘focus day’.

A focus day is one where you spend around 80% of your time working on your goals and completing tasks so you can move forward with your projects. Blocking time specifically allows you to concentrate and dedicate time to execution. Are we suggesting that you can’t have any meetings or check your communication channels? No, we’re not. You still have 20% of your day to do that. You can have meetings related to your projects so you can align them, and move forward. You can also have stand-up meetings so you can ensure team alignment in order to increase decision-making and execution speed.

What do you need to implement a focus day?

  • Define how many you need per week at the company level.
  • Lay down simple rules to determine what kind of meetings can happen during focus days — like daily stand-ups and project alignment meetings.
  • Align your communications schedule to reflect your focus days framework. Avoid sending announcements in your company-wide communication channels on focus days.
  • Train your team accordingly and get them to reorganize their calendars.
  • Ask your team leaders to lead by example. By successfully implementing the framework themselves, it’s much easier for the members of the team to follow suit.

Recommendations

  • Set three focus days per week and two days for meetings. Adjust your schedule to reflect this.
  • Your focus days should be from Monday to Wednesday; research has shown that people are most productive in the first half of the week.
  • Mark your availability on your calendar clearly. If you don't want to be disturbed at a particular time, your calendar is the best way to share that information.
  • Have fewer or shorter meetings if you feel your meeting days are not enough. This mindset will force you to better identify when a meeting is actually needed. Some of your meeting agenda points could well be easily addressed in a Slack message or another communication tool.
  • Don’t plan team-wide meetings during focus days.
  • Begin every quarter by planning your 1-on-1s, other team meetings, and alignment meetings. Actively share this info with your team.