Battling context switching

A few months ago, I started blocking off my calendar on Wednesdays every couple of weeks or so in order to really sit down and grind some work out. It was great, but inevitably that started to go away as urgent meetings started showing up and slowly my protected Wednesdays disappeared.

Eventually, I just stopped blocking off my calendar altogether. And yet another productivity experiment had initial success and then became a failed experiment in the long-run. At the beginning of this week, I decide to block off my entire Wednesday again and have a get shit done day.

It’s been great so far and I haven’t been this excited for a day of work in a long time. There’s just been so much shit that I’ve wanted to do from a strategic and more creative side that I’ve wanted to tackle, but just haven’t had any prolonged blocks to do so.

Going forward, I know that blocking off my Wednesdays is just not manageable. And I’ll need to make to make adjustments.

In addition, my call schedule often creates a lot of context switching. I take a 30 minute call, and then have a 30 minute window until my next call. Those 30 minutes are just not enough time for me to sit down and really tackle a lot of these tasks. As such, I use those minutes to catch-up on Slack/Email and sometimes even take a break. It’s not the most productive use of my time.

My new experiment is going to be trying to adjust my calendar on Fridays for the week ahead. I’ll put in 2-4 hour blocks of time where I try to protect myself from calls and meetings so I can focus on these projects that take longer. I’m hoping this experiment lasts a bit longer and allows me to be more productive