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Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of iHeartRadio.
Good morning.
This is Laura.
Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast.
Today's tip is to plan time for focused work early in the day.
We have all heard about the value of scheduling time for heads down deep work free from interruptions.
This is time when you are not available for meetings, when your email and Slack notifications are turned off and when your door is literally and metaphorically closed.
Focused work time lets you produce more work, and generally better work, than if you are never able to give a challenging project the full attention it deserves.
Deep work can be fun.
It feels great to get lost in a project rather than playing whack-a-mole, responding to the messages that come in through various channels.
It all sounds great, but the question of when to schedule such deep work arises.
For many people, it's going to be good to schedule this early in the day.
Indeed, you might even aim to schedule your most important, focused work before breakfast.
If you work for yourself or set your own hours or work from home early in the morning has many upsides.
People are less likely to interrupt you, even if sometimes interruptions are the work, as we learned in a recent episode.
There are fewer emails and Slack messages coming in at, say 630 in the morning than later, which means that turning off notifications is generally going to be less problematic.
Almost no one is going to set a meeting with you at 6 a.m.
And if they do, you probably gave your consent for it to be there.
And this is a very different matter.
If you get your focused work done early, then perhaps you could end work early too.
And for people who have school-aged kids being around for the afternoon shift might be a real upside.
Now, if you work for a larger organization, I am not saying you need to work more hours.
Logging hours before breakfast.
If you have general set hours, what you could do is just aim to get in on the earlier side of what is acceptable and use this as focus time.
Years ago, I worked in a place where most people got in around 10 a.m.
By getting in closer to 9, I had time to work in the quiet.
And since I was catching a specific express bus home, no one really questioned my walking out the door to meet it.
In general people drift in and drift to work at most organizations over a period of time in the morning.
You might be easily able to get an hour or even more of focused time before people start looking for you.
Plus many people have more ability to focus in the morning.
After that first cup of coffee, we feel like we can take on the world.
Now, protecting this time might sometimes be challenging, but maybe sometimes not.
In a lot of cultures there might be a general practice against scheduling meetings before 9 or even 930.
Given the drifting in factor
If you are asked to meet at 9, you could try moving it a little later.
I might have something at 9 you could say, and if the person is flexible, potentially you can move the meeting to later in the day.
There may also be a great many days when you just naturally don't have something before 10 or 11 because no one has scheduled it.
If you look at your calendar, perhaps the day before, and see this open time, then plan on those being your focused mornings.
Get your coffee, take a quick calendar check and then dive in.
You can break at 945 to go grab some breakfast as a mid-morning break and you may feel like you have already won the day before breakfast, right?
The length of your focused work times and their frequency will vary depending on your job, but I would venture to guess that almost everyone needs at least some focused work time every week.
And most of us would probably benefit from more focused time than we are currently getting.
I am not saying you need to work longer.
But sometimes doing this work early and a little bit earlier than most people are at work will buy you a lot of flexibility later in the day.
That might be worth changing your schedule a little bit.
In the meantime, this is Laura.
Thanks for listening.
And here's to making the most of our time.
Thanks for listening to Before Breakfast.
If you've got questions, ideas, or feedback, you can reach me at laura at lauravanderkam.com.
Before Breakfast is a production of iHeart Media.
For more podcasts from iHeart Media, please visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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