<aside> <img src="/icons/info-alternate_yellow.svg" alt="/icons/info-alternate_yellow.svg" width="40px" /> This page is part of The Toolbox by Danny Smith.

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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?