Overwhelmed? Try this! - Part 1 - Calendar Segmentation

In this series, I describe all of the different methodologies I employ and encourage others to try to feel less burnt out, more focused and ultimately feel better during their working day. Most of these are also job-agnostic so non-technical people - feel free to read on!

What?

There's a relatively famous film called About a Boy which is basically about quite a sad man who aside from living off a relative's royalties divides his time into units; 1 unit for a haircut, 3 units for going to see a film etc. This is quite rightly portrayed as a negative in real life but when you employ this tactic in work; you may find it shockingly effective.

The idea is pretty simple and applicable to any job in which you have access to a hard or soft copy of a calendar. You assign appointments in your calendar to tasks in which you need to perform during your day; during that appointment, you only perform that task.

To quantify this with something visual; here's a relatively normal representation of what my daily calendar looks like:

In order throughout the day:

1. I have an immovable/uninterruptable (and therefore purple) administration appointment of 15 minutes whilst I read emails and look at my DMs (Bookending)
2. I have a stand up every day at 09:15
3. I will routinely have ad-hoc meetings placed into my calendar, this is totally normal at my level
4. I have an immovable/uninterruptable work item appointment to solely focus on a single work item
5. I have lunch as an uninterruptable (and out of office therefore grey) appointment. The time mostly never changes.
6. Again another immovable/uninterruptable work item appointment
7. Another ad-hoc meeting
8. I have an immovable/uninterruptable (and therefore purple) administration appointment again to bookend my day. I usually use this time to create appointments for the coming days/weeks calendars (Bookending)

The most interesting and pertinent calendar entries are 4. and 6. This is the time were I typically set a do not disturb and will become pretty strict about not being disturbed.

Why?

If you're relatively junior, especially in a technical role, then I am afraid to say that one of the negatives of becoming more senior is you will lose more and more personal focus time (by virtue of giving it to other people). It's inescapable; your calendar will run riot; you will be pulled into things with little to no notice and/or context.

The downsides of being more senior may be inescapable but you can start employing this tactic now to protect yourself; I have for the last few years and I've observed the following benefits:

1. If you block out your calendar more likely than not people will (and really should!) respect it. In general, people do use the availability features of calendar applications. Meaning - you get stuff done in a focused manner.
2. It acts as self-documentation for your day. Are you in a stand-up daily? Cool! - you can just read yesterday's calendar to tell the team what you did. If for some zany reason you work for somewhere that wants you to account for every moment of your day - Cool! you have everything in your calendar
3. Setting clear boundaries within your day minimizes context switching
4. Setting boundaries and routines is *physiologically beneficial * to most people. I have particularly found great comfort in bookending my day.