I used to think my calendar was full. It wasn't. It was busy — which turns out to be a completely different thing.
Every slot had a meeting in it, sure. But the spaces between the meetings, the supposed "free time" where the real work was meant to happen, were a free-for-all. Anyone could grab them. I'd start something, get interrupted, restart, get pulled away, and end the day having attended six conversations and finished zero things.
The fix was almost insultingly simple. I started treating my own deep work like a meeting nobody else was allowed to book. That single shift roughly doubled the amount of focused time I actually got — not the time I scheduled, the time I used.
The trick: block your deep work as real, defended calendar events — same color, same weight as any meeting — and protect them like you'd protect a call with your boss. Most people leave their best hours unclaimed, so meetings flood in to fill them. Claim the hours first. Two ninety-minute blocks a day, named for the specific task, treated as non-negotiable, will out-produce a calendar full of open space.
Here's the thing about unclaimed time: it's not yours. It just looks like it's yours.
To everyone else, a blank slot on your calendar reads as available. So they book it. And because saying no to a specific meeting request feels rude while protecting a vague intention to "work on the report" feels optional, the meeting always wins. Your good intentions lose to other people's concrete requests every single time.
Empty space is a vacuum, and calendars abhor a vacuum. The work you meant to do never had a defender. It was a wish, not an appointment. This is the same dynamic Cal Newport describes in his writing on deep work and time-blocking: unprotected attention gets colonized by shallow demands until there's none left for the work that counts.
The reframe that changed it for me: a block of focus time isn't the absence of a commitment. It is the commitment. It deserves a name, a start, an end, and a closed door.
I'm wary of "systems" that take a weekend to build. This took one coffee.
That's the whole setup. The work was never in the building. The work was in the defending.
A block you cancel whenever someone asks is just decoration. So I gave myself one rule, and it's the load-bearing wall of the entire thing:
A focus block can be moved, but it cannot be deleted.
If something genuinely urgent collides with my 9 a.m. block, I don't cancel it — I drag it to the afternoon. The time still has to happen. This one rule does something subtle: it stops me from negotiating my focus away meeting by meeting until there's nothing left. Moving is a rescheduling. Deleting is a surrender. I only allow the first.
The second rule is smaller but matters: one task per block. Multitasking inside a focus block is just interruption you scheduled yourself. The whole point is single-threaded attention.
People assume the magic is the time. It's not. It's the kind of time.
Ninety uninterrupted minutes isn't ninety scattered minutes added up. Focus has a warm-up cost — that fifteen-to-twenty-minute climb into the deep state where hard problems become tractable. Every interruption resets the climb. A day of "free time" sliced into ten-minute fragments never once reaches the deep state. You pay the warm-up tax over and over and arrive nowhere.
A defended block lets you pay the tax once and then stay. That's where the doubling comes from. It's not that I work twice as long. It's that the same hours, made continuous, produce far more than the same hours made jagged. When I later tracked my time for ninety days, the data confirmed it bluntly: fragmented hours were worth a fraction of continuous ones, which is also why the difference between feeling busy and making real progress comes down to protecting continuity.
To protect the continuity, I do three small things:
The part I underestimated was enforcement. It's tedious to constantly defend your own time, and AI assistants quietly took that chore off me.
I now let an assistant handle the triage. Scheduling requests that collide with a focus block get a polite "here are three other times that work" reply automatically. The block holds without me lifting a finger. The same assistant drafts a quick agenda from my named task so I sit down already knowing the first move — no warm-up spent deciding what to do.
This is where light automation earns its keep: not doing the deep work for you, but standing at the door so the deep work can happen. The thinking stays human. The guarding gets delegated.
I didn't get this right immediately. The first few weeks, I broke my own rules in predictable ways, and naming those failures is probably more useful than the wins.
The first mistake was making the blocks too long. I started with three-hour monster blocks because they looked impressive. They were unsustainable. My focus would collapse after ninety minutes and the last hour became guilty drifting. Ninety minutes turned out to be my real ceiling for genuinely deep work, and pretending otherwise just taught me to associate the blocks with failure. Be honest about your capacity, not aspirational.
The second mistake was putting them at the wrong time. I scheduled my focus blocks in the early afternoon because that's when my calendar happened to be empty. But early afternoon is my energy trough. I was protecting my worst hours and leaving my best ones — mid-morning — open for meetings. I had it exactly backwards. The fix was to move the blocks to where my energy actually was, and defend that, even though it meant pushing meetings later.
The third mistake was the sneakiest: letting "just this once" become every day. Someone would ask for my 9 a.m. slot, I'd think "it's only today," and cancel. Then it was only tomorrow too. The no-delete rule exists precisely to kill this. Once I made moving allowed but deleting forbidden, the slow erosion stopped, because there was no longer a frictionless way to give the time away.
Here's the table I wish I'd had at the start:
| Mistake | What it felt like | The fix |
|---|---|---|
| Blocks too long | Productive, ambitious | Cap at ~90 minutes |
| Wrong time of day | Convenient | Match to peak energy |
| Cancelling "just once" | Reasonable, flexible | Move, never delete |
| Vague block names | Harmless | Name the exact task |
None of these are exotic. They're the obvious traps, and I fell into every one. If you set this up expecting it to work perfectly on day one, you'll quit when it doesn't. Expect the stumbles, fix them one at a time, and the habit holds.
The deeper reason these mistakes are worth dwelling on is that each one quietly attacks the continuity that makes the whole thing work. A block that's too long fragments at the end. A block at the wrong time fragments because your energy isn't there. A cancelled block fragments your week. Continuity is the entire value proposition — uninterrupted depth is what separates a defended block from ordinary scattered time — and every mistake erodes it from a different angle. Once you see that, fixing the stumbles stops feeling like fussy rule-following and starts feeling like protecting the one thing the method exists to give you.
If your best hours keep slipping away to other people's requests, try claiming two of them on tomorrow's calendar before anything else can — and follow along if you want more small, defensible ways to protect your focus.
Q: What if my job is mostly meetings and I have no two free hours? Start with one block, even thirty minutes, even at 7 a.m. before the day starts. The principle scales down. A small defended block beats a large undefended one.
Q: Won't my colleagues be annoyed I'm "unavailable"? Less than you fear. Offering alternative times defuses almost everyone. People resent a flat no; they accept "not then, but here are three options."
Q: Isn't this just time blocking, which I've tried and dropped? The difference is the no-delete rule and the specific task name. Most time blocking fails because the blocks are vague and disposable. Named and defended, they survive.
Q: How many blocks a day is realistic? Two is plenty for most people. Deep focus is metabolically expensive; three or four high-quality blocks is a genuinely huge day. Don't pad your calendar with focus theater.
The trick was never about the calendar. It was about a quiet decision: my most important work deserves a defender, and that defender is me, in advance, before the day fills up.
Unclaimed time isn't free time. It's just time other people haven't claimed yet. Claim it first, name it, and refuse to delete it.
What are your two best hours? Go find them right now, and put something in them before the week does it for you.
I spent years saving the hardest task for when I 'felt ready.' Doing it first instead quietly fixed my focus, my dread, and my output.
I tracked every distraction for a week and was horrified by what I found. Then I fixed the three that mattered most.
I chased big, audacious goals for years and burned out every time. Then I built my whole life around wins so small they felt like cheating.
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