Work in 90-minute focus cycles

Email, Teams, Slack and other instant messaging systems are great, until they clog up our day and we find we spend more time responding to messages than we do doing any meaningful work. 

What can we do? Well, that’s what I’m answering in this week’s episode.

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Script | 409

Hello, and welcome to episode 409 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. 

Last week was a workshop week for me. I finished off the Ultimate Productivity Workshop and held an in-company session. 

During both sessions, a similar question was raised. How to manage your time when you are compelled to respond to your messages instantly or at the very least within a few minutes. 

The problem with this situation is that it’s an uncontrollable one. You have no idea when or how many messages will come in on any given day. This makes it practically impossible to do any work. 

You will not be able to focus on anything if you have to be checking your messages inbox all the time. 

Now, I should caveat this: if you are employed to respond to client messages, then being responsive is part of your core work, and therefore it is something you would prioritise. 

However, in these situations, you’ll likely be working as part of a team, and most of your client queries will be handled in real time. Those that cannot be dealt with would be escalated to another person or department. 

The issue of response times arises when you are expected to do work that requires quiet, focused time to complete. In this situation, you will need to find time during the day to do that work. If not, all you will be doing is building unsustainable backlogs. 

To get to a place where you can complete your work and respond to messages in a timely manner, something will have to change. 

The first thing I would address here is response times. What is the expected response time for the work that you do? Is it realistic? 

Now, you have the data. You know how much time you need to do your work. Perhaps you need two hours a day to complete it. This means you have a degree of flexibility each day.

In this situation, I would recommend you look at the times when most of your messages come in. 

For me, most of my messages come in through the night. I may go to bed around midnight with an empty inbox, but when I wake up, come through to the office and open my email, there will be between 100 and 150 emails sitting there waiting for me. 

The first step is to clear those emails and sort the ones I need to act on from the ones that can be deleted or archived. That gives me a heads-up for my day and calms my anxious mind, knowing there are no fires to deal with.

Later in the day, I will set aside 40 to 60 minutes to clear the actionable emails. 

Now, I am fortunate in that when I wake up, Europe is asleep, the east coast of the US is going to bed, and the west coast is finishing the working day. In the morning, there is no rush for me to respond. 

If I were living in the UK, I would adjust my response time to better align with the time zones I work with. 

This is working with the data I have. 

But let me illustrate a different type of work and how to deal with it.

Imagine you were responsible for writing proposals for your sales team. On a typical day, you would receive six to eight new proposals and four or five adjustments to make to proposals you have already done. 

If it takes you an average of twenty minutes to write a new proposal and ten minutes to make an adjustment, that will take up around four hours of your day just focused on writing proposals. 

That does not take into account having to request any further information you may need to complete a proposal. 

Now here’s where things get interesting. Not all proposals are equal. If you were asked to write proposals for a $10 million project and a $1,000 one, the $10 million project would likely take priority. 

I’m also pretty sure the person asking for the $10 million project proposal will be chasing you to get it done faster. 

If you already have a two-day turnaround on proposals, moving that project up would delay one of the other proposals. What do you do? 

The problem here is that while you are fielding messages from the people wanting their proposal done today, you are not writing proposals. Everything is getting delayed. 

Now, I’ve worked at companies with strict processes for these situations. Salespeople had to follow the process and inform their customers when to expect proposals or invoices. They were not allowed to contact the sales admin team to chase proposals unless they were overdue. 

I’ve also worked in companies where there were no such processes. In those companies, nothing ever seemed to get done on time. 

There needs to be time for things to get done, and in order to ensure they do get done on time, a process should be put in place. 

For example, if your proposal turnaround is within 24 hours, then there needs to be a cutoff time. If you want your proposal done by tomorrow at 4:00 pm, it needs to be in by 4:30 pm today. 

This puts the responsibility onto the person asking for the proposal. If they do not get the proposal in on time, the delay will be entirely their own problem. 

When you do not have these processes in place, you risk running into a company that plays the blame game. 

I remember working for an English Language training company here in Korea, and I wanted to launch a new Business English Programme in August. 

We had a meeting at the head office and the CEO told me that if we wanted to launch on 1st August, then I would need to get the curriculum and artwork to the marketing team by the 15th June. 

Brilliant! As long as we got the necessary work over to the Marketing Department by 15th June, then the responsibility for the marketing was on the marketing team.

They delivered, and we had a fantastic launch. From my perspective, handing over the materials to the marketing team before the 15th took a huge weight off my shoulders. 

It was a superb team where both parties respected each other’s boundaries and, more importantly, timelines. Everyone involved knew each other’s deadlines, and these were respected. 

Another way to deal with communications is to set some rules. A sort of “if this then that” rule. 

For example, I have a rule that any message relating to lost passwords or money, I will deal with the moment I see it. 

Fortunately, I do not get many of these, but I do get around three or four a month. When I see them, I act on them immediately. They don’t take long to deal with, but I know how frustrating it is to wait a long time to access a course or get a refund. 

Another rule I have is that if I get a student question, I will respond within 24 hours. 

With AI, it can be tempting to set up an AI system to respond to these for me, but I have a red line I will not cross. That is, I will personally respond to all questions within 24 hours and never farm them out to a chatbot. 

That goes to my professional integrity. I would feel awful knowing that I am not communicating directly with my students. It would feel like I am cheating. 

However, by far the most effective way to deal with the interruptions messages can cause, whether they are emails or messages, is to set your own communication response times. 

For example, mine are:

Email within 24 hours, instant messages (Teams, Slack, etc.) within four hours and phone calls within an hour if I cannot answer immediately. 

Those response times have worked for over ten years now. I’ve never received any pushback, and most of the time I get a “thank you for your quick response”,—which suggests people are really back at responding to emails. 

If you do decide to set your own response times, communicate them with your colleagues and customers. This way, you can be held accountable for your standards. That’s a great motivator. 

Let’s get back to checking messages. 

If you do need time to do work that requires your focus, then, when you are doing that work, you do not check your messages. Period.

Turn off notifications when you are doing that work, close down your email, Teams or Slack and any other messaging system. 

Your phone can be set up to allow only a vetted number of people through. For instance, when I put my phone or computer on “focus time”, only my wife and mother can get through. Only my mother or my wife would call me with a genuine emergency. 

Most people can only do real focused work for around ninety minutes. At that point, you can check your messages. 

According to neuroscientist Andrew Huberman, we work in 90-minute cycles. (We also sleep in 90-minute cycles). This means our brain begins to run low on energy after we have been intently focused on something for more than 90 minutes, and we need to change our focus. 

I use this time to quickly check my messages and do some chores. Most of the time, I process my inbox, then respond to my team’s messages on my phone while I am doing the chores. 

The reality is you cannot be constantly checking your messages and doing meaningful work at the same time. Something has to give. 

If you are in a position where others cannot do their work until you have authorised it, you are the bottleneck, and that needs to change. 

Working in a law office, we needed to get cheques signed by a partner in the firm. Normally, I would go to the partner in charge of my department, but if he were away or in a meeting, I would need to go to another floor and ask another partner to sign it. My boss knew there was a risk that he could be a bottleneck and took steps to prevent others from doing their work. 

I know I have given you a lot of ideas in this episode. What I would suggest is that if interruptions from messages are causing you problems, look at where the main problem is.

If it’s because you feel you must respond instantly to messages from certain people (your boss or customers), that may indicate you need to have a conversation with them to set some boundaries. 

I know that conversation may be uncomfortable, but not being able to do your work to the high standard you want is a much bigger problem. That’s going to affect your promotion chances, and eventually, you will start to believe that there’s something wrong with you. 

There’s nothing wrong with you. All it requires is some processes and a boundary you can work within. Surely that’s not much to ask of anyone. 

Thank you for listening, and thank you to all of you who have asked questions about this subject. 

If you want a system that will help you to regain control of your emails and messages, then my Email Mastery course will show you how to build it. I will include the course details in the show notes for you.

It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.