It was October 14th, 2022. A Tuesday. I remember the date because it was the day I decided to finally “fix” my productivity by implementing a strict four-hour Deep Work block from 8:00 AM to noon. I’d read the book. I’d bought the yellow highlighter. I was ready to be a visionary leader who produced massive amounts of high-value output. I put my Slack on ‘Away,’ turned off my phone, and opened a blank Google Doc to write a strategy for our Q1 rollout at Vantage Point Logistics.
It failed. Hard.
While I was busy feeling superior and “focusing,” our lead developer was stuck on a deployment error that cost us $4,000 in lost shipping labels over three hours. My junior designer was waiting for a simple approval on a landing page and ended up sitting idle for half the morning. When I finally emerged at noon, feeling very proud of my 1,500 words of “strategy,” I had 42 unread messages and a very pissed-off boss. I wasn’t being a deep worker. I was being a bottleneck.
The math of being a manager is just different
The core problem with the whole Deep Work movement—and I know people will disagree with me here, especially the productivity nerds on Twitter—is that it assumes your value comes from what you produce individually. For a coder, that’s true. For a writer, definitely. But for a manager? Your value is a multiplier. If you spend four hours producing one unit of “strategy” but your team loses ten units of “execution” because they’re waiting on you, you are literally a net negative for the company. You’ve actually done a bad job by being focused.
I decided to get scientific about it after that Tuesday disaster. I tracked my focus for 14 working days using a simple spreadsheet. I didn’t use any of those fancy automated trackers because they’re mostly garbage and don’t capture the nuance of a quick tap on the shoulder. I just hit a stopwatch every time I was interrupted. My average window of uninterrupted time was exactly 11 minutes. That’s it. Eleven minutes between a Slack ping, a “hey do you have a sec?”, or a calendar invite for a “quick sync” that inevitably takes forty minutes.
Cal Newport is a tenured professor. He doesn’t have seven people reporting to him who all have different crises at 10:15 AM. Trying to copy his schedule when you’re a middle manager at a place like Stripe or some fast-moving startup is like trying to perform surgery in a bouncy castle. It’s physically impossible and you’re going to end up hurting someone. What I mean is—actually, let me put it differently. You aren’t “protecting your time,” you’re hiding. And your team knows it.
I hate Notion and I’m tired of pretending I don’t
This is a bit of a tangent, but it’s related. Everyone tells you to build a “Second Brain” in Notion to manage your deep work and your life. I spent $450 on productivity courses in 2021 trying to make this work. I hate Notion. It’s too slow. It’s a performative productivity trap where you spend three hours formatting a database instead of actually talking to your people. I’ve gone back to Apple Notes and a physical notebook I bought at a CVS for six dollars. It’s ugly. It works.
Anyway, the point is that we get so obsessed with the tools and the philosophies of focus that we forget what our actual job is. Our job is to be the grease in the machine. Grease doesn’t get to have “deep focus time.” It just has to be there when the gears start grinding.
The 60-minute triage (and why you should check email first)
I used to think that checking email first thing in the morning was a sin. Every blog post says “Don’t let other people’s priorities dictate your day!” I was completely wrong about this. For a manager, other people’s priorities are your priorities. If you don’t check your email and Slack at 8:30 AM, you are delaying everyone else’s start. It’s selfish.
Here is what I actually do now, and it’s the only thing that has kept me sane:
- The 9:00 AM Sweep: I spend 30 minutes unblocking everyone. I don’t do “real work.” I just answer the “yes/no” questions and approve the things that are stuck.
- The Shallow Block: I don’t aim for four hours of deep work. I aim for 60 minutes of “Medium Work.” I know I’ll be interrupted. I accept it. I don’t get angry when a notification pops up.
- The 2:00 PM Cutoff: This is my one risky stance. I stop taking new meetings after 2:00 PM. I don’t care if the CEO wants to “jam.” If it’s not a fire, it waits until tomorrow. This is the only time I actually get to think.
- Office Hours: I have a Zoom link that is just open from 4:00 PM to 4:30 PM. No agenda. Just come in and tell me what’s broken.
If you’re a manager who successfully does four hours of Deep Work every morning, your team is almost certainly drowning and they probably have a private Slack channel specifically to talk about how unavailable you are.
I might be wrong about the 2:00 PM cutoff. Some weeks it’s a total disaster and I end up in meetings until 6:00 PM anyway because something at the warehouse broke or a client threatened to churn. But having it as a default at least gives me a fighting chance. Most managers I know are just drifting in a sea of other people’s calendars. It’s pathetic, honestly. We’re paid too much to be that passive.
Your calendar is a junk drawer
The reality is that your calendar is a junk drawer where every item is somehow covered in honey. Everything sticks to everything else. You try to move one 30-minute meeting and suddenly your entire Thursday is ruined. I’ve stopped trying to make it look pretty. I don’t color-code anymore. I don’t use Calendly because I find it incredibly rude to send a link to someone and tell them to find time in my “busy” life. I just look at the mess and try to find the 11-minute gaps where I can actually be useful.
I genuinely don’t know if this is the “best” way to live. I’m tired most Fridays. I still feel like I’m behind on the “big picture” stuff more often than I’d like. But my team isn’t waiting on me anymore. They’re moving. They’re hitting their numbers. And at the end of the day, that’s the only metric that actually matters for my paycheck.
Stop trying to be a monk. You’re a manager. Embrace the chaos or go back to being an individual contributor. Those are the only two real options.
Does anyone else feel like they’re just LARPing as a productive person while their inbox slowly consumes their soul? I’m still trying to figure out if there’s a middle ground, but I haven’t found it yet.
Just get the unblocking done. That’s the whole trick.