Uninterrupted Work Time Is, Of Course, The Greatest Managerial Gift

But how many managers realize and recognize that?

There are about 24.2 million hits on Google for “uninterrupted work time,” so it feels like something people are interested in and others are putting out content around. Makes sense, right? We’re all super busy, e-mail is the current generation’s ultimate time waster, and ‘Death By Meeting’ is a real tangible thing.

I had a friend once (worked for Accenture, I believe, in one of those “Project Manager” roles where you don’t really know exactly what he does all day) and he told me at a bar, “Honestly, most days I can’t even do real work until 4pm.” I feel like a lot of people probably feel similarly, and especially those in the middle tier — half of the reason for the existence of the middle-tier is to go to meetings and throw out ideas that the upper tier “listens” to and then goes in a totally different direction completely not based on anyone’s guidance. That’s where the 13 percent employee engagement stats come from, in a nutshell.

So … how about uninterrupted work time? Could we do it?

We could, yes, but it requires a few shifts in philosophy. Let me start with the most basic point of all:

• Anyone can do this whenever they want: Just block three hours to yourself on a Thursday or something. No one will try to schedule over that. The “Meeting Planner” and calendar time are sacrosanct in the American workplace. So if you need time to grind on a project, schedule that shit in Outlook or Slack or Google or whatever you use and then just take it. No one will mess with you if there’s a block on your calendar, typically (and if they do, it’s likely up the chain; up the chain meetings you pretty much have to take anyway. That’s called hierarchy.)

Alright, so … how could we do it aside from just doing it ourselves?

• If you’re a manager, think about the point of meetings: Like, think for one second about calling it. Here’s kind of how the whole system works, IMHO: the goal of most companies is to “make money.” However, the company can’t say that, because it sounds bad and unethical. So they mask their goal and their internal priorities as “communication” and “collaboration” and other…