Focus time
A time period reserved on the calendar for work that needs deep concentration, free of meetings and interruptions.
Focus time is a time period set aside, free of meetings and interruptions, for concentrating on deep thinking and work. Based on the concept Cal Newport proposed in his book “Deep Work” (2016), it spread as a practice for maximizing the productivity of knowledge workers. Google Calendar officially added a “Focus time” feature in 2021, providing a mechanism that automatically mutes notifications during the set time period and declines meeting invitations.
Why continuous time is needed
- It takes a little over 23 minutes on average to fully return to interrupted work (an observational study by Gloria Mark and colleagues at the University of California, Irvine, 2008)
- There is a limit to how long deep concentration can be sustained, and collecting fragmented 30-minute pieces is no substitute
- The standard practice is to secure about 90 minutes of continuous time as one block
Google Calendar’s Focus time feature
When you enable Google Calendar’s Focus time feature, the following happens automatically: your chat status changes to “Do not disturb,” notifications are muted, and a warning appears when others try to set a meeting in that time period. This lets you explicitly send the signal on the calendar that “I am doing focused work at this time.”
Its relationship with scheduling
As a form of time blocking, registering focus time on your calendar as “busy” makes scheduling tools automatically exclude that time period from the candidates. Whereas a no-meeting day is an organization-level measure, focus time is distinctive in that it can be set flexibly at the individual level.
The key to making it stick is team agreement
Even if you set focus time on your own, it does not work unless the people around you respect it. In a culture where people see a “busy” block and still pile meetings on top, thinking “you’re not free, but it’s urgent,” the block becomes an empty formality. Conversely, a single line of team agreement, “while focus time is shown, contact only for emergencies,” is enough to give individual settings real force. Think of the tool’s feature and the agreement on how to use it as something to introduce together.