Comment by The_Colonel
2 years ago
In my experience scheduled meetings tend to be longer and involve more people than necessarily.
Also, somewhat contraintuitively, I often avoid starting some new work e. g. 30 minutes before a scheduled meeting, meanwhile without it I just start, and if interruption happens,... it just happens.
No, I think that makes sense and is pretty common.
It's hard for me to get into the zone if I know I've got a hard stop in 30 minutes.
Two workarounds for me. One is that I tell myself I'll spend the final 5 minutes jotting down todo's so I can pick back up relatively close to where I left off. I normally work in 20-30 min bursts anyway. This is actually not super successful for me but better than nothing.
Slightly more effective for me is using those 30 minutes to bang out some smaller tasks. Review a small pull request. Pay a bill or two. Apply some software updates. Gotta be done eventually so I get them out of the way now, in service of more focus time later.