The next big meeting on your calendar might not have any other attendees—it might just be you. A growing number of high-performing leaders, including managers at Google and other Fortune 100 companies, are carving out protected “focus blocks” and treating them like mission-critical meetings.
With constant pings, shallow tasks, and back-to-back calls, this might be the only way to produce strategic, high-value work. Google and Microsoft have even rolled out Focus Time features that automatically block off calendars to protect deep work.
Paige Donahue is a product marketing leader at Google who helps YouTube creators grow their communities and monetize their followings. She says she’s started using the Focus Time feature inside Google Calendar to carve out protected blocks for deep work. “Before, my day was really just a stream of constant meetings, and I think a lot of people can relate to that,” she says. “It was meeting after meeting, ping after ping, and I was finding that I didn’t have a lot of time to do the deep work that’s really important to move things forward.” Now, she notes, it’s much easier to see forward momentum. “[The focus time feature] is really helping me get in the groove and tackle projects . . . instead of getting bogged down by endless meetings.”
Deep work has become a job requirement
While the idea of “deep work” isn’t new, the urgency around it is. Leaders can no longer treat focus as a luxury. In today’s reactive workplace, carving out uninterrupted time for thinking and creating has become a core leadership responsibility.
And employees want this just as much as executives. According to a recent Twilio survey of over 1,200 UK workers, 47% said they prioritize distraction-free focus time, and 36% said they’d like their employers to formally schedule such quiet periods. This suggests that protecting focus isn’t a personal quirk—it’s a cultural shift waiting to happen.
But it’s all too easy to let your week get sucked up by shallow work, the work that may appear urgent (such as last-minute requests and fire drills) but rarely move you towards the end-of-year KPIs that determine your bonus and future promotion potential.
At Lifehack Method, where we coach executives and teams on productivity, we see this firsthand: when leaders skip focus time, teams flounder in shallow work. When they protect it, they model a culture of depth, clarity, and results. Every Friday, our clients practice a Weekly Planning ritual where they calendarize the entire week, ensuring strategic work has nonnegotiable slots before the week fills up with reactive tasks.
Forget time management, start managing your attention
The calendar is a useful tool, but the deeper shift is about what we choose to protect. As organizational psychologist Adam Grant points out, the old paradigm of time management—squeezing as much as possible into the day—has limits and can even be detrimental. The new frontier is attention management: “the art of focusing on getting things done for the right reasons, in the right places, and at the right moments,” as Grant defines it in a New York Times essay.
When we coach leaders in our programs, we encourage them to embrace this mindset shift. The question isn’t “How do I fit this in?” but “Does this deserve my attention?” That pivot can mean the difference between a week lost in shallow work and a week that produces breakthrough outcomes. Use your deep work blocks to empty your mind of those pesky urgent tasks and give yourself the gift of diving into your most leveraged activities. These are often not even on your to-do list, that’s how little attention they tend to get!
When a calendar block isn’t enough, bring a buddy
Of course, protecting time on a calendar doesn’t always mean using it well. Getting forward momentum is tough when you’re facing procrastination and anxiety about how to start. That’s where accountability comes in. Enter virtual coworking, a rising trend that pairs you with a partner online to ensure you show up and do the work. Many of our clients here at Lifehack Method rely heavily on coworking sessions as a force multiplier to speed through otherwise procrastinated tasks.
Science backs this up. A 2024 study in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience found that real-time, subtle feedback during lapses of attention helped participants regain focus. The researchers concluded that it may be more effective to intervene during low-focus moments than to simply enforce long, uninterrupted blocks. For high-stakes or creative work, this suggests that lightweight accountability systems—like coworking sessions or structured check-ins—can serve as the “feedback nudges” that keep people in the zone.
Virtual coworking platforms are seeing traction among enterprise employees. Taylor Jacobson is the Founder & CEO of Focusmate, the world’s No. 1 virtual coworking community. He shares that Fortune 500 Focusmate members currently average 31% more sessions than the average user, and 13% more time spent on the platform.
Donahue shares that at work, she uses both virtual and in-person coworking to ensure she says on task. “I am a big fan of coworking. I feel that it adds a layer of accountability and it’s just nice to sit around the campfire with other people who are in it as well. It’s a great way to do deep focused work almost like a sprint.”
How to make focus time impactful
Protecting focus blocks isn’t just about willpower. It requires communication and culture change. Leaders who succeed tend to:
- Treat focus time like a sacred meeting. Don’t reschedule unless it’s truly urgent.
- Communicate clearly. Let your team know when you’re offline for focus and when you’ll be available again.
- Pair protection with accountability. Use tools like Focusmate, or—as we do at Lifehack Method—stack focus time with rituals like our Winning the Week Method® planning process, which makes deep work part of the weekly rhythm.
- Model the behavior. When managers visibly protect focus, employees feel empowered to do the same.
Protect your focus to future-proof your job
As tools evolve and workplace demands intensify, the rarest resource is no longer money, ideas, talent, or even time. It’s unbroken attention. Leaders who defend it will drive innovation; those who don’t risk drowning in noise. Focus time is not indulgent. It’s the only way to do the kind of work companies actually pay leaders to do.