Protecting a block, and what it costs someone else

The last lesson in this level is the first action, and it is deliberately small: two protected blocks of forty five minutes, on two different days, during which you put the phone away, close what is not needed, and work on one thing. At the end of each block you record what was completed.

This is the source programme's exercise and it is worth keeping because it is falsifiable. Either there are two dated entries with a completed output, or there are not.

What the source programme does not say, and what a leadership course has to, is that a protected block is a cost transferred to someone else.

For forty five minutes you are unavailable. Somebody will need you and will wait, or will make a decision without you, or will escalate. Any of those may be better than the alternative and none of them is free, and the difference between a leader who protects focus time and a leader who is simply hard to reach is entirely in whether that cost was acknowledged and arranged in advance.

So the block has three parts, not one.

Before. Tell the people most likely to need you when the block runs and what to do if something cannot wait. This is one message. It is also the part everyone skips, and skipping it is what makes focus time read as withdrawal.

During. One task. Phone away rather than face down. Notifications off rather than muted.

After. Record what was completed, and check what arrived while you were gone. If nothing that arrived needed you within forty five minutes, that is data. If something did, that is also data, and it tells you the arrangement needs a route around you rather than through you.

There is a version of this that fails and it fails predictably.

You protect the block, you complete the work, and you tell nobody how it went. Two weeks later the blocks have quietly stopped, and the account you give yourself is that things got busy.

What actually happened in most cases is the third part. A block that is never reviewed produces no evidence that it was worth the cost you imposed on other people, so when the first genuine conflict arrives there is nothing on your side of the scale except a preference. Preferences lose to deadlines every time, and correctly.

The block survives if, after four of them, you can say what got finished that would not otherwise have been finished, and what it cost the two people you warned. That sentence is worth more than the four blocks.