Honoring Your Own Time, Even When You’re Busy

OK world, I finally did it. I took a deep breath, pulled up my Outlook calendar, links, removed days, and reduced hours. 

Let me walk you through my week. I'll share what led me up to finally doing what I’ve advised other people do for a long time… honor their own time. 

It’s been a busy week.

I think we can all say that about our week every week. Am I right?

Still, this week I had some things that I really needed to tackle; deadlines attached, and the interruptions just wouldn’t stop! One of which is learning how to do some new stuff in a relatively new piece of software.  

I outlined what I needed to accomplish on Tuesday, in between a handful of meetings, and thought that I would have it completed by Wednesday. No problem at all. Wednesday hit and reality sunk in.  

I had twelve meetings on Wednesday with one 15-minute break and two 30-minute breaks scattered throughout the day so I did what any industrious professional would do. I ate during the internal meetings, and I did what I could with this software in 15- and 30-minute increments.  

Needless to say, I ended my Wednesday extremely frustrated.

You know the dance: one step forward, two steps back, two steps forward, get interrupted, retrace your steps, and try again…. And that’s exactly how it went.

I was living the example Rishi Nicolai talks about in this video from Microsoft about modern collaboration (MOCA) and focus.  

Does this look familiar? 

My poor husband heard the sighs of frustration when he got home from work and peeked his head in to check on me. I gave him a terse recap then he asked why I was so frustrated. I exploded with, “BECAUSE I’VE NEVER DONE THIS BEFORE AND I’M HAVING TO HACK AT IT 15 MINUTES AT A TIME!” …Sigh 

Thursday was a little better since I only had eight meetings, not all of which ran an hour, mind you.

Confident that I was going to go run a couple of tests and publish the new functionality. I went to work between meetings two and three. It did not go as planned.

This went on throughout most of the day until finally, between my last two meetings, I realized what would finally work… I think. I did not get a chance to test it because I had to leave for an appointment. So here I am on Friday cautiously, optimistic that I’m going to get this new functionality published. 

That’s the back story, now to the main point… 

Yesterday, in our internal standup of Sales, Marketing, and Success, I announced that I would be pulling back availability from my Outlook calendar.

Not only would they see the focus blocks that are always on my calendar (that I’m a little too willing to schedule over), my colleagues would also see additional blocks for me to use to focus on doing the work that we talk about in those said meetings. 

Sometimes we have to go through these moments to actually put into practice the things we know we ought to already be doing. 

I know I’m not alone when I say that it’s hard to admit we can’t do it all. But we can’t.

Not in an eight- or ten-hour window of time. To truly be productive we must guard against those ad-hoc interruptions that chip away at our productivity and our sanity. Let’s be honest, when the end of our workday comes, our Real Life is waiting for us to show up.  

Here are some practical ways we can protect ourselves from notification fatigue, distractions, and busyness for the sake of busyness.

The good news is the tools we use every day have the functionality built in to support us!  

My top recommendations are: 

1. Use Microsoft Viva Insights to schedule focus time on your calendar every day. 
   Respect it. Repeat after me, “Focus time is not flex time". Use it to get into deep work.
2. Use Microsoft Focus Assist (previously Quiet Hours) to minimize distractions during your focus time.  Here’s a great article from The Verge on setting up  Windows 11 Focus Assist.  
3. Mute the chats in MS Teams that are used for unofficial communication.  Better yet, leverage the best practices of Modern Collaboration Architecture (MOCA) and use Viva Engage for “nice to know” and keep “need to know” in MS Teams. 
4. Hide/mute MS Teams channels that you’re not an active participant in.  I’m a huge fan of this. Remember, if you do this, let your team know to @ mention you in Teams channel posts to make sure you’re notified.  

Another thing to ask ourselves in this age of modern work when everything is a meeting: “Does this have to be a meeting?” Are you sure?  

Additional Tools

The Microsoft Teams Updates App 

Have you tried asynchronous communication in place of the meetings that are just updates or check-ins?

Did you know MS Teams has an Updates app that lets you collect updates from your colleagues without having to have a meeting? This can help increase productivity without setting aside time each day to connect.

You can even create your own update templates!  

Virtual Commute in Viva Insights

I also recommend you take a look at the Virtual Commute in Viva Insights.

It’s a fabulous tool for helping you mark off the tasks you’ve accomplished, take note of the things you need to do tomorrow, and mindfully end your workday (you do know they’re supposed to end, right? 😉) 

My favorite part about the Virtual Commute is capturing tomorrow’s tasks and reviewing upcoming meetings. This allows me to enjoy my evening without repeating in my head, “Don’t forget tomorrow to…” over and over.  

Modern Work is busy. We seem to forget that we’re all humans in need of breathing between the back to back to back to back agendas we face every day. I hope this has helped you think of ways to honor your own time and create a little space for yourself in the process.

After all, we are the Humans of IT.