Best Practices: Preserving Heads Down Time
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Prioritize Focus Time
Set Focus Time minimum
Setting a weekly Focus Time goal helps determine when and where Clockwise will defend a shift in your schedule. Having this set allows maximum preservation starting from 3 weeks from the current week, allowing calculated trade-offs to happen with flexible meetings and necessary holds.
Any time you have fewer than 10 hours selected in settings, or any time 10 hours are preserved within a week, you’ll start to see 1-hour blocks preserved in an attempt to meet your goal instead of the typical 2-hour blocks.
You can set your Focus Time goal in Ideal Day.
Make everything flexible
The more events you mark flexible (❇️), the better your schedule will be.
Flexible meetings and flexible holds allow for the maximum fluidity of your schedule – which means maximum consideration to your preferences. Not only does this benefit your entire organization, but it leads directly to the greatest amount of uninterrupted Focus Time for yourself.
Show your teammates you’re busy
Choose to show a busy status to others when you’re in scheduled Focus Time. This marks an event’s availability status as busy rather than free – which makes it harder to book over; when folks within your org try to book over it, it won’t be offered as an available time if it’s marked as busy unless it’s the only option after considering the rest of your preferences.
If you have Slack enabled as a connected app, syncing your status either with or without event titles will add an additional level of visibility and understanding toward your intention to be heads-down in Focus Time.
With this enabled, a light bulb emoji (💡) will show in your Slack status. If you choose to sync with event titles, “Focus Time” will be visible when a teammate hovers on your name.
Sync in personal commitments cal for conflicts
Turning on Personal Calendar Sync ensures that any other interruptions to your Focus Time are synced in. Adding in that doctor’s appointment or banking-hour errand within your personal calendar makes sure that you’ll still hit your Focus Time hours-held goal by end of week.
Set your day to be actively time-defensive
Beside setting a weekly goal of hours-held in Focus Time, you can create an aggressive approach to heads down time with a few specific changes. Achieving days shaped how you’d like with Focus Time targeting specific hours of the day provides consistency while allowing you to be flexible with hours you share meeting space with others.
Use granular Focus Time settings
With Focus Time engaged, you can allow Clockwise to automatically decline new meetings you’re invited to once your week’s scheduled Focus Time falls below a minimum amount of hours-held.
For this minimum, you’ll typically want to choose something reflecting fewer hours than your Focus Time goal, but something aggressive enough that it meets your bare-minimum need of heads down time.
Note: The auto-decline feature works on an individual invitational basis. If you have fewer than your bare minimum hours-held and an invitation comes in to a new event, Clockwise will auto-decline it. If another event cancels and frees up Focus Time following that, the next event will not auto-decline as long as your bare minimum hours-held is met. Clockwise will not resurface the auto-declined event previous to the freeing up of your schedule and its RSVP will remain no.
You can manually change your RSVP on any auto-declined event to yes without adjusting your overall settings.
Modify your meeting hours
Creating some free-time scarcity can help focus meetings you’re in frequently, especially if you work on a team with established presence time – for example, regardless of timezone all US-based workers are online from 9AM - 1PM Pacific (GMT-8). In that scenario, ensuring your meeting hours cover only 9AM - 1PM Pacific would allow you to be available for meetings during those core business hours, and otherwise structure your working hours around them.
With the above scenario, you can expect that your Focus Time would then focus itself to be created between 8AM - 11AM. If your Focus Time goal exceeds 15 hours (3 hours x 5 day-week), you can expect that more Focus Time will be created during your meeting hours as well.
Make lunches as flexible as possible
More flexibility is always better.
Inflexible lunches (such as 30-minute minimum lunch times only able to flex within an hour’s space) often cause event-crashing, where lunch is scheduled in conflict with another event and you’re expected to multitask. Choosing to allow lunch to schedule itself over several hours means Clockwise can target more places to fit your lunch in without interruption.
Particularly helpful if you operate with core business hours, intentionally scheduling your lunch hours to include meeting hours within a larger range will help Clockwise best preserve your bare-minimum hours-held. Because such targeted meeting hours can often mean a much shorter time available to meet, and because you deserve to respect your own lunch break, scheduling lunch to fall outside of those meeting hours means the least amount of day-to-day compromise.