What is Focus Time?

Clockwise maximizes the amount of time your team has for focused work by increasing the number of consecutive blocks of free time in your team's calendar.  Focused work is most effective in longer blocks of time because it allows you more time to focus on the same topic without context switching and interruptions.  

Syncing Focus Time blocks to my calendar

If you choose to enable it during on-boarding, Clockwise will automatically sync blocks of Focus Time to your work calendar.  A few important things to know about the Focus Time blocks:

• You can sync all available Focus Time to your calendar or choose a weekly threshold
• They will be visible to your coworkers when they view your calendar
• You can choose how they appear, "busy" or "free" 
• They will automatically update if a meeting is booked over them so you have an accurate view of your Focus Time
• If you delete a Focus Time block, we will not recreate it
• You cannot edit the Focus Time blocks to your desired time frame
• Syncing of Focus Time blocks can be disabled from settings

How Focus Time is calculated

Clockwise scores every block of time in your calendar and the calendars of the teammates you meet with most so we can make recommendations based on Focus Time.  

A few important details about how we calculate Focus Time:

• The minimum length of time that Clockwise counts as Focus Time is 2 hours.  If you have a block of free time shorter than 2 hours, that is considered Fragmented Time.
• We automatically categorize some types of meetings as Focus Time (Ex: No Meeting Wednesday, or "WFH").  You can customize this categorization by clicking on the event and selecting the right category from the dropdown menu.

To calculate the total Focus Time cost of a meeting, we sum the amount of Focus Time the meeting disrupts for all meeting attendees.  You can hover over the individual attendees to see the individual Focus Time costs.

The Focus Time cost of a meeting is not just the duration of the meeting.  For example, the "Disruptive Meeting" scheduled at 4:30pm below, has a Focus Time cost of -2 hrs, but a duration of 30 min, because it interrupts what would otherwise be a 2 hour block of consecutive free time.

How to sync all Focus Time vs. setting a weekly Focus Time goal

Setting up your weekly Focus Time goals will allow you to protect the right amount of Focus Time per week while maintaining a sense of availability on your calendar. This may me useful for managers who want to keep their schedules relatively open so their reports can schedule ad hoc meetings or this is also ideal for people who schedule a lot of external meetings.

Set your weekly Focus Time goals in Settings>Focus Time, lunch, and travel time>Check the option "Schedule x hours Focus Time per week". Use the drop down menu to choose exactly how many hours you'd like to protect.

If you don't need Focus Time goals per week and you'd like to protect as much time as possible, select "Schedule all my available Focus Time".  This option will allow Clockwise to protect every slot of 2 hours or more uninterrupted time in your calendar as Focus Time. 

For more information, read our article on Focus Time events.