It is Monday today. On Friday last week I determined to try to make two changes to the way I work this week with the overall aim of making better progress on substantial tasks and getting less stuck hacking my way through email-related work and other stuff that comes up. Change number 1 was to schedule specific times to handle work email each day – usually one at the start of the day and one at the end of the day or as close to that as I could get given other commitments – and to switch to offline mode at other times so that I could still work on tasks that required access to emails and attached documents but would not see anything new incoming. Change 2 was to schedule largish blocks of time (minimum two hours) that were pre-allocated to specific substantive tasks. Linked to this I made a new sign for my door that indicated that I was not to be disturbed (to be displayed during these work sessions) and which also showed when I COULD be disturbed at other times.
The result was that for today, I planned to do an email catch-up from 09:00-09:30 followed by a 30 minute buffer of unallocated time, followed by a two hour block to work on a new version of a Workload Data Collection Form, an hour ‘spare’ over lunchtime and then a three hour block for marking some reflective reviews by Final Stage students with a final one hour block for further email catch-up at the end of the day.
It is now almost 5pm and I am somewhat surprised to find that I have more or less stuck to my plan. I found that I needed about 40-45 minutes on my email this morning but I was still able to fit in 10 minutes of meditation and a trip to the kitchen to make a cup of tea into the shortened buffer period. I then did more like two and a half hours concentrated work on the Workload Form before having lunch despite forgetting to switch the sign on my door and being interrupted by a colleague for about 20 minutes (albeit that it was an important interruption). Lunch over-ran a bit due to some interesting conversation with colleagues (who, incidentally, were amused by the sign on my door that said I was ‘Open for Business!’) but I was still hitting the marking by 1.30pm and managed to mark 18 pieces of work (one third of the total amount) before 4pm which represented a rate of progress that I was happy with. I then switched my email back on to find about 12 new incoming messages including one important one that I was expecting which required a fair amount of thought/effort to respond to. Clearly, given that I am writing this now, I managed to do everything email-related that I needed to and still had time to write this entry. I also had time to read a Scientific American article about the search for Dark Matter (axions) in between completing the marking and starting email again this afternoon, which provided a kind of break.
So far so good then. I have set things up with an almost identical structure tomorrow so I ought to be fairly optimistic of another day of success, but Wednesday gets a bit more messy as I (currently) plan to go for a run for an hour or so before work (so will get in a bit late), have a big two hour meeting at the end of the afternoon and have populated the hours in between with some different types of task that I need to get to (bracketed by email sessions again) – an hour for some initial planning for four new lectures I have to prepare and an hour to do some reading relating to a little piece of research I am trying to do at the moment (on atmospheric tides). Then, on Thursday, I have two teaching sessions to complete that will dominate the day and so I have only scheduled one email session that day. Friday is currently left more or less open as I wanted to see how the first part of the week panned out and leave myself plenty of time clear in case something unexpected and important cropped up.
Frankly (Mr Shankly*), I will be pretty amazed if things continue to go as well as they have today but I have had quite a bit of success recently getting unstuck and getting things done so there’s reason to be hopeful.
[* Anyone who is a fan of the music of The Smiths will appreciate that it is virtually impossible to write or say the word ‘Frankly’ without continuing (perhaps internally/silently) with the words ‘Mr Shankly’.]
Tim O'Hare 
BTW – Im case you are looking at the photos in this post and thinking that I work in a cage, I don’t. I have a long-thin vertical window in my door and have stuck my reversible sign onto this so that I can change it over from inside my office while it remains visible from the outside. The photos are taken from the inside looking out.