Meetings. Emails. DMs. Texts. Appointments. More meetings.
Sound familiar?
Sometimes our days are so crammed with conversations, check-ins, and digital noise that we don’t have a single stretch of truly uninterrupted time to THINK. Deeply. Creatively. Strategically.
A simple tool to deal with overwhelm and generate the BIG ideas
One of my wonderful clients at the Jewish Fertility Foundation recently told me about a great organizational practice. They have implemented something called Focus Fridays—a day intentionally kept free from meetings, both internal and external. No Zooms, no quick check-ins, no “got a sec?” pop-ins.
Instead, they use Fridays to reflect, plan, create, and concentrate.
This is brilliant. And rare.
With a million competing priorities, it’s easy to let those stretches of quiet work time slip through our fingers. This is especially for remote teams, where a five-minute hallway conversation has been replaced by a 30-minute scheduled call or Zoom meeting. But we need that time. It’s in those calmer moments that the big ideas emerge. The solutions bubble up. The strategy clicks into place.
How to make this happen at your organization
Can you give yourself the gift of Focus Fridays?
Or maybe just Focus Friday mornings?
Of course, this only works if it’s adopted across a team or organization. It’s not really “uninterrupted” time if you’re still expected to attend a staff meeting or respond to real-time messages. And yes, getting buy-in from your whole team might feel like a stretch. But what if you and your team tried it for just one month?
What if you protected even two hours each Friday to disconnect from the noise and reconnect with your own thoughts?
Focus Fridays are not about doing nothing—they’re about making room for what matters most.
What could you do with that space?
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