Create Space for the Work That Matters
You hire people to benefit your business. You don’t hire them to spend their days buried in email, distracted by pings, or half-listening on calls while trying to do real work in the margins.
But let’s be honest: that’s where too much of their time is going.
And it’s not because they’re slacking. They’re working hard.
It’s that the environment isn’t built for the kind of work that really makes a difference. The kind of work that requires real focus. The kind of work that takes thinking, not just doing. The kind of work you actually hired them to do.
Let’s talk about deep work – what it is, why it matters, how we’re unintentionally making it harder than it needs to be… and what we can do to bring it back so your business is more productive and your team is happier.
What Deep Work Actually Is (and Why It Matters More Than Ever)
The phrase deep work was popularised by Cal Newport – a computer science professor and author of the bestselling book by the same name. He describes it as:
“Professional activity performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that pushes your cognitive capabilities to their limit.”
In plain English? It’s the kind of work that happens when you’re fully present, undistracted, and applying your best thinking to something that actually matters.
You’ve probably felt it before. That moment when time drops away. When ideas start to flow, problems untangle themselves, and things finally make sense.
It’s the zone where strategy is built, where messy systems get simplified, and where solutions get implemented, not just discussed.
It’s the kind of work that brings a deeper sense of satisfaction, impact, and progress.
But here’s the challenge: deep work is fragile.
It takes time to get into that flow – often 10 to 30 minutes just to reach a state of meaningful concentration. And it takes almost nothing to knock someone out of it…
A ping.
A shoulder tap.
A “quick question”.
You don’t just lose a second – you lose momentum, clarity, and the thread of your thinking.
And getting it back takes time. According to University of California, Irvine, the average time it takes to return to a task after an interruption is over 25 minutes. Once disrupted, it can take 15 minutes or more to return to the same level of intense focus. And according to research from Michigan State, even a three-second interruption can double your error rate.
All of this is something that open-plan offices and ‘always-on’ work-from-home expectations make worse.
And that’s not just lost time. It’s lost progress. Lost energy. And often, lost motivation too.
Yet we expect people to do deep work in environments that make it nearly impossible.
What’s Getting in the Way of People Doing the Work You Pay Them For?
When I started in audit in the early 2000s, email wasn’t always-on. When out at the client’s site (which was most of the time) we literally had to find their fax machine (often in some dingy cupboard), unplug it, and plug in our laptops to download the day’s messages. All told, it took 25 minutes and wasn’t worth doing more than once a day.
But what if something was urgent? They phoned you, or you phoned them.
Fast forward to now and we’ve got inboxes that never sleep, Slack or Teams messages, DMs, calendar pop-ups, and alerts on our taskbars. And we’ve trained ourselves and each other to be constantly available.
Urgency has lost all meaning. We now confuse responsiveness with effectiveness, and everything feels immediate – whether it really is or not.
Even the sight of a notification / unread message marker breaks focus. That momentary mental shift – even for a second – is enough to derail deep thinking.
The result? People spend their day reacting, rarely getting deep into the work that actually moves things forward, meaning their work has less impact, is slower, or of lower quality.
But it doesn’t have to be this way…
So What Can We Do About It?
Deep work doesn’t happen by chance. We have to make space for it, by designing an environment that protects focus.
That doesn’t mean banning meetings or cutting off communication. It means being more intentional and clearer about what’s truly urgent, smarter with our tools, and more respectful of people’s cognitive energy.
Here’s what helps:
- Reintroduce boundaries around urgency
We need a shared understanding of what actually counts as urgent.
A useful benchmark? If it can wait three hours without causing a problem, it’s probably not urgent.
Urgent means you’d interrupt someone, pulling them out of their deep work state. It’s a quick ping or a call, done because the benefit of immediate action outweighs the significant loss of productivity.
Everything else? Park it. Write it down. Let them respond when they’re not in deep work mode.
And don’t just set this as a policy – talk about it. Define “urgent” as a team. Align expectations, so everyone knows the rules of the game.
- Structure communication more thoughtfully
We’re not short on tools. We’re short on clarity.
Decide as a team what goes where. What belongs in chat, what belongs in email, and what should live in project boards or systems.
And when in doubt, don’t expect an instant reply. Most things can be sent as a message that gets picked up and actioned later – without interrupting someone’s flow.
- Make focus time visible and respected
Block out time for deep work. 1-2 hours per person, per day, is a good start. Twice a day is better.
Put it in the calendar and protect it like any other meeting.
And more importantly? Honour it across the team. Don’t schedule over it. Don’t interrupt. Let that time be sacred.
- Match rhythms to the role
Creators and managers need different structures to thrive.
Creators (e.g. designers, writers, analysts, developers) need long, uninterrupted blocks to solve complex problems with creativity and ingenuity.
Managers need rhythm, meetings, and frequent check-ins to lead and support others.
We’ve built most workplaces around manager habits. It’s time we designed with creators in mind.
Final Thoughts
You hired smart people to do meaningful work. But if they rarely get time for deep work, you’re wasting talent and missing opportunities.
The good news? This is fixable. With a few smart changes, we can build an environment that supports deep thinking, sustained focus, and meaningful results.
If you’re a founder, leader or manager who wants to help your team (or yourself!) reclaim space for deep work—we’d love to help. Book in a call below and let’s redesign this for success ⬇️
