Posted by Somewhere between exploring a new way of working and embracing the flow of a portfolio life, I struggled to find the space for something: deep work. A time to engage fully in thought, to reflect, to pause and not divert my attention somewhere else. I like my analysis, my deep-dives, my reading through all details to then let them linger in my mind and see the stories emerge, the trends take shape, the dots being connected. The ability to see through and take time to ask questions. Inspired by my latest audiobook – Slow Productivity – I have been reflecting on how my relationship with deep work has evolved. And how I wanted more of it.
Want to listen instead? I have asked AI to read it out for me:
Why has it been missing?
It did not happen all at once. In my year of exploration, I opened myself up to new opportunities, and I took on diverse projects. I have also been mentoring start-ups, developing my new business, and working with advisory clients. I have been investing and let’s not forget, managing the charity with multiple hats.
It took time for me to notice because I was utterly focused on a client call or a team meeting. The spark was there. I did not seem to have a problem focusing. But as I took on some consulting-type projects or as I worked on developing some of my new coursework, I realised how my brain deviated from it. My mind was always a bit elsewhere. My browser tabs were multiplying. My calendar, though “flexible,” started looking like a bad game of Tetris. And I started wondering if I would ever get my portfolio life to flow with the amount of things I had added to it!
Has it always been like that?
Not really. Back at Morgan Stanley, I had found ways of protecting my time. In my Deputy COO role, if I did not take some control of my agenda, someone else would. It was usual for people to add committee meetings to others’ calendars, project meetings, and regular updates, without asking much about it. In fact, that was efficient, and I had no issue with people seeing my calendar and popping things in. Until it got to a point where I had no time to work with my team or just look into my own projects.
For quite a few years, I had blocked time in my calendar for deep work. At first, I called it whitespace. Time to think, reflect, and analyse. Then I just added so-called “blocks of no meetings” so that my team knew what it meant. They could still reach me if needed, but they knew to avoid meetings at those scheduled times if possible. And, to compensate, I often stacked meetings on other days to allow for this. There was a time that, with a former manager and mentor, we even had two kinds of meetings: the catch-up kind for quick tasks and the deeper strategy ones where we worked on something together and debated without a fixed agenda.
Slow Productivity Rules
It was not until I started listening to Slow Productivity lately that I smiled as I recognised ideas I once lived by—before forgetting them in the whirl of multi-hyphenate life. In fact, some of these good old habits were lost in my last couple of years as I commuted between Lisbon, London, Frankfurt and Paris. There was just no way to block off meetings. I just assumed deep work would have to be done after hours or on the plane. And it was happening ever less. I was on overdrive by the time I left.
In the last couple of weeks, between a mix of Cal Newport’s work and Julia Cameron’s Artist’s Way, I have been seeking to protect my flow again. I already have my Calendly organised in a way to ensure that meetings get stacked and some mornings or afternoons are reserved for deep project work, but I admit I have not been very good about protecting it when I need to be flexible. To the extent that I can, I am using automation to allow me to block debrief time after each meeting and allow no more than a fixed number of meetings a day.
One of the suggestions of the book is a no-meetings day, which I learned yet again from my former manager, who took no meetings on a Friday. I copied her to quickly learn that it made the end of the week a perfect time to work with fewer interruptions. Especially as work from home took over.
Blocking for Flow and Focus
It is funny to think that one needs to block time for flow. But indeed, if you just have “free” time, you are likely to end up on your email, to-do list or scrolling through another article. As I learnt many years ago, being intentional about my free time was what allowed me to accumulate a portfolio life even before I left my corporate job. I did it with a little hand from the bullet journal and a lot of discipline.
Now, I can see how a modern portfolio life requires you to be just as intentional with your work time. And as I became more intentional with how I allocate my free blocks of time, I suddenly saw how it all starts to become more possible. And no, I have no intention of being focused all the time. That is just not possible either; that is not how our brain works.
Don’t get me wrong, it is hard in the beginning. When you sit back in your chair to reflect on documents or readings you are going through, your eyes inadvertently move to your inbox. The (few) notifications I still have on my phone still haunt my attention when I avoid the screens to focus on paper.
It is like you need to relearn how not to be distracted.
But as with any other habit, all it takes is practice.
The irony of multitasking
There was a time in the world when multi-tasking was hype. I abandoned that a long time ago. I can accumulate a large amount of small tasks in a small period of time, but typically in sequence. You can multitask listening to your audiobook when you drive, but that is because your brain has automated the art of driving. If you need to focus on your driving to avoid an accident or deal with heavy rain, you probably don’t realise what the last few sentences the author said were.
Yes, we can technically do many things at once—but not if they require real thinking and real focus. Mental multitasking is deceptive.
There’s an example Cal provides in the book that I loved: if a project takes 8 hours of work, you can get it done in a day. But if you’re juggling five projects, you don’t finish any as you feel the need to move all of them in parallel. The throughput speed vanishes. It’s obvious, and yet, how often do we do just that?
Reclaiming focus
In the last couple of weeks, I have been experimenting. I’m reclaiming focus. I accept short-term tasks mornings in exchange for hours of focus on a single project. That is how I got most of the reporting done last year for the charity, because these were such big reports to go through, and the rush of the new year seems to have blocked some of those strategies out of my mind. I also remember to adjust these with my energy cycle, which I have learnt over the years.
No doubt Morning Pages have helped me unblock some of this. It was no surprise to find that, amidst working on a project or report, I found myself suddenly remembering to pay bills, send an email to the school, find a gift, or take care of something for the house. The flexibility of work allows for that. But your mind gets taken away. And the demands of teams and clients can be distracting.
So as I dabble in my first attempts at Morning Pages, I let my mind wander in all these things that crowd my mind often during the day, so they leave me in peace for the following hours. If needed, I still take a moment to send a few messages or note down something I remembered. But I no longer cave to the “quick wins” of the dopamine of getting something quickly off my list. My hope is they’ll show up less often.
The Artist Way
The Artist’s Way speaks of the importance of flow and creative space. Though I’m still early in the book, it resonates. Deep work isn’t just productivity—it’s how I problem-solve, how I write, how I think. It’s how I create. And it needs more than an hour squeezed between calls. Sometimes, it needs a full day.
Recently, a friend was telling me she needed a few “full days” of uninterrupted writing to work on an article. I laughed as I asked her to tell me her secret if she ever found them. I think I left her pondering, because this weekend she messaged saying she had just traded a day of solitude away from home and kids with her husband and had gotten her first dedicated day done. I was proud of her as I knew she was abiding by the rules of slow productivity, protecting her time and focusing on a large project, allowing it time to flourish, even if that meant shutting down everything else. I am considering doing the same this summer.
Sometimes, flow needs solitude. Mostly, it just needs less distractions.
This isn’t about being more productive for the sake of more. In fact, if I remember correctly, the first rule in the book is to do fewer things. I always struggle with that one, but it is basic maths. There is a finite amount of time. My goal here is not necessarily getting more done. It’s about doing things fully. When we scatter ourselves across too many things, few get done—and even fewer get done well. Split time works. Split attention does not. It does not flourish. Maybe it’s time to stop glorifying the juggle and start celebrating the focus.