The 90-Minute Day: Why Most Calendar Advice Fails Knowledge Workers
Most productivity systems assume you have eight focused hours. You don't. Here's what to do with the ninety minutes you actually have.
James Whitlock
Be honest. Of your eight working hours yesterday, how many were uninterrupted, undistracted, doing the work that only you can do? For most knowledge workers it's somewhere between sixty and ninety minutes.
That's not a failure. That's the constraint. Plan around it.
The 90-minute rule
Pick the one piece of work that, if it shipped today, would make today a good day. Block it for the morning, before slack opens. Defend it like it's a customer meeting — because it is, with the most important customer you have: your future self.
Everything else can happen in the chaos of the afternoon. The mail will still be there. The meetings will still happen. But the thing that mattered? It shipped at 10am.
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