ISSUE #113

It will never look this open again. Act accordingly.

It's 8:30 on a Monday morning, three weeks into a bigger role. You've finally opened the problem you've been trying to think through, a real strategic problem that needs real focus. Your coffee is hot. Your calendar looks clear. For the first time all morning, you can think.

At 8:47, Slack pings. There's a production issue. Someone needs you, so you switch.

By 9:05 the issue is handled. You go back to the strategy and try to remember what you were thinking. Then the stand-up starts. After the stand-up, someone needs help with a personnel issue. Someone else asks for five minutes, and five minutes becomes 20. By 11, your thinking is in pieces. Lunch happens at your desk. Then three meetings back to back.

At 5:30, the problem sits exactly where you left it at 8:47.

Every request was legitimate. Nobody did anything wrong. And the work that mattered most has vanished from your day.

This is one of the most common patterns I see in technology leaders, especially in a new or bigger role. There are two kinds of work in your week, and they behave very differently.

The first is the work coming at you. It has deadlines. People chase you for it, escalate it, and schedule meetings around it.

The second is the work your role actually requires: learning how decisions really get made, understanding your team, building relationships, identifying risks, deciding what deserves attention. Nobody sends you a meeting invite called "figure out your new organization." That work depends entirely on you, and because it's quiet, it becomes discretionary. Discretionary work is the first thing a busy executive drops.

Clients describe this in almost the same words. One told me, "I still operate the old way, where I'm like, okay, I'll just get to it." Another said, "Maybe I'm just very much overwhelmed." Overwhelmed doesn't always mean the job is too big. Often it means the loud work is winning every single time.

Interruptions carry a real switching cost. One widely cited study found that interrupted workers took about 23 minutes to return to their original task. That doesn't mean every interruption destroys 23 minutes. It does mean the detour usually takes far longer than the interruption itself. In a new role it's worse, because you haven't built the mental map yet, so every interruption forces you to rebuild more context. Fragmented attention doesn't build your capacity for hard problems. It wears it down.

This doesn't fix itself, and the reason is your calendar.

Right now it looks open. It will never look this open again. Your one-on-ones will multiply. Steering committees will appear. Operating reviews will land. Your boss will add recurring meetings, and people will start booking you weeks ahead. One leader I worked with said, "I only had six reports before. I think now I have 18." That changes a week fast.

Deep work goes first. Once it's displaced, it rarely comes back. Your days get more crowded. They almost never get less crowded on their own.

There's a second cost, and it's quieter. Every fire you personally put out teaches the organization something: that you handle fires. So they keep bringing them to you. The habits that earned your promotion, being responsive, answering fast, solving problems personally, start working against you. You end up managing well and leading poorly.

And there's a window that closes. Three weeks into a role, changing how you use your calendar shows people how you work. Three years in, the same change surprises them.

So here's the lens. Separate the two kinds of work, and treat the quiet kind as real work.

1. Put the quiet work on the calendar. Learning time. Stakeholder time. Team assessment time. If it isn't scheduled, it belongs to whoever asks first.

2. Decide what you'll stop doing to pay for it. You can't add this work to an already full plate. Something has to come out.

3. Block it far ahead. Not next Thursday. Three months out, six if you can, before anyone else asks for that time.

Three questions to sit with:

1. What important work has quietly disappeared from your week?

2. What would you stop doing to make room for it?

3. Whose requests get your attention by default, and should they?

Blocking time alone won't save you. Eventually somebody senior wants that time, and you'll probably give it to them.

That's why the next move matters: absorb your boss. Your boss gets preference. You defend against everything else.

Your boss will create surprises, and that comes with the role. The CEO needs an answer. A major customer escalates. The board needs something tomorrow. A production problem reaches the executive team. You're going to respond, and you should. So don't build a calendar that breaks every time that happens. Build slack around the important work, and treat your boss as part of that important work.

Everyone else gets a boundary. You stay reachable. You just stop treating every request as yours to fulfill.

This matters because you're teaching people how to use you. If every question gets an immediate answer, people learn to ask immediately. If every meeting gets accepted, more meetings appear. If every problem comes to you, you become the system. People value what's scarce. When your time is unlimited, it stops being worth much.

Here's what that looks like in a real week. Your boss asks on Wednesday afternoon for an analysis by Thursday noon. If you built your week with slack, you move one protected block and keep the other two. If you didn't, the analysis eats every bit of thinking time you had, and the strategic work slides back to nights and weekends. Same request, very different week.

Make your protected time visible, too. Put a no-meeting block on the shared calendar where everyone can see it. You're not an individual contributor trying to sneak back an hour. As a leader, you can declare it. When you do, your team sees that thinking counts as work, and they get permission to protect their own.

And when someone asks for that time, begin with no. You can always say yes later. Saying yes and cancelling later creates a bigger problem, because by then somebody has built a plan around you. Saying no to a meeting is simply choosing where your attention belongs.

For most of my 30 years in technology, my calendar ran me. I was busy all day. The real work moved to nights and weekends. It was unsustainable, and I thought that was the job. It wasn't. So I rebuilt how I work, and this is a large part of what I rebuilt.

Even a protected hour can fail you. You can defend a block of time perfectly and then spend it refreshing your inbox or drifting. If that's happening, your focus is out of practice, and practice is exactly what rebuilds it.

The last habit is the smallest, which is why it lasts. Take ten minutes at the end of every day and ten minutes at the end of every week. Small survives bad weeks. Ask three questions: What did I learn? What changed? What needs my attention now? Use the weekly ten minutes to look at the bigger picture: what you've learned about the organization, and what you're behind on.

You will fall behind. A production system will fail, a customer will escalate, and your boss will need something. Your plan will get blown up. Aim for knowing what changed rather than perfect control, so that when you're behind, you're clear about what you're behind on. Overwhelm usually feels like one giant cloud called "everything." A few minutes of planning turns it back into choices you can make.

Expect a valley, too. A lot of leaders hit one several months into a new role. The excitement wears off. The problems get clearer, and the easy wins are behind you. You understand enough to see how much you still don't understand, and that can feel personal. You start wondering whether you should have figured this out already, or whether they picked the wrong person.

Don't turn the valley into a verdict. It's common, and knowing it can arrive makes it easier to get through. You don't have to feel settled right away. Keep learning while you lead, and protect the time that learning takes.

There's a video on my channel that goes through each of these in more depth: the two kinds of work, blocking your calendar months ahead, absorbing your boss, the ten-minute habit, and the valley. If your important work keeps disappearing from your week, watch it, and if you know someone who just stepped into a bigger role, send it to them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzBG-6zxtjc

Your calendar will never be this open again. Whatever you don't protect now, somebody else will claim for you.

P.S. If you're aiming for a $350K+ CIO, CTO or CISO role, that's the work I do. Book a free 30-minute diagnostic and we'll map your path.