Block One Uninterrupted Thinking Session and Treat It as Non-Negotiable

This week’s been about time — protecting space to think, and noticing how often a meeting is standing in for a decision you could just make. Today’s the practical part.

Block one hour this week. No calls booked over it, no email open, phone in another room if that’s what it takes. Better still — get up from your desk entirely. Walk somewhere. Movement changes thinking in a way that staring at a screen never will.

Pick one thing — the decision you keep circling back to without landing on, the process that’s still living in your head instead of written down somewhere, the conversation you’ve been meaning to have and haven’t. Give it your full, undivided attention for that hour.

That’s genuinely the whole tip. One hour. One thing. The part that matters is treating it with the same seriousness you’d give a client meeting — it doesn’t get bumped because something louder shows up that morning. If a client wouldn’t accept you cancelling on them because “something came up,” don’t accept it from yourself either.

When I was rebuilding my week after leaving Amazon, this was the single change that made the biggest actual difference — not a new planner, not a productivity app, just one hour a week that nothing else was allowed to touch. It sounds almost too small to matter. It wasn’t. Most of the real progress I made in those first few months of figuring out what came next happened in hours like that, not in the busy ones.

If you only take one thing from this week, take this: put the hour on the calendar before the week fills in around it. It will, if you let it.

Your turn: what’s the one thing you’d tackle if you had an uninterrupted hour this week — and when are you going to book it?