Nobody schedules their concentration, only their meetings

We book the rooms and leave the thinking to chance.

Watch how a week gets built. Meetings go in first because they involve other people and other people are insistent. Travel goes in because it is unavoidable. Then the actual work, the reason the meetings exist, is left to occupy whatever is left over. It is treated as filler. This is exactly backwards, and almost everybody does it, because the work does not send invitations and nothing complains when it is squeezed.

The result is that concentration gets whatever the schedule discards: the twenty minutes before something, the tired end of an afternoon, the fragment between two commitments. Nobody would resource an important project this way deliberately. It happens because attention has no advocate in the room when the week is being assembled. Everything else has someone pushing for it.

The correction is not elaborate. It is simply to let one or two blocks of concentration go into the week the same way a meeting does, before the rest arrives, and then to treat them as similarly real. Most people find they can defend a meeting with a stranger far more easily than they can defend an hour with their own work. That asymmetry is worth noticing, because it explains a great deal about where the week ends up.