“Many of the conversations from the research we did last summer have had a strong influence on how I've organized my life and work in the past year,” Brook says. “One way I've chosen to do that is my calendar. I outsource the boundary setting to my calendar because it’s my interface to the organization.”
“What I've tried to do is to have three days a week where I discourage people from putting time on my calendar and two days a week where I encourage it. For some reason, this method of three days heads down, two days engaged, has worked shockingly well.”
Brook started to notice that other people in the organization were making their calendars private, and that inspired her to do the same in the name of taking control of her schedule.
“It's like having these blocks of time that I can then fill in with the sort of hours of labor I need to put into the kind of work that I'm doing,” Brook explains. “It's that idea of the permeable boundary, right? I want anyone in the organization to feel like they can have a conversation with me or put time on my calendar.”
Brook says the simple calendar adjustment has had an impact on how others approach her regarding meetings. “If someone doesn't know me, they'll often reach out to ask permission and set context. It's a more respectful interaction. If you have a nice garden and you have a fence around it, people aren't just taking the tomatoes. They might ask you first before they do it.”
Once you’ve agreed to take on the meeting, though, there’s another important decision to make: how much of your day should you devote to it?
"Our calendars have decided that the hour is a default unit of time,” says Brook. “I believe the defaults within the products funnel our time and attention in specific ways. That hour as a default meeting unit is, I think, absurd. Any hour of time that I'm spending in conversation with another person requires about an hour to prepare, then an hour to process. So a one-hour meeting often represents three to four hours of labor.”
As a result, we wind up with less and less time to do the work we need to do on our own. So how do we make room for that—on our calendars and in our offices?
Open offices aren’t the collaborative utopia employers hoped they would be, but they seem to be our reality for foreseeable future. Until we enter a new office design paradigm, here’s what workers can do: Hone your skills for staying focused and improvise ways to protect your time. Because even if you can’t control your environment, you can take control of your boundaries.