Notes on attention, working hours and the plans that survive contact with a Tuesday.
Questions
Mostly from readers who wrote to the desk. If yours is not here, send it — the list is updated when a question arrives twice.
No. There is no methodology to adopt, no acronym and nothing to buy. Each article describes one narrow practice, what it costs and where it fails. Take the two that fit your work and ignore the rest — that is how the desk uses it too.
Not at all. The board is one layout that happens to hold the practices together on a single sheet. Every article stands alone, and several people on the desk keep the same habits in a plain text file.
About three weeks for the note, mostly because the first week feels like extra work and the second is when the record starts being useful. Habits involving other people — meeting rules, focus signals — take longer, since they depend on colleagues learning them too.
Yes, with the times inverted. Support and operations roles cannot protect a morning, so the protected block moves to the end of the shift when the queue has drained. The principle is about protecting one predictable block, not about mornings.
Because the constraint is the product. A fixed sheet of paper caps the week at what fits; software removes that cap by default and then sells the cap back as a feature. If you want a screen, a plain text file works — see the Clarity Board page.
Quote a paragraph with a link and that is fine. For an internal newsletter or a training deck, write to the desk first — the answer is usually yes and takes a day.
Both, labelled. Findings from published work on attention and interruption are described in plain language; everything else is what happened when four people tried something for three weeks. We do not invent statistics to make a paragraph sound firmer.
One short piece a week — usually a method someone on the desk tried and either kept or dropped. No attachments, no course, no schedule creep.