Phases of Focus

Rick Pollick
10 hours ago
6 min read

How I Try To Divide My Day Into Phases of Focus (And Why It Works Better Than Just Prioritization)

Most productivity advice says the same thing: set your priorities and tackle them in order. That’s fine—but in my experience, it’s not enough.

Prioritization helps me choose what to work on. But what I learned the hard way is that if I don’t also structure when and how I give tasks my attention, my best work gets lost in the shuffle.

That’s where phases of focus come in. Instead of looking at the day as one big block of time, I break it into phases—deep focus, collaboration, and exploration. Each one has a purpose, a set of rituals, and the kind of work that thrives best in it.

This not only changed the way I work—it changed the way I lead teams. Because once you get teams aligned on shared phases, the effect multiplies. Collaboration improves, innovation gets more consistent, and nobody feels like they’re constantly fighting interruptions.

Why Phases Beat a To-Do List

To-do lists assume every task can be tackled in the same state of mind. That’s simply not true.

Psychologist Daniel Kahneman explains in Thinking, Fast and Slow that “our attention and effort are limited resources” (Kahneman, 2011, p. 23). In other words, how effective you are at tackling a task depends heavily on when in the day you attempt it.

By breaking my day into phases, I give tasks the right conditions to succeed. For example, I do forecasting models and bug reports in the morning deep focus phase when my brain is sharpest. If I tried to do them at 3 p.m., I’d likely need to redo them.

Research on attention residue supports this: Sophie Leroy found that when people switch between tasks, “a portion of their attention remains stuck with the prior task,” undermining performance on the next one (Leroy, 2009, p. 168). Phases reduce this residue by minimizing switches.

Phases vs. Time Blocking

At first glance, phases sound like time blocking. But here’s the key difference:

Time blocking: Rigidly assigns exact times to tasks (“Work on deck 9:00–10:30”).
Phases: Broader and mindset-driven (“Mornings are for deep work, afternoons for collaboration, evenings for learning”).

That flexibility matters. In my morning deep focus phase, I might do Azure DevOps reporting one day and roadmap analysis the next. The mode stays the same—concentrated, heads-down work—even though the project changes.

This echoes Godden and Baddeley’s (1975) research on context-dependent memory, which showed that recall and performance improve when tasks are grouped in the same mental context. Phases create those consistent contexts.

My Daily Phases

Here’s how I break down my day in practice:

1. Deep Focus (Morning)

What I do: Strategic work—writing, data synthesis, debugging, release planning.
Why it works: Chronobiologist Till Roenneberg notes that “cognitive performance peaks in the morning for most chronotypes” (Roenneberg, 2012, p. 46).
Ritual: Coffee, scan notes from yesterday, silence messaging/email.
Example: This is when I build my Python-based release reporting suite. Tasks like pulling API data, aligning fields, or plotting charts demand deep concentration. If I try them later, I make more mistakes and waste more time.

2. Collaboration & Engagement (Mid-Morning)

What I do: Team stand-ups, 1:1s, sprint planning, product demos, release syncs.
Why it works: Energy dips after lunch, but conversations are energizing. Social engagement draws on different mental resources, so it doesn’t compete as much with focus (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990).
Ritual: Walk into each meeting with a one-sentence purpose (“By the end of this, I’ll know X”).

3. Exploration & Learning (Afternoon/End of Day)

What I do: Research, testing tools, reading, sandbox experiments.
Why it works: Research on incubation shows that stepping away from tasks improves creativity. “Mind wandering facilitates creative problem-solving,” notes Baird et al. (2012, p. 1118).
Ritual: Keep a “sandbox list” of things worth poking at, then test one.
Example: Many of my AI-driven reporting prototypes started here. Testing automation with schedulers, experimenting with integrations, or exploring visualization tweaks—all of that came out of late-day tinkering. Several of these prototypes ended up rolled into our release planning process.

Getting Teams in Sync With Phases

The real win is when teams—not just individuals—align around phases. Here’s how we’ve done it:

Shared Deep Focus Windows

We block mornings as “focus hours.” No meetings, no Slack noise. As Mark, Gudith & Klocke found, “interruptions increase speed but also increase stress and errors” (2008, p. 108).

Meeting Clusters

Instead of scattering meetings all day, we group them in early afternoon. Atlassian’s Flow Time Report (2023) calls context-switching “the silent killer of productivity.” Our experience mirrored this: when meetings were scattered, projects slowed; when clustered, blockers cleared faster.

Team Sandbox Sessions

We experimented with “Friday sandbox hours,” where we test tools together. Google’s famous “20% time” worked the same way. As Laszlo Bock noted, “innovation isn’t accidental—it’s the result of giving people structured freedom” (Bock, 2015, p. 129). One of these sandbox sessions is where we tested Tableau Pulse for FrameworkInsight.

Make Phases Visible

I block my calendar with “Deep Work” or flip my Teams status. Amy Edmondson argues in her work on psychological safety that “clear norms are essential for collaboration and experimentation” (Edmondson, 1999, p. 354). Visibility makes it safer to set boundaries.

Why This Fuels Innovation

Too often, exploration is seen as “extra.” By making it a phase, we normalize it.

Some of my best professional wins came out of exploration time:

Automating version reports that now save hours of manual tracking.
Testing new integrations across Aha!, Azure DevOps, and Monday.com that gave leadership clearer release visibility.
Prototyping early dashboards that later turned into formalized tools.

As Teresa Amabile puts it: “Extreme time pressure stifles creative thinking; moderate pressure with room for incubation supports it” (Amabile, Hadley, & Kramer, 2002, p. 59). By giving exploration its own protected space, innovation becomes steady—not accidental.

Showing the Value of Phases to the Business

The question every exec asks is: How does this help the business?

Here’s how I frame it:

Improved Delivery Speed and Quality
- Deep focus mornings mean fewer errors and faster turnaround. Multitasking cuts productivity by up to 40% (Rubinstein, Meyer, & Evans, 2001). By protecting focus time, we essentially recapture that lost capacity.
Stronger Cross-Team Alignment
- Clustering collaboration ensures dependencies are resolved quickly. Ancona & Chong (1996) found that when teams synchronize work rhythms (“temporal entrainment”), they coordinate more effectively and finish projects faster.
Consistent Innovation Pipeline
- Based on my examples: Sandbox time has produced automations, integrations, and dashboards that now save hours per week. As Bock (2015) showed with Google’s 20% time, exploration institutionalizes curiosity and delivers outsized returns.
Employee Engagement and Retention
- Teams that know their focus time is protected report less burnout. Edmondson (1999) showed that psychological safety drives motivation and learning behaviors in teams.
Risk Reduction
- By aligning phases, high-stakes planning (like release forecasts) happens when accuracy is highest. Decision fatigue research shows that “making choices depletes willpower” (Baumeister et al., 1998, p. 1256). Morning phases reduce costly mistakes.

In short: phases of focus translate directly into faster delivery, higher quality, a steady stream of innovation, and more engaged teams—all measurable business outcomes.

Final Thought

Dividing the day into phases isn’t about squeezing more out of the clock. It’s about giving yourself—and your team—the right environment for the right kind of work.

Prioritization tells you what matters. Phases make sure it gets the attention it deserves, at the right time, in the right state of mind. And when whole teams sync their rhythms? That’s where the real magic happens. You’re not just getting more done—you’re building, learning, and innovating together.

Most importantly, you can show the business the value: faster, higher-quality delivery, a steady pipeline of innovation, and teams who are engaged because they’re working with their natural rhythms—not against them.

References

Amabile, T. M., Hadley, C. N., & Kramer, S. J. (2002). Creativity under the gun. Harvard Business Review, 80(8), 52–61.
Ancona, D. G., & Chong, C. L. (1996). Entrainment: Pace, cycle, and rhythm in organizational behavior. Research in Organizational Behavior, 18, 251–284.
Atlassian (2023). The Flow Time Report. Atlassian Team Playbook.
Baird, B., Smallwood, J., Mrazek, M. D., Kam, J. W., Franklin, M. S., & Schooler, J. W. (2012). Inspired by distraction: Mind wandering facilitates creative incubation. Psychological Science, 23(10), 1117–1122.
Baumeister, R. F., Bratslavsky, E., Muraven, M., & Tice, D. M. (1998). Ego depletion: Is the active self a limited resource? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74(5), 1252–1265.
Bock, L. (2015). Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead. Twelve.
Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Harper & Row.
Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383.
Godden, D. R., & Baddeley, A. D. (1975). Context-dependent memory in two natural environments. British Journal of Psychology, 66(3), 325–331.
Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Leroy, S. (2009). Why is it so hard to do my work? The challenge of attention residue when switching between work tasks. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 109(2), 168–181.
Mark, G., Gudith, D., & Klocke, U. (2008). The cost of interrupted work: More speed and stress. Proceedings of CHI 2008, 107–110.
Newport, C. (2016). Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World. Grand Central Publishing.
Roenneberg, T. (2012). Internal Time: Chronotypes, Social Jet Lag, and Why You’re So Tired. Harvard University Press.
Rubinstein, J. S., Meyer, D. E., & Evans, J. E. (2001). Executive control of cognitive processes in task switching. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 27(4), 763–797.