The two-hour block that changed everything
Why protecting two uninterrupted hours each morning made me a better PM, thinker, and dad.
I used to start every morning in reactive mode — Slack, email, stand-up, repeat. By noon I’d feel busy but hadn’t moved anything meaningful forward.
Then I tried one thing: blocking 7–9 AM as sacred thinking time. No meetings. No Slack. Just the hardest problem of the day.
What changed
- Better decisions — Thinking deeply before the noise hits means I show up to meetings with clarity, not confusion.
- Fewer meetings — Half the “alignment” meetings I used to need disappeared because I’d already written the doc or made the call.
- More energy for my kid — By evening, I’m not drained from a day of shallow context-switching. I actually have presence left.
The rule
Two hours. Every morning. Non-negotiable. Everything else can wait — and it always does.