Gustavo Antonio Parada Sarmiento

“Decide when you want to leave work and you’ll know how many hours you have. Slot in what you need to get done by priority. Cal calls this “fixed schedule productivity.” You need boundaries if you want work–life balance. This forces you to be efficient. By setting a deadline of six p.m. and then scheduling tasks, you can get control over that hurricane of duties, and you can be realistic instead of shocked by what is never going to happen.

Most of us use our calendars all wrong: we don’t schedule work; we schedule interruptions. Meetings get scheduled. Phone calls get scheduled. Doctor appointments get scheduled. You know what often doesn’t get scheduled? Real work. All those other things are distractions. Often, they’re other people’s work. But they get dedicated blocks of time and your real work becomes an orphan. If real work is the stuff that affects the bottom line, the stuff that gets you noticed, the thing that earns you raises and gets you singled out for promotion, well, let me utter blasphemy and suggest that maybe it deserves a little dedicated time too.

Also, at least an hour a day, preferably in the morning, needs to be “protected time.” This is an hour every day when you get real work done without interruption. Approach this concept as if it were a religious ritual. This hour is inviolate.”
― Eric Barker, Barking Up the Wrong Tree: The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Success Is (Mostly) Wrong