Two disconnected thoughts on time and results this week.

On the value of an uninterrupted hour (or eight) ⏳
I've been listening a bunch of Jason Fried's interviews recently and this one had a great bit about the power of uninterrupted work. Jason was talking about most workers rarely get more than a few hours of contiguous uninterrupted focus time at work each day, and when he was speaking at a conference a few years back and asked how many people had had four hours of uninterrupted time at work in the past week, less than 5% of people raised their hands.

Jason says that Basecamp achieves so much with their small team in part because of their culture that is so protective of each person's time. Each person should have as close to eight hours of uninterrupted time for their work every day due to their low meeting, asynchronous communication culture. The value of eight hours really stuck with me when Jason said "Get on a flight from New York to London without any entertainment and sit their for eight hours. Then tell me that not a lot can get accomplished in eight hours".

He likes his time split into one-hour blocks and finds it optimal over something like four 15-minute chunks. I've restarted on the pomodoro technique recently, but I'm wondering if upping it to more like 50 minutes with a 10 minute break would work better. The UK school system runs on this timetable, so do university lectures, and it's how therapists hours work too.

Measuring the right metric ⏱️
I was on a run recently and my Garmin watch face has three fields that I'd set up years ago and have been a default: time, distance, and pace. I’ve been using these for years without a second thought.

But I realized these weren't the goal for my Zone 2 easy runs - I wanted to be:

So I changed the face and my runs are just that bit more zen now. No more distraction of distance or pace.