For me, summer offers a unique opportunity to slow down, reflect and reset.
As many colleagues take time off, it’s the perfect moment to step back from the daily grind and evaluate. With fewer meetings and deadlines, you can look at what’s working. And what’s not. A bit like my favorite French saying: 'reculer pour mieux sauter'.
Use this quieter period of time to prioritize what truly matters. Intentionally redesign your calendar for greater focus, balance and impact.
By optimizing now, you set yourself up for a more productive and sustainable second half of the year. Your future self will thank you later.
Where to start?
Start by asking yourself these 3 questions
- Are you working on the right things?
Take a critical look at your recurring meetings, ongoing projects, and daily tasks. Are they aligned with your long-term goals, or are they just keeping you busy? Take your time to reassess priorities and eliminate the noise. What is eating up your time and energy but doesn't drive meaningful results? - Do you have time to make real progress?
Don’t settle for being busy. Aim to move the needle. To deliver value.
Look at your calendar and ask yourself: Where is the time for deep focus work? For strategic thinking? For making progress and delivering value?
If every day is crammed with back-to-back calls and urgent-but-not-important tasks, allow yourself to build in more protected blocks of focus time. - What with everything else that ends up on your plate?
How do you handle new requests, shifting priorities and surprise projects?
The key is to design a flexible system that can absorb those changes without derailing your focus. That means learning to delegate, defer, or delete with confidence, and making sure your calendar reflects your actual bandwidth. Not your wishful thinking.
By allowing yourself to slow down this summer and honestly reflecting on these questions, you’re not just reorganizing your calendar. You’re laying the groundwork for a more intentional, balanced, and productive rest of the year.
Manage your triggers and your energy!
One of the most underrated productivity hacks isn't a tool. It’s self-awareness. If you want to design that system, that schedule that actually works for you, you need to understand your internal rhythm.
You have to understand:
- when you tend to get bored during the day. When does doing the dishes sound more appealing than doing your actual job?
- what causes you stress. How does this stress manifests in your body or your behavior?
- when you go looking for distractions. And are those distractions email, social media, snacks or anything to avoid the task at hand?
These are hard questions to answer if you’ve never given them some thought. And let’s be honest: in a 9 to 5 at the office, there’s hardly room for this. For designing and planning your calendar based on what works best for you.
So, observe yourself these upcoming weeks.
Pay attention to those subtle moments when your energy drops, your attention drifts, or your frustration spikes. And be honest about it! The only one benefitting from this journey, is yourself. It’s not worth lying about it.
Once you start noticing those patterns, you can build smart strategies and habits to manage them.
Exercise: create your focus curve
Bring all these observations together and create your focus curve:
Draw two axes.
- The vertical axis is your ability to focus.
- The horizontal one is the time of day, from the moment you wake up to the time you go to bed.
Plot your energy and focus over the course of a typical day. You might be surprised by what you discover. Are you a morning person like me, or do you deliver your best work in the evening?
Here’s my curve as an example:
I’m most focused in the early morning: between 8 and 10 a.m.
That’s my sweet spot for deep, uninterrupted work.
After lunch? From 1 to 3 p.m., my energy dips and my attention scatters. Around 4 or 5, I get a small second wind, but after 6 p.m.? Don’t ask me anything important. My brain has checked out.
Turn insight into action
Once you’ve mapped your curve, it becomes much easier to design a smarter calendar. Ask yourself:
- When should I schedule my most important work. The kind that requires deep thought and focus?
- When should I plan meetings or collaborative tasks that don’t require as much solo brainpower?
If you look at my curve, your advice might be something like: “Do your deep work in the morning, schedule meetings after lunch, and don’t even think about trying to solve complex problems after 6 p.m.”.
And you’d be right. This is exactly how I (try to) design my calendar.
My team knows mornings are my prime time. And I try to protect that focus window as much as possible. Afternoons are great for collaboration, meetings, casual check-ins or creative brainstorming.
Combine your priorities with your focus curve
Once you’ve identified your focus curve and reflected on the three key questions we started this article with, you can design your calendar with purpose.
- Start by blocking your peak focus hours for your most important, high-impact work. The kind that moves projects forward or requires deep thinking. Protect these blocks with your life: no distractions, no exceptions.
- Then, schedule routine tasks, admin work, or collaborative meetings during your lower-energy periods. When focus is naturally harder to maintain. Be realistic about how much you can take on.
- Create buffer zones for unexpected tasks or overflow.
- Finally, build in short breaks: time for reflection, intentional “slack time” to recharge.
Know that this calendar isn’t rigid. It’s a living thing, matched to your energy, aligned with your priorities, and structured to help you make the most out of your work hours.
Be proud if this way of working works for 80% of the time. We don’t strive for perfection. Our goal is to organise work around our natural rhythm.
The extra dimension of hybrid work
There is a catch though: hybrid work and collaboration can complicate your focus curve and your well designed calendar.
Even if you know your ideal rhythm, syncing with a team can pull you out of that natural flow.
Maybe your peak focus time overlaps with your team’s preferred meeting hours. Maybe you're expected to be “available” when you’d rather be heads-down.
That’s why it’s crucial to communicate your work style clearly and advocate for your needs where possible.
Share your efficiency curve with your teammates. Suggest meeting windows that work for everyone. And use tools like shared calendars or async updates to reduce unnecessary interruptions.
Hybrid work thrives on flexibility—but it requires intentional boundaries if you want to protect your most productive hours.
What works for me and my teams is planning as many internal meetings as possible on the same day of the week. Project stand-ups? Internal syncs? Meetings to discuss planning and priorities?
I have them all booked on Monday.
At the end of that day, I feel drained. But at least I have the flexibility to organise the rest of my week like I want to.
Conclusion: it’s all about energy. Your energy!
The questions and exercises I suggest here, seem simple. But they can be very powerful if you allow yourself some time to reflect and reorganise.
As soon as you understand your natural rhythm and your personal triggers, you see what needs to be done. And perhaps even why you sometimes blame yourself for a lack of willpower or motivation. When it’s basically your energy crashing.
Instead, plan your day in a way that respects your biology.
Productivity isn’t just about doing more. It’s about doing the right things at the right time, and with the right energy.
This is the perfect season to slow down just enough to observe these patterns, fine-tune your schedule, and lay the foundation for a more balanced, efficient, and sustainable way of working.
So take out that piece of paper. Sketch your curve. Write down your triggers and priorities. And start shaping a calendar that works the way you do.
Disclaimer
This article combines best practices on hybrid work from Atlassian with insights from the book ‘Focus is the new gold’ from Elke Geraerts into something that works for me.