[chasedehan]

I wholly like the idea and is one that I preach and do my utter best to follow.

As context, my company is 95% remote in engineering (I'm a remote manager with some IC responsibilities). Of course, there is some of that internal pressure of making sure I am able to respond to slack in a timely manner. SO, I continually stress to take the deep work breaks and do everything I can to make sure that my team is protected from meetings or other outside requests.

Some explicit things we do as a team. - Have 3 standing meetings, M/W/F for 30 minutes each. We are fluid with these times making sure that they work for everyone and are blocked next to other commitments. We also change the context of the "standups" to incorporate planning/retros, etc - Thursdays are explicit "no meeting days" I fight back hard against anyone who tries to put engineers on my team in a meeting on Thursday. Unfortunately, I as a manager sometimes have no choice but to accept a meeting - Tuesdays are recommended no meeting days - It is ok to turn off slack/email. We all have each others phone numbers and will text if it is something actually urgent, which it almost never is. - Our team is measured by how much we hit our deadlines, which we have input into how those deadlines are set

This is one of the best and most productive work environments I have ever been in -- it would be extremely difficult for me to move back to any office, especially an open one where productivity is proxied by seat time.