What is Focus Friday?

SPEAKER_1 (0:01)

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SPEAKER_2 (0:27)

I get so many headaches every month. It could be chronic migraine, 15 or more headache days a month, each lasting four hours or more.

SPEAKER_3 (0:34)

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SPEAKER_2 (1:19)

Why wait? Ask your doctor. Visit botoxchronicmigraine.com or call 1-800-44-BOTOX to learn more.

Joseph Chance (1:32)

What is Focus Friday?

Thanks for asking.

Let's be honest. Being productive at work on Fridays can be a real challenge. A 2019 study by Accountemps found that Friday was the least common choice for American workers when naming their most productive day of the week. The slump is likely down to having worked hard over the first four days of the week, as well as thinking ahead to the weekend. What's more, your colleagues are in the same frame of mind too. But in recent years, a method has emerged to combat this phenomenon and potentially turn Friday into the most impactful day of the working week.

It's known as Focus Friday, and the name pretty much speaks for itself. It's a day dedicated to concentration. The whole point is to eliminate the distractions and interruptions that often prevent us from effectively focusing on the tasks we have at hand. And it's been catching on, with high-profile businesses like Google and Slack adopting the method. How exactly are they doing that? It's pretty simple. One of the main principles is to schedule no meetings on Fridays. Of course, in any business, team meetings are useful to keep things coordinated, with everyone moving in the same direction. But sometimes the sheer amount of them prevents us from dedicating any time to actual productive work, like conducting research or completing reports. Since COVID came along and we all found ourselves working from home much more often, meeting inflation has been seen in most companies. Writing for Harvard Business Review in December 2022, Andrew Brodsky and Mike Tolliver found that remote meetings had increased by 60% since 2020

You may remember that we discussed the idea of deep work a while back on Do you really know? As per Cal Newport, who coined the term, the definition of deep work is professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that pushed your cognitive capabilities to their limits. This is the kind of work you could seek to perform on Focus Friday. So implementing Focus Friday means banning in-person meetings, video calls, instant messaging, and any other form of non-urgent, casual discussion. You know, the kind of can-I-grab-you-for-a-quick chat you might usually feel like you have to accept when your manager asks you. Friday is also a strategic choice because such interactions are more likely to drag on due to mental fatigue and a desire to unwind before the weekend. How can I implement it on my own?

Your goal should really be to create a group dynamic by discussing the idea with your colleagues and management, explaining some of the arguments behind it. You may find support from your peers who also suffer from meetings encroaching on their primary tasks, but you still need to be realistic. Raine Terry is HR Director at UK hiring platform Total Jobs, talking to stylist.co.uk for a feature about Focus Friday. She said, It might not be achievable to block out an entire day. It will depend on the nature of the business you work in. When making your case for protected time, take into consideration any business needs and factor that in. To get started, you may try gently questioning the necessity of certain meetings, especially recurring ones which seem to exist just because they always have. If Focus Friday isn't an option, you could always try another day of the week. There you have it.