The Quiet Hours: Building a Focused Design Routine.

Design work has a warm-up cost. The first twenty minutes of any session are spent rebuilding a mental model of the problem, which means a day chopped into six meetings produces roughly zero design and a great deal of rework.

My week now has two shapes. Tuesday and Thursday are open for calls, reviews and estimates. Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings are closed: no calls before one, notifications off, one file open. Clients get a faster answer on Tuesday than they used to get on any day, because the answer is actually finished.

The other half of the routine is a written handover to myself. Before closing a file I leave three lines at the top of the notes: what I just did, what I was about to do, and the one decision I am still avoiding. It costs a minute and saves the twenty-minute warm-up almost entirely.