Protecting your Executive’s focus time is a really important part of the EA role, although I think we don’t give it as much attention as some of the others. When our Executive is interrupted throughout the day, they don’t get enough uninterrupted time to think properly about the decisions that matter most, such as where the business is heading or who to hire, and those decisions end up being rushed between meetings or left until the end of the day when they’re tired. As EAs, we manage their calendar and handle most requests for their time, so we are usually best placed to help protect their focus time.
Each interruption on its own is usually small, and most of them are perfectly reasonable requests, but over a few weeks they add up to a lot of lost thinking time, and that thinking is a big part of what our Executive is paid to do.
Two recent articles, one in Forbes and one in Fast Company, looked at this from the leader’s side, and both came to a similar answer: block out protected time in the calendar for thinking, and delegate any decisions that don’t require the leader to make them. For many Executives, the person who sets up the focus time and makes sure it stays protected is their EA.
So this is what we are going to look at in this blog post: why interruptions do so much damage to our Executive’s thinking, how to spot when their focus has slipped, the practical ways of protecting your Executive’s focus time, and how to do the same for yourself.
This template is a resource to help you manage responsibilities effectively, improve alignment with your executive, and maintain organized, consistent support.
So why does a two-minute question cost so much more than two minutes?
Sophie Leroy, a business school professor, has spent years researching something she calls attention residue. Her 2009 study found that when people switch from one task to another, part of their attention stays behind on the first task, especially if it was left unfinished, and their performance on the next task suffers because of it. So when our Executive is halfway through reviewing a proposal and gets pulled into a call, they come back to the proposal with part of their mind still on the call.
Gloria Mark, a researcher at the University of California, Irvine, has studied how interruptions affect stress levels. In her 2008 study, people who were interrupted actually finished their tasks faster than people who weren’t, but they paid for it with higher stress, frustration, time pressure and effort, and that showed up after only 20 minutes of interrupted work. I think most EAs will recognize this from watching their Executive on a busy day, when they get through a huge amount very quickly and are completely drained by 3pm.
And interruptions are increasing. Microsoft’s 2025 Work Trend Index found that workers using its tools are interrupted roughly every two minutes during the working day, and that 57% of meetings are now ad hoc calls with no calendar invite at all. Executives are usually more in demand than the average worker, so for them the real figure is probably higher, and protecting your Executive’s focus time has probably got harder over the last few years.
Some work copes with interruptions reasonably well. Answering emails or approving expenses can be dropped and picked up again without much consequence. The bigger decisions our Executive makes, about things like strategy or budgets, require them to think through a lot of information at once, and those are the decisions that suffer most when their day is constantly interrupted, because they get pushed to the end of the day when our Executive is at their most tired.
So where do EAs come into this?
Harvard Business School professors Michael Porter and Nitin Nohria ran one of the largest studies on how senior leaders spend their time, tracking 27 CEOs across more than 60,000 hours (a must-read for every Executive Assistant, in my opinion). The CEOs spent 72% of their working time in meetings, and about 36% dealing with issues as they came up. Interestingly, the time data was recorded in 15-minute blocks by the CEOs’ own Executive Assistants, which shows just how much of an Executive’s day EAs can see.
The Forbes piece makes a point I think is really useful for EAs: the Executives who protect their focus best are usually the ones who delegate well, because they have already built a team that can take decisions off them. In practice, protecting focus and delegating well depend on the same thing, which is the Executive trusting someone else to make decisions they used to make themselves. For many Executives, that person is their EA.
This is why protecting your Executive’s focus time is such an important part of what we do. When our Executive has time to think clearly, they make better decisions, and everyone who works for them benefits. It’s also one of the clearest examples of the value an EA creates for their Executive.
Most Executives don’t notice their focus slipping while it’s happening. They tend to notice afterwards, when a decision has taken three times longer than it should have, and by then they have usually been short of thinking time for weeks. As EAs, we are often in a better position to spot it earlier, because we can see the pattern across their whole week, and spotting it early is the first step in protecting your Executive’s focus time.
A few signs to look out for:
I’d add one more that’s specific to us, which is the number of times a day someone asks you, “Have they got five minutes?” If that number is going up, your Executive’s day is being interrupted more and more often, and neither you nor your Executive have noticed.
So what do you do about it? Most of the practical work of protecting your Executive’s focus time starts in the calendar, although a block labeled “focus time” won’t protect anything by itself. It needs a few habits built around it, and this is where we can really help.
Some things that make a real difference:
If you want to go further with the calendar side of this, we’ve covered a lot more in how to manage Executive time more effectively, and our time management guide has plenty of practical tools for your own day too.
Once the blocks are in the calendar, the next challenge is keeping them when colleagues ask for time, because most of the people asking have perfectly good reasons.
When you’re protecting your Executive’s focus time, how you say no makes a big difference to whether people respect the block next time. Instead of saying, “Sorry, they’re busy all morning,” try, “They’re working on the board paper until 11, so I don’t want to interrupt them, but I can get you ten minutes at 11:30, or if you send me the question now, I’ll make sure they see it at 11 and get back to you before lunch.”
Can you see the difference? The first version leaves the person to try again later (probably by messaging your Executive directly), while the second tells them exactly when they’ll get an answer and gives them a reason to come through you next time.
It also helps to keep a running holding list of the questions that come in during a focus block, which is one of the simplest ways of protecting your Executive’s focus time. Instead of your Executive getting six separate interruptions across the morning, they get one short list when the block ends, and they can often answer most of it in five minutes. Onceyou put these boundaries in place, you’ll also start to see who is asking and what about, which is really useful for the next step.
Protecting your Executive’s focus time gets much easier when fewer decisions need to go to them in the first place. This is the delegation side of the Forbes argument, and it’s where EAs can make the biggest difference.
Start by looking at your holding list and your Executive’s inbox, and sort the decisions into groups: the ones only your Executive can make, the ones you could make and tell them about afterwards, and the ones you could make without them needing to know at all. Then have a conversation with your Executive about the last two groups. You might be surprised how much of their week goes on small decisions, like which flight to book or whether to accept an event invitation, and how happy they are to hand those over.
When you have that conversation, agree how you’ll report back, whether that’s a line in your end-of-day summary or a weekly note of what you’ve handled. That way your Executive can see decisions are being made well without being involved in each one, and you have a record of what you’re taking on, which is really useful when it comes to your own review. We’ve written more about how to approach these conversations in managing up as an Executive Assistant.
Even with all of this in place, focus blocks will sometimes get broken, whether that’s because something urgent comes up or your Executive decides to take the call themselves (it happens!). When it does, the useful thing is to look at why.
Once a week, take a few minutes to look at which blocks stayed in place and which didn’t. If the same person keeps breaking into the Tuesday morning block, maybe they need a standing ten minutes on a Monday afternoon. If the blocks keep moving because of calls with colleagues in another time zone, it might be the blocks that need to move. After a few weeks of this, protecting your Executive’s focus time starts to fit the way their week actually works.
Everything above applies to you as well, and I know it’s easy to forget that when so much of your day goes on protecting your Executive’s focus time.
And we’re not the only ones who want more time to focus. A Twilio survey of more than 1,200 UK workers found that 47% prioritize distraction-free focus time, and 36% would like their employer to formally schedule quiet periods. For EAs, being available is part of the job, of course, so the aim is to decide when you’re interruptible and when you’re not.
Some EAs find it helps to block out the first hour of the day, before their Executive is online, for the work that needs real thought, like planning a complicated trip or preparing for an offsite. Others agree a set of response windows with their Executive, so everyone knows when messages will be picked up. And if you find it hard to get started on the bigger pieces of work, a virtual coworking session might help. The Fast Company piece points to research suggesting that small nudges during lapses in attention help people get back on track, and working alongside someone else on camera, even someone you’ve never met, gives you that nudge.
So if you’re wondering where to start, pick one focus block in your Executive’s calendar next week, agree with them what it’s for, decline anyone who asks for time in that block, and look at what happened by the end of the week. You’ll find protecting your Executive’s focus time becomes part of how you work together, and your Executive starts to rely on you to guard the time they need for their best thinking.
Share this article:
Join 30,000+ Assistants receiving our carefully crafted weekly newsletter packed with valuable tips, tricks, and insights tailored specifically for Assistants like you.
