One of the questions I get asked most often is how I manage my time. How do I run a business while conducting research, preparing for speaking engagements, writing this newsletter every week, and still making time for friends and family?
The question is typically framed as one of time management. But over the years, I’ve found that the answer has less to do with fitting more into each day and more to do with deciding what deserves space in the first place.
There are only 24 hours in a day, and what feels urgent is not always what actually matters. Someone asks to pick your brain for just 15 minutes, someone else sends an urgent email, and before you realize it, your week has filled up around you. Meanwhile, the things you care about most can get postponed because they don’t demand your attention with the same urgency.
That’s why I practice what I call timeshielding. At the beginning of each week, I protect time for my key priorities. Right now, those include collecting data for a study at the ADHD research lab, coordinating the kitchen renovation in my new house, and preparing for the September relaunch of the Ness Labs community.
Timeshielding means protecting blocks of time for what matters to you without assigning them a specific task list. You might protect time for research, reading, creative exploration, or simply doing nothing. This differs from timeboxing, where you assign a specific task to a fixed period.
This structure gives your priorities a place in your calendar while leaving enough flexibility to respond to your energy and attention in the moment.
That flexibility is important because productivity is constrained by cognitive bottlenecks. You can’t sustain focused attention indefinitely or work at the same energy level all day.
The point of timeshielding is to work with those limits rather than pretend they don’t exist. Here are three ways I use this approach to protect what matters:
1. Shield your priorities first. At the beginning of the week, identify what matters most and reserve time for it before other commitments take over. When something overlaps, consider moving the new request rather than automatically giving up the time you protected.
2. Work with your energy. Avoid filling every hour with predetermined tasks. Leave some flexibility so you can adjust based on how you feel. A burst of energy might be better used for creative work, while a lower-energy period may be better suited to routine emails.
3. Protect recovery too. Breaks and rest are easy to sacrifice because they can look unproductive on a calendar. But research shows that sleep deprivation negatively affects performance, so protecting time to step away and wind down is part of sustaining meaningful work.
A calendar will always fill up if you let urgency decide what belongs in it. Timeshielding gives you another option: make room for what matters before your inbox gets a chance to decide for you.