COVID-19 gave the rise to working around the world remotely, and today it has become the new normal.
Companies were forced to trust their employees more, employees learnt to focus better, both benefited from this. Of course, everyone had to upgrade their homes to be more connected. To ensure the smooth running of not 'work', but other things, such as their Entertainment devices, Cable, Banking, Grocery Shopping, Workouts, Meditation apps. All from the comfort of their homes.
But of course, as important, it is to stay healthy, safe and alive, it is to be able to earn. Working remotely and with efficiency does exactly that. But, the foundation of progress is defined by our efficiency in communication and transport infrastructure.
And in the absence of transport, when we over-indexed on communication alone, it was all about time management. It ensured we have enough time to communicate as we have to work and deliver a project. Because talking or communicating doesn't alone deliver work. It's the time we spend processing it and applying our learnings and knowledge that does!
This brings us to the highly efficient Google calendar app. Oh, boy have we all been grateful to it in the lockdown. From businesses to entrepreneurs, to creators alike. It was and still is one of the simplest solutions out there to manage your work, time and efficiency.
But staying home and working remotely has also meant blocking more time for meetings to work as teams or to deliver projects. With the added hours of commute - that we've now learnt to dedicate to work as well, oftentimes people have started to complain that they have had too many meetings each day and almost no time to actually work.
So while the Google calendar app has helped us find time with others and block our calendars to do so, it has almost not accounted for hours we put aside everything and work.
"Focus hours" is a concept that ensures you have time on your calendar that can be blocked each day post a meeting or as part of the day you dedicate each day of the week to actually do your work - during your work hours. Others can see this and they can see the agenda of your focus hours as well, but they won't be able to actually block your time in that period unless you allow them to do so exclusively.
The feature is simple, it shows your calendar as 'partially blocked', the reason for it being blocked. It gives better control to the person as it lets them decide who can block their time in these defined hours while ensuring a larger set of people do not actually intrude or break your focus.
