One executive discovered her open door was stealing her mornings

Debbie Moysychyn had just started building a new health-care education division at Brandman University when she agreed to keep a time log during a workshop Vanderkam ran at the Healthcare Businesswomen's Association convention. After a few days of writing down what she actually did, the pattern jumped off the page. Her days were a constant relay of ad hoc meetings and short conversations, thirty minutes on one thing, thirty on another, never enough on any single project to make real progress. Some of this was intentional, she had built an open-door policy to create a collaborative culture on her team, and from that angle, the interruptions were the most important part of her job. But she also had other work that simply wasn't getting done.

The answer turned out to be hiding in her personal schedule. Her teenage daughter played water polo and needed to be at the pool before seven in the morning most days. After the drop-off, Moysychyn had been heading home to watch television or going into the office to clear out her inbox. Vanderkam pointed out that her inbox could be handled in the scattered five-minute gaps between visitors later in the day, but nobody was knocking on her office door at six-thirty in the morning. That stretch was uniquely hers.

Moysychyn agreed to try using it for focused work on her single top priority of the day, treating it as protected project time and simply not answering email during it. The change, she reported, was surprisingly easy, mostly because she was already awake and at her desk. Within days she was hooked. Weeks later, checking in, Vanderkam learned Moysychyn was still using that early window for what she called the heavy lifting. I can accomplish more before breakfast than I used to do in a day, she said. Maybe not quite, but I am checking long-standing things off my to-do list.

Look for the window that already exists in your schedule but currently goes to waste, the twenty minutes after a school drop-off, the hour before colleagues arrive, the stretch before your inbox starts filling. Claim that specific slot as the time nobody else is likely to interrupt, and pick one real priority to put there, the project that keeps losing to smaller tasks the rest of the day. Leave your email closed for that window, even though it will be tempting to peek. Give it a few days before judging whether it works, since the biggest obstacle usually isn't the schedule itself but the habit of treating that quiet stretch as spare time rather than protected time.