11. September 2026

Protect Your Time Before Someone Else Claims It

Article written by Ildikó Sealey in the category Time Utilisation

You protect your phone. You protect your car. You protect your home. But how much of your time do you actually protect?

If your diary is full, you are working hard and yet, the work that would genuinely move your business forward keeps getting pushed to tomorrow.

You might even assume you have a problem with time management. But apart from the fact that you can't manage time, what you may rather have, is a misalignment with protecting your time. Because, knowing what matters is only half the job. You also need to make sure it gets the time it deserves.

Being busy does not mean your priorities are protected

Imagine a genuine crisis landed in your life today. Would you find the time to deal with it? Of course you would. You would drop things, rearrange your diary and make it happen. So perhaps the more useful question is not whether you have enough time, but:

What are you choosing to protect your time for?

For so many business owners, the working day becomes reactive almost by default like this:

You sit down to work on something important. Twenty minutes later, an email arrives. Then a message. Then you remember something you need to deal with. A quick job appears that will "only take five minutes".

You deal with it and return to the original task. Except your brain may not return quite as quickly as your body does.

Research by Sophie Leroy¹ identified a phenomenon called attention residue. When we switch from one task to another. Particularly when the first task is unfinished, some of our attention can remain attached to the previous task. Her experiments found that this can impair performance on the next task.

That matters when your work requires concentration, judgement, problem-solving or decision-making.

The cost of the interruption is therefore not simply the five minutes you spent answering the email. It can also affect the quality of the thinking that follows. And when that pattern repeats throughout the day, fragmented time becomes fragmented attention.

Your calendar affects how your business performs

Time Utilisation is the foundation of my T.E.M.P.L.E. Method™ because every other improvement you want to make requires somewhere to put it. But it also affects your business much more directly.

Your personal routines influence your capacity to focus.
That affects your thinking and decisions.
Those affect how consistently you execute.
And execution ultimately affects business performance.

Research into daily work planning² supports the value of deliberately deciding what to do and when to do it. A two-week workplace study found that time-management planning, including prioritising tasks and deciding how and when they would be performed, was associated with stronger work engagement and performance. Interestingly, those benefits weakened when employees experienced frequent interruptions. The researchers found that planning for potential interruptions helped people perform better when interruptions occurred.

In other words, having a plan matters. Protecting that plan matters too. So here are three practical places to start.

1. Put boundaries around your best time

A boundary determines in advance what gets access to your time.

That could mean:

not checking your phone first thing in the morning
not allowing people to book into any available gap in your calendar
giving meetings a defined purpose and end time
protecting particular hours for focused work
deciding when you will deal with email rather than responding whenever it arrives

These are small decisions, but they change the default. Your time is no longer available simply because somebody or something asks for it.

There is evidence for being more deliberate about email in particular. A Microsoft Research study⁴ tracked 40 information workers for 12 working days and found that longer daily time spent on email was associated with lower perceived productivity and higher measured stress.

Don't get me wrong, you do not have to ignore your inbox, but you definitely need to decide when it deserves your attention.

2. Build buffers into your day

Do you run your working day back-to-back? Meeting. Task. Call. Meeting. Another task. It looks efficient on paper because every available space is occupied.

Then one call overruns. A technical problem takes ten minutes to resolve. Something genuinely urgent appears. Suddenly the whole day is running late.

Five, ten or fifteen minutes between activities can look like wasted capacity, but I see buffers differently.

Scheduled buffers are the shock absorbers of your working day.

They stop one disruption becoming four. They also give your brain some opportunity to transition between different types of work rather than expecting it to switch instantly from a client conversation to financial decisions to writing content.

Research into interruptions reinforces why those transitions matter. Leroy and Glomb³ found that interruptions can create attention residue and reduce performance on the interrupting task. Their research also found that making a brief "ready-to-resume" plan for the interrupted work can help mitigate the effect.

So if you have to interrupt important work, spend a moment recording exactly where you stopped and what needs to happen next. Make it easier for your brain to return.

3. Protect the important work in your schedule

This was a significant change in my own business. I used to organise my work according to the different arms of the business: podcast, speaking, coaching and so on. The result was a very long list of tasks that all appeared to compete with each other.

Reading Michael Gerber's The E-Myth⁵ changed how I thought about the structure of my business. I began looking at my work through functions such as sales, marketing, administration, delivery and CEO work.

Around the same time, I started applying the Eisenhower Matrix more deliberately, separating work according to urgency and importance. Cross-referencing my task list against those categories changed what I protected time for:

The important, needle-moving work began getting my protected morning focus sessions.

Administration moved into the afternoon, when my energy naturally drops but I still have plenty of capacity for those tasks.

And the A4 page of jobs that previously felt overwhelming became something I could actually navigate.

The objective was not to overwhelm myself by squeezing more into the day. Far from it. It was to match the right work to the right time.

What is your unprotected time costing you?

This is where time protection becomes a business issue.

You can remain extremely busy while the work that creates future results keeps slipping.
The decision that needed making this quarter.
The content that could have been building your audience for the past six months.
The prospective client you intended to follow up.
The strategic thinking you never quite reach because operational tasks consume the day.

Each individual delay can look insignificant. But repeated often enough, they create a very different business trajectory.

There is also a personal consequence. When you are continually busy without making the progress you expect, it is easy to question your own discipline or capability.

But before reaching that conclusion, look at the environment you have created around your priorities. Are they actually protected? Time protection will not magically give you more hours. It can give you the right hours back.

Start with one day

Do not redesign your entire working week tomorrow. Just start with auditing one day. At the end of it, compare where you intended your time to go with where it actually went.

What interrupted you?
What did you allow into protected time?
Where would a boundary have helped?
Where did you need a buffer?
Which important task was deferred because something more urgent claimed its place?

That gap between intention and reality is your starting point. Because an unprotected calendar will fill itself with other people's priorities. The question is whether your priorities get in there first.

Protect your time like it matters. Because nothing that matters gets done without it.

And remember: a healthier you makes a wealthier you.

References

Leroy, S. (2009). Why is it so hard to do my work? The challenge of attention residue when switching between work tasks. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 109(2), 168-181. DOI: 10.1016/j.obhdp.2009.04.002
Parke, M. R., Weinhardt, J. M., Brodsky, A., Tangirala, S. & DeVoe, S. E. (2018). When daily planning improves employee performance: The importance of planning type, engagement, and interruptions. Journal of Applied Psychology, 103(3), 300-312.
Leroy, S. & Glomb, T. M. (2018). Tasks interrupted: How anticipating time pressure on resumption of an interrupted task causes attention residue and low performance on interrupting tasks and how a "ready-to-resume" plan mitigates the effects. Organization Science, 29(3), 380-397.
Mark, G., Iqbal, S. T., Czerwinski, M. & Johns, P. (2016). Email duration, batching and self-interruption: Patterns of email use on productivity and stress. Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.
Gerber, M. E. (1995). The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It. HarperBusiness.