Welcome to the Brilliance Brief. Every week, we break down leadership, mindset, and personal growth into something real and doable. Expect research-backed insights, a little storytelling, and practical ideas that actually fit into your life (even the messy parts).

I am not good at this.

I want to be upfront about that before we go any further.

Every morning I sit down with a plan. The important project goes first. The deep thinking gets the best hours. I know the playbook. I teach the playbook.

And almost every morning, my plan falls apart by 8:15.

Sometimes it’s a fire. A client issue that can’t wait. A team question that was supposed to take a minute and takes 20.

Sometimes it’s me. I underestimate how long something will take. I open one more tab. Check one more message. And suddenly it’s noon and the thing I sat down to do is still sitting there untouched.

This has been my fight for most of my adult life.

I’m not writing this as someone who solved it. I’m writing it as someone who went looking for answers because I was tired of reaching Friday and realizing I’d been busy all week without making progress on anything that mattered.

What I found helped. I hope it helps you too.

Microsoft studied 31,000 employees and found something that explained the feeling perfectly.

For the most heavily pinged people, an interruption lands every 2 minutes during core work hours.

That’s 275 interruptions before the day is done.

Researcher Gloria Mark at UC Irvine studied what happens after each one.

It takes 23 minutes and 15 seconds to fully return to the same depth of focus you had before you got pulled away.

Twenty-three minutes to recover. An interruption every two.

The math is brutal. Of course the plan doesn’t survive. The environment makes sustained focus structurally impossible.

Cal Newport named this over a decade ago in his book Deep Work.

Deep work is what happens when you concentrate hard on something demanding.

Shallow work is everything else. Logistics. Replying to things. Anything you can do while half paying attention.

Newport wasn’t arguing that shallow work is worthless. Somebody has to answer the email. Most days that somebody is you.

His argument was about proportion. Shallow work expands to fill any space you leave open for it. It feels like productivity the entire time it’s eating your week.

You reach Friday responsive, helpful, and no closer to anything that matters.

Most productivity content treats this as a personal problem. I think it’s a leadership problem.

The leaders who spend their week in shallow work fall behind on the decisions their teams are waiting on.

Your team is watching you. If you spend your day reactive and scattered, they will too. 

Focus is a culture. It starts with what the leader protects.

Boring and practical. But they moved the needle for me, and the research backs up why.

1. Book it like an executive meeting.

Open your calendar. Put a block in. Give it the name of the actual project, not “focus time.”

Then treat it the way you’d treat a meeting with your CEO. You wouldn’t push that for a quick sync. Don’t push this one either.

2. Give it your best hours, not your leftovers.

Most people schedule deep work into whatever gap the calendar has left over.

That’s usually 4 pm, when you have nothing left in the tank.

Pay attention for a week and find out when your thinking is sharp. For most of us, it’s the first 2 or 3 hours after we start.

Schedule your deep work then. Push collaboration and check-ins into the afternoon.

3. Batch the shallow work.

Responding to email, messages, and quick questions is real work. It still has to happen.

Give it 2 or 3 windows a day instead of letting it run in the background from 8 to 6.

People adjust faster than you’d expect. Almost nobody needs an answer within 4 minutes.

4. Defend it out loud.

Somebody will ask for that block. They always do, usually in the first week you try this.

“I have something on my calendar then, can we do 2?” is a complete answer. You don’t owe an explanation.

People learn your calendar by watching what you protect.

Open your calendar and find your best 90 minutes tomorrow morning.

Block it. Name it after the project.

Do that every morning this week.

You’ll finish more by Thursday than you did all last month.

Talk soon,
Justin

P.S. What’s one task that’s been sitting on your to-do list way too long? Hit reply. No judgment.