As someone who's changed careers from dev into management, I can tell you that flow state is not something that is unique to developers. Almost everyone needs it to be the most productive they can be. Even managers. _Nobody_ seems to give a shit about it.
Your options are to think nobody understand you and everyone is working against you, or to take ownership and defend your time accordingly. Which is incredibly easy to say and very difficult to achieve.
I worked at a place once that had one day a week where meetings were banned. Across the entire company. I've since realized that it wasn't the "no meetings" aspect that was the value, it was the co-ordinated scheduling of time for deep work. The biggest challenge I have today with defending my time is co-ordinating it with other people. At a sufficient scale everyone has a different block of time you're trying to defend, and when you're trying to get 4 people together to have a synchronous chat it almost inevitably clashes with someone's block. Having a mandated "everyone has at least one very long deep work block every Thursday" was a powerful way to preserve _at least_ one large period of focus each week. You're still free to schedule others too.
>Your options are to think nobody understand you and everyone is working against you, or to take ownership and defend your time accordingly.
I'm not sure if you meant it in this way, but "defend your time" is a phrasing that implies an adversarial relationship between your time and those that are supposed to be facilitating you to do your best work, like a manager. I believe a manger is someone who removes distractions, buffers you from interruptions, and facilitates frictionless coordination with others. Anything less is just making the hard job harder.
I didn’t say “defend your time, from your manager”. The people who will invite you to a meeting in most companies are myriad. Some of these are truly collaborative and for mutual benefit. Many are, as you said, just making your job harder. Hopefully for _their_ benefit but it does come at a cost to you and you can’t afford to give all of your time up for others. Defend your time.
Thanks for clarifying that you didn't mean managers. I was confused because my post was only concerned about managers, and so I thought you were replying to that.
Your options are to think nobody understand you and everyone is working against you, or to take ownership and defend your time accordingly. Which is incredibly easy to say and very difficult to achieve.
I worked at a place once that had one day a week where meetings were banned. Across the entire company. I've since realized that it wasn't the "no meetings" aspect that was the value, it was the co-ordinated scheduling of time for deep work. The biggest challenge I have today with defending my time is co-ordinating it with other people. At a sufficient scale everyone has a different block of time you're trying to defend, and when you're trying to get 4 people together to have a synchronous chat it almost inevitably clashes with someone's block. Having a mandated "everyone has at least one very long deep work block every Thursday" was a powerful way to preserve _at least_ one large period of focus each week. You're still free to schedule others too.