I've been working for around 20 years now, and it's taken me an embarrassingly large proportion of that time to realise something fairly obvious:
I don't work particularly well when somebody else designs my day for me.
I don't mean that in a rebellious don't tell me what to do kind of way.
It's more fundamental than that.
We all think differently. Our energy rises and falls at different times. Some people need structure. Others need freedom. Some do their best thinking surrounded by people, while others need to disappear into a quiet room for three hours.
My own experience is inevitably shaped by working in the creative industries and having ADHD, so I'm not suggesting that what works for me will work for everyone.
These are personal musings rather than a productivity system.
But after experiencing both the complete freedom of self-employment and the considerable structure of a large organisation, I've become convinced of one thing:
Wherever possible, we should have some say in designing the way our working lives actually feel.
Because we spend far too much of our lives at work to let someone else design all of it for us.
When every day was different
For around a decade, I was self-employed and co-ran a small creative studio in central Leeds.
This was before Covid, when remote meetings were unusual and almost everything happened in person.
Our working lives were wonderfully loose.
We'd meet clients for coffee in cafés and coworking spaces. Sometimes they'd come to our studio and we'd talk through a project on the sofa. We'd spend long days designing, sketching, planning and testing, then suddenly disappear to an exhibition, networking event or client meeting.
The work ebbed and flowed with the seasons.
Business development was equally organic. A coffee here. An event there. An introduction from someone we'd worked with three years earlier.
We were always busy, but somehow it rarely felt like work in the conventional sense.
There was freedom in it.
But there was a downside too.
The lack of routine could be liberating one week and completely disorientating the next. During the strange gaps between projects, or those undefined stages where nobody quite knew what needed to happen next, I could feel like I was floating in the void.
Looking back, I think my ADHD brain loved the variety and autonomy but occasionally desperately wanted someone to build it a handrail.
I needed freedom.
But I also needed structure.
I just hadn't worked out the balance yet.
Then I got exactly what I thought I wanted
After around a decade of running the business, I decided I wanted a change and moved into full-time employment.
The shift made my head spin.
Suddenly there were calendars filled with meetings. Processes. Approval chains. Administration. Meetings about projects. Meetings before meetings about projects. Meetings about meetings.
I had gone looking for stability and discovered that too much structure could feel just as difficult as too little.
I found the transition genuinely hard.
The flexibility I'd taken for granted had disappeared, and my days were increasingly being designed by invitations appearing in my calendar.
I'd accepted a senior role, meetings were obviously unavoidable. Talking to people, making decisions and helping teams move forward were important parts of my job.
But back-to-back meetings were obliterating my brain.
I'd leave one conversation with ten thoughts still bouncing around my head and immediately enter another conversation about something completely different.
There was no time to digest.
No time to think.
No space between things.
Eventually I realised I couldn't keep waiting for the organisation to design a working day that suited me.
I needed to start designing it myself.
I started with a notebook
For the first few months, I journalled almost every night. Pen and paper, 100% analogue.
There's a small fold-out writing desk in the corner of my studio at home. Before bed, I'd sit there and write about the day.
What worked?
What didn't?
What drained me?
When did I feel sharp?
When did I feel completely useless?
And, importantly:
How do I want tomorrow to feel?
It was part reflection, part planning, and a little bit of manifestation.
But slowly I began noticing patterns.
Instead of thinking about work as a block of hours I had to fill, I started thinking about the conditions I needed to do different kinds of work.
That changed quite a lot.
Meetings need breathing room
One of the first things I tackled was meetings.
My team was meeting too often.
We were talking about work when sometimes we would have been better off simply doing the work.
So we started questioning meetings.
Does this need a meeting?
Who actually needs to be there?
What decision are we trying to make?
Could this be an email, message or five-minute conversation instead?
I'm not anti-meeting. Good conversations are incredibly valuable.
But I've found there's a sweet spot between talking about the work and actually doing the work.
Too little communication creates confusion.
Too much creates noise.
The goal isn't maximum productivity. I'm much more interested in effectiveness.
Remove enough noise and suddenly people have space to think.
I stopped treating every day the same
This has probably been the biggest change.
I've gradually learned to separate my work into two broad modes.
There are outward days: meetings, conversations, presenting, influencing, making decisions and working with other people.
And there are inward days: thinking, writing, designing, strategising, planning and making things.
I try not to mix the two too heavily.
They're not fixed to Tuesdays and Thursdays or colour-coded six months in advance. I arrange them as the work develops.
But wherever possible, I cluster similar modes together.
A morning containing five meetings followed by a two-hour creative task looks perfectly reasonable on a calendar.
My brain strongly disagrees.
Switching repeatedly between completely different modes of thinking has a cost.
So now I try to give things room.
Sometimes doing nothing is part of doing the work
This has also forced me to rethink what productive work actually looks like.
Some of my most useful working periods don't look particularly productive from the outside.
I'm walking.
Staring out of a window.
Doodling.
Making coffee.
Turning an idea over in my head.
For years, I felt guilty about those periods.
Now I understand that this is often where the work is happening.
My creative process tends to involve long periods of percolation followed by intense bursts of output.
An idea might sit somewhere in my head for hours or days. Different pieces gradually connect. Problems resolve themselves in the background.
Then suddenly everything arrives at once.
It feels a little like an electrical storm slowly building. The pressure rises, the voltage increases and then, eventually, lightning strikes.
I can sometimes accomplish several days' worth work in a few incredibly focused hours.
The mistake I made for years was judging the quiet period as wasted time.
It wasn't.
It was part of the process.
Walk when you're stuck
I'm also a huge fan of walking meetings.
If the conversation doesn't require a screen, I'll happily get outside.
There's something about walking side-by-side with someone that changes the nature of a conversation. Ideas seem to loosen up. Silences feel less awkward. You notice things. The conversation moves because you're physically moving too. There's also something subtly powerful about moving in the same direction as someone while working towards the same goal; even subconsciously, it can create a sense of alignment and shared momentum.
Research has even found a relationship between walking and improved creative idea generation, which is reassuring evidence for something many of us instinctively experience.
I particularly like walking for brainstorming, early-stage strategy and conversations where we're trying to work out what we actually think.
Then you can go back inside and turn those ideas into something concrete.
Move first.
Make second.
Change the scenery
I also don't believe that good work needs to happen in the same chair every day.
I love working from cafés, libraries and coworking spaces.
There's something about the gentle background noise of a coffee shop that I find incredibly useful. Enough activity to make the environment feel alive, without necessarily requiring my participation in it.
Some offices have the opposite effect on me.
There's a particular artificial hush that seems to dry up creativity.
So, when the work allows it, I move.
Different places seem to support different modes of thinking.
My desk is good for making.
A meeting room is good for deciding.
A walk is good for thinking.
A coffee shop is great for writing.
Again, the right tool for the right job.
Sometimes the room is part of the tool.
Protect the morning
I've also become protective of my mornings.
Not in a wake-up-at-five, plunge-into-an-ice-bath-and-write-your-business-plan-before-breakfast kind of way.
I just like giving myself a little time before the machinery of the day starts.
Some mornings I wake up and immediately want to work. If the energy is there, I'll use it.
But generally I prefer a slower beginning.
Stretch.
Walk the dog.
Get outside.
Make a decent breakfast.
Drink a good coffee.
During the warmer months, eating breakfast outside in the garden feels like discovering a cheat code nobody told me about.
Fresh air. Sunshine. Food. Coffee. Gentle conversation.
All before the working day has technically started.
It sounds ridiculously simple.
Maybe that's why I like it.
Work with the energy when you can
Perhaps the hardest habit I've had to unlearn is the idea that my brain should produce its best work between predetermined hours simply because that's when the working day happens.
Sometimes it does.
Sometimes it absolutely does not.
I've sat at a computer at two in the afternoon desperately trying to force an idea into existence and achieved almost nothing.
Then at nine in the evening, while technically not working, the whole thing suddenly appears in my head.
For years I'd try to ignore that.
I'll do it tomorrow.
Then I'd become restless because the idea was still fizzing around, or I'd wake up the next morning and discover that whatever felt so obvious the night before had disappeared.
So I've learned another rule:
Grab hold of inspiration when it strikes.
If I have the freedom to follow that energy without compromising the rest of my life, I do.
And the opposite matters too.
If nothing is happening, sometimes the answer isn't to stare harder at the screen.
Make lunch.
Go for a walk.
Tidy the office.
Let the mind wander.
Come back.
This obviously isn't possible for every person or every profession. Nurses, teachers, retail workers, factory workers and countless others can't simply disappear for a contemplative walk whenever inspiration fails to arrive.
Even within office work, there are responsibilities, colleagues and deadlines.
But where flexibility exists, I think it's worth using.
Design around yourself
I don't have a perfect daily routine.
That's partly the point.
I've become suspicious of highly prescriptive morning routines and productivity systems because they assume the person who designed them has the same brain, body, responsibilities and life as you.
They don't.
My ideal day probably isn't your ideal day.
The useful question isn't:
What's the perfect routine?
It's:
Under what conditions do I tend to do my best work?
Pay attention for a while.
When do you naturally feel creative?
What drains you?
Do meetings energise you or exhaust you?
Do you need silence or background noise?
Do you think better sitting down or moving?
Do you need strict structure or room to improvise?
When does your attention naturally sharpen?
You don't need to redesign your entire working life overnight.
Move one meeting.
Protect one morning.
Take one conversation outside.
Leave some space between things.
Work somewhere different.
Give yourself an hour where the calendar deliberately contains nothing.
Small changes begin to shape the day.
A working life designed for humans
The nine-to-five working day is excellent for calendars and timesheets.
I'm less convinced it's the perfect framework for every human mind.
We're not machines operating at a consistent percentage of capacity throughout the day.
Our energy changes.
Our attention moves.
Ideas need time.
Sometimes we need people.
Sometimes we need to be left completely alone.
After 20 years of working, I've stopped trying to optimise every hour and become much more interested in creating the conditions where good work can happen naturally.
Enough structure that I don't float away.
Enough freedom that I don't feel trapped.
Enough conversation to stay connected.
Enough silence to actually think.
And enough flexibility to recognise when my brain is telling me that now is the moment to make something.
We spend an enormous amount of our lives working.
Perhaps we should spend a little more time asking whether those days actually feel like days we want to live.
Because your calendar doesn't just describe your work.
Eventually, it describes your life.
I think that's something worth designing.
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About the author.
Will Saunders is a UK-based designer and founder of UK Focus Lab, a studio creating analogue tools for focus and calmer work. He writes about attention, distraction, tactile design, creativity and our increasingly complicated relationship with technology.
