Offer office hours to concentrate collaboration

Designate one or two open windows per day when collaborators can reach you freely, then protect everything else.

Why it works

Office hours solve the social contract problem: protecting maker time feels selfish unless collaborators have a reliable window. By providing a concentrated, predictable access window, you give people a legitimate path without granting open access to the full day. This also batches low-priority requests that would otherwise arrive as interruptions throughout the day.

How to do it

1. Choose one or two 30–60 minute windows per day — typically mid-morning and late afternoon — and mark them on your calendar.
2. Announce these windows to your team as the best time to reach you with quick questions.
3. When a request arrives outside those windows, reply with "I’ll address this at my 3pm office hour" rather than immediately.
4. Batch the queued questions and answer them efficiently during the window.

Evidence

Batching interruptions reduces total task-switching overhead across the day. Mechanistically, each interruption imposes a recovery cost; concentrating them into windows converts many small recovery costs into one. (mechanistic)

This is a practitioner-level application of task-switching cost research; the office-hours structure itself has not been the subject of controlled studies.

Common mistake

Setting office hours but still responding to Slack messages instantly throughout the day, so collaborators learn the hours are performative and ignore them.