Why I stopped time‑blocking and started scheduling 'anchors' instead
I used to gridlock my day with time blocks. That failed when meetings and power cuts hit. Anchors — a few protected commitments — gave me focus with the flexibility India‑work demands.
Written by: Rohan Deshpande
It was 10:47 a.m. on a Tuesday in my Bengaluru apartment. My calendar showed a neat grid: two-hour deep work, lunch, two hours of meetings, a 45‑minute admin block. I had a green “DEEP WORK” label. I was mid-refactor when Slack pinged—a manager asking me to jump on a quick call to resolve a payment gateway issue. The call turned into a one-hour troubleshooting session. By 2 p.m. the rest of my block was gone. The day felt like a train derailed at the first signal.
I spent three months trying to fix that derailment with better time‑blocking. I color‑coded. I hardened boundaries (don’t accept meetings during green blocks). I schedule every tiny task. It worked… until it didn’t. In India, and especially in startups, “until it doesn’t” happens often: urgent conversations, vendor escalations, the PM remembering a release, intermittent power cuts, slow corporate VPNs that need reauth, a client in another timezone pinging at odd hours. My blocks were brittle. They looked disciplined but they were fragile.
So I stopped blocking everything. I stopped pretending the day could be a perfect Tetris puzzle. I started using anchors.
What anchors are (and why they matter) An anchor is a single protected commitment — a block of time I refuse to trade away unless something genuinely critical is on fire. Not a task list. Not every 30 minutes mapped. Just 3–5 anchors per day that structure my time.
My daily anchors:
- Morning anchor (9:00–10:30): my heavy thinking window. No meetings unless the entire incident system is down.
- Commute/Errand anchor (6:30–7:30 p.m.): when I’m home from office or stepping out. I don’t schedule work that expects synchronous responses.
- Admin anchor (4:15–4:45 p.m.): invoices, quick UPI payments, responding to non-urgent mails.
- Weekly sync anchor (Tuesday 11:00–11:45 a.m.): one short slot I use for recurring one‑to‑ones and quick demos.
That’s it. The rest of the day is flexible. I don’t try to map every email or every PR review to a slot. I schedule anchors on my calendar with clear titles and keep them visible to my team.
Why this beats gridlocking (for me) First, anchors reduce decision friction. When a meeting invite comes, I glance: does it overlap an anchor? If yes, I push back or request a different time. If no, I accept. No more internal wrestling: “Do I value this 45‑minute meeting over my 40‑minute refactor?” The anchor already decided.
Second, anchors scale with chaos. In India you can’t predict a vendor call or a last‑minute office power cut. Anchors give me pockets of guaranteed sanity — windows where deep work actually happens. The rest of the day is acknowledged as potentially noisy, which reduces the disappointment when it gets noisy.
Third, anchors are communicable. I tell my manager and team: “I have a morning anchor from 9–10:30 for deep work; ping on Slack if there’s an incident, otherwise email.” That sentence is short, clear, and realistic. People are surprisingly okay with it. Once they know the pattern, they schedule around it.
Practical setup (what I actually do)
- One calendar, two colors. I use Google Calendar. Anchors are a single color and stick out. Everything else I leave transparent. No need for a second calendar.
- Short, explicit titles. “ANCHOR: Deep work (9–10:30)” or “ANCHOR: Admin 16:15–16:45”. No cryptic names or emoji.
- Two‑step meeting rule. If someone wants to schedule over an anchor, they add a note: “Why reschedule?” If it’s urgent, we reschedule. If it’s not, they pick a new slot. This kills passive encroachment.
- Soft buffer after anchors. I leave 10–15 minutes free after deep anchors. In India, meeting punctuality is generous: you’ll need the buffer.
- Phone/UPS planning. For power cuts, I keep a 90‑minute UPS and my laptop at ~50% brightness during anchors. If the home internet drops, I move anchors to a co‑working day or change to an offline task.
The failure I didn’t expect Anchors are not magic. They broke hard once. At my last startup we had an aggressive go‑to‑market sprint. The founder instituted daily cross‑functional touchpoints at short notice. Meetings started creeping into my anchors regardless of my calendar. I tried to negotiate, and then I tried to be the lone gatekeeper of my anchors. Both failed. Team priorities were different: speed over focused work. I learned two things the hard way.
First, anchors need team buy‑in. If leadership treats them as an individual quirk, they won’t survive senior pressure. Second, if everyone behaves like an emergency, nothing is. In that sprint I either surrendered my anchors or left the sprint team. I chose the former. Productivity for the week went up on short‑term metrics, but my ability to do deep work and ship thoughtful code dropped. That cost showed up as more bugs later.
So now I negotiate anchors before sprints and high‑pace phases. I also keep a personal rule: if anchors are consistently violated for more than two weeks by systemic reasons, it’s a signal to change responsibilities or raise the issue with leadership.
What I walked away with I walked away with one simple lesson: protect a few commitments, not a perfect schedule. Anchors give me reliable thinking time without pretending I control everything else. They respect the reality of Indian work life — flaky infrastructure, urgent vendor pings, timezone-driven meetings — while still carving out a sane day.
If you’re trying this, start with one anchor: pick the single hour you want to defend for deep work and mark it on your calendar for a week. Be explicit about it in one sentence to your team. If it survives one week, add another. If it gets eaten, ask why. The answer will tell you more about your team’s rhythm than any productivity book ever will.