Let's be unavailable for 1 working day per week

Not having any reception, I find it a pleasure and horrific at the same time. I was offline for 32 hours this month and that made me actually not want to be online anymore. But since I picked up my phone again, that feeling quickly faded. Which is strange, because it actually brings me a lot.

Being unreachable turns out to be the secret to doing your work productively, reports Harvard Business Review, and they got it from the former Director of Leadership Development at Walmart, Neil Pasricha. A untouchable day is what they call it. I find that sounds a lot sexier than an unreachable day, by the way. I also have a tactic that resembles that. Working an hour in advance at times when I absolutely know my colleagues are not working. Or when they think I am not working. That can be at half past seven in the morning or just after eight in the evening. The weekend works well too, although it is handy if you extend the weekend at the front or back.

On those Untouchable Days you must be completely unreachable at all times and really for e-ve-ry-one. Phone off, email off, everything off. And what are you going to do then? The work that never seems to get done. That story of writing three thousand words. Developing that pitch from start to finish. Basically everything that requires focus, perseverance, or a bucket of creativity. Pasricha himself says he is ten times more productive on such a day. Normally, he writes maybe five hundred words between meetings; when he is unreachable, he easily writes five thousand.

You do need to untouchable day schedule those, by the way. Sixteen (!) weeks in advance, that is indeed three months. Why so endlessly long in advance? Simple, Pasricha explains, this is the timeframe in which he is sure that his schedule is not yet fully booked. So he writes sixteen weeks in advance in capital letters in his agenda that he is off the radar.

Yes, but what if there is an emergency? Simple. Tell someone where you are working. That way your girlfriend/boyfriend/child/father/mother/wife/husband can always reach you and call or come by if disaster strikes. But honestly: how often does that happen in a year?