We recommend you set an autoreply on Focus Day using this out-of-office message as a starting point:

I am following Imperial College London’s Department of Life Sciences guidelines around Focus Day on Fridays, in which department members are encouraged to switch off email and focus on important-non-urgent tasks. I will respond to your email in due course on the next working day.

For staff who need to be contactable in the case of emergencies, we recommend adding additional contact details such as a phone number to the end of this message.

If you’re approached and asked to arrange meetings for “Friday focus day”, then try this response:

Imperial College London’s Department of Life Sciences guidelines on Focus Day actively encourage staff to refrain from scheduling non-urgent meetings on Fridays, empowering us to deal with important tasks that require large blocks of continuous time. If possible, let’s reschedule for another time.

Focus Day does not mean ‘zero communication day’, and if you need to contact a colleague then you should. But you should not expect your colleague to be monitoring email as they might be on other days of the week. If it’s urgent, then use the phone or Teams to contact them instead.

Timetabled teaching and student-facing activities will inevitably fall on Focus day for some staff in some weeks, and teaching takes priority.

Focus Day is not an excuse, and staff are expected to meet deadlines as usual. Within the department, we encourage deadline-setters to avoid setting them for Focus Day. Where those deadlines exist, staff who want to engage in Focus Day should organise their work patterns to ensure deadlines that clash with Focus Day are met in advance.

This is an issue that’s relevant to a number of job roles, including academics and support staff that field urgent student queries and technicians that deal with building and equipment failures.

Where it’s appropriate, staff in these roles could consider using their email auto-reply function to have a standard statement about being on Focus Day, but then provide your phone number for emergency contact. That ensures you are still available and contactable for real emergencies, but it could help filter out non-urgent requests.

Where it is necessary to always have an ‘instant responder’ on email, investigate ways to have a ‘duty roster’ that allows staff in these roles to rotate on Focus Days. That wouldn’t free up Focus day for all staff every week, but could provide limited ability to take advantage of Focus day.

Implementing Focus Day in a format where individuals choose the day that suits them would give us all more flexibility, but would lose the department-wide synchronization of protected time which will limit its effectiveness. To work well, implementing Focus Day needs to be simple: we need to make it as easy as possible to schedule meetings, teaching and deadlines to work around Focus day, which is only achievable if it’s the same day for everyone.

We do all, however, control our own calendars. You have always had the option to block out time in your calendar to focus on your own tasks, and Focus Day does not remove that right.

To some extent, this is going to be inevitable and unavoidable, but there are actions we can take to minimise the disruption.

Within College interactions

We’ve specifically avoided timing Focus day for Wednesday, which is when many cross-College meetings are scheduled for. This will partially limit the extent to which this is a problem.

We can raise awareness of Focus day across College directly by publicising through HoDs lunch and having it presented to Faculty, but we wouldn’t expect that to immediately result in a reduction in the number of meeting requests for Focus day. The most likely route to reducing within College demands is if across College meeting requestors receive a consistent, unified response from our department members who explain what Focus day is and ask for meetings to be scheduled for other days.

Outside College interactions

Ultimately there may be little we can pro-actively do as a department to influence the timing of these interactions, but as individuals we can all request for meetings to be scheduled for different days. In some cases that will be feasible and in others it won’t, but we would hope that consistently making and explaining this type of request with your colleagues will, through time, begin to reduce the number of external meetings being arranged for Focus day.

We hope the solution to this can be found via community-wide engagement with Focus Day. For example, it would be appropriate to accompany responses to last-minute non-urgent requests with a reminder that this is Focus day and this request could reasonably have been made in advance with appropriate planning.

People who work better in this manner are welcome to continue doing so, but we do ask them to respect the fact that others of their colleagues do require uninterrupted blocks of time and are less likely to respond to you on Focus Day.

It is Friday, this week’s to do list is still ominous and next week’s deadlines are already looming. My group meeting in the morning is the highlight of the week, and afterwards now often we lunch together as a group, which provides a much needed recharge of our ‘being human’ batteries (last week we even made it for a walk in Hyde Park - blissful).  After that, the reduced email income and meeting schedule is a unique opportunity for catching up with all sorts of pending tasks and even sparking some new thoughts and ideas. Focus Friday looks like a small change but ‘it is bigger on the inside’ and has a wonderful impact on both morale and productivity. I hope it continues!

We’ve decided to continue the Focus Friday with each of us having one Friday per month to work from home. We’ve borrowed from the tech world and run ‘demos and donuts’. We spend the time learning a new skill so that we can keep up to date with current technology and practice. This will be highly valuable as we need to provide advice and help users perform these type of analyses – but we never get time to practice or increase our learning. Even if we have free time, if we are at our desk we are called away with frequent disturbances. We should be able to manage one Friday each a month going forward – and ‘demos and donuts’ will structure the time productively in a way that will benefit staff development and the facility service.

I use Focus Fridays as a way of making sure there’s always dedicated time for those things where I need to work in quiet, uninterrupted solitude. I put a bit of effort into the earlier in the week to make sure Focus Friday has a clear objective and I’ve got a clear head going into it. Fridays are completely blocked off for me so that I don’t agree to any meetings on those days. I generally make a plan for what I’m going to do that day on the day before, so I’m not trying to make decisions on Focus Friday itself. When I haven’t done that, I’ve found Focus Fridays less successful. I try to make Focus Friday a day for doing intellectual work like writing or coding. I mix in some breaks involving more menial tasks (like a bit of work in the lab or preparing illustrations for figures), but most of what I’m doing is a discrete, focussed effort to move some important intellectual/scientific project forward.