This meets with my experience. I rarely have meetings, and I regularly get solid, 4-hour blocks of productivity. Typically two to three time per week. Those pushes account for most of my work, and my best work.
I do not schedule those 4 hour blocks because I would not be able to stick to the schedule. I often have trouble concentrating for even 30 minutes straight. When I hit 4 hours (and my time tracker sends me a notification to celebrate), I am always surprised. I get into the zone, and then I find myself still coding 4 hours later.
Every meeting is a chance to miss that enter-the-zone window.
I'm like this too, and I hate it - because it means I can't reliably get those four hour blocks.
Not having a schedule isn't a good thing, it just means that if you're ever in an environment where outside factors become significant (new job, new child), your productivity gets fucked.
I have the same issue. I'm managing a team, but at the same time I'm expected to actively participate toward the sprint goals. Because I keep getting pulled away for meetings, or to help the other developers, I can't get any focus time and my velocity is incredibly low. To the non-developers in my team, it seems like I'm a really slow developer and it's really hard to explain to them that it's really hard to write code ad-hoc.
I'm not sure if that would work for @oftenwrong - they said that one of their problems isn't external interruptions as much as the fact that they can't force themselves to focus on a schedule, and that their focus just kind of comes and goes.
That's the same with me. Having a block of time where I know I won't be interrupted definitely helps, though - and I've been trying to do that more and more at home.
<rant>
This has slowly and surely become the top reason for productivity loss at work for me and in my opinion, also for the team that I work in. I have walked out them once I realize there's no valuable input or output, declined them, carried my work in the meeting room, passively attended them, aggressively tried to keep the meeting on track, MoM'ed the hell out of them and just about tried every single trick I've known to get an ounce of productivity from them. And I have failed.
My next attempt is to measure time spent in meetings per sprint and report it out in the retro (meeting, ironically). I have no clue how I can get the people responsible for developer productivity see this gaping hole that are meetings that I don't have to be a part of.
</rant>
Qbserve has been pretty great for me as well. Good days for me are >6 hrs of productive time. I'm torn b/c all of my Zoom meetings are counted as productive time, but thankfully basically all of my meetings actually are productive. Company culture enforces such productivity. I count email as "neutral" time, which seems about right.
I do not schedule those 4 hour blocks because I would not be able to stick to the schedule. I often have trouble concentrating for even 30 minutes straight. When I hit 4 hours (and my time tracker sends me a notification to celebrate), I am always surprised. I get into the zone, and then I find myself still coding 4 hours later.
Every meeting is a chance to miss that enter-the-zone window.