I'm in a position where I spend half my time working on "manager's schedule". After a relatively short time of doing so, I adopted the trick of scheduling an all-day meeting for Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. Then, when people want to schedule a meeting (regular or recurring), and it isn't incredibly urgent, they'll generally default to Monday or Tuesday, days where I primarily handle meetings, email, and short activities. This works well with automated tools that find the next available timeslot that everyone has marked as "free". Occasionally, someone will ask if I can accommodate something urgent on Wed-Fri, to which the answer is usually "yes", but despite that, I tend to have 7-8 hours of uninterrupted time on those days.
I use the same trick by blocking out my whole afternoon every day, and find that it works really well. It turns out that most meetings have no particular time that they need to be scheduled for, so this gives me maker schedule time and makes me far more productive.
One caveat is that if many people in an org start doing this it might become difficult to schedule things, in which case it might be useful for the whole company to coordinate (eg "no meeting Mondays").
I do the same but the other way round (maker = morning, manager = afternoon).
I find that sometimes at night I wake up and think about problems and it's best to put them into practice in the morning, before absorbing all the noise during the day.
When I'm really lucky, I just schedule 2h manager time after lunch (because there my stomach is full and my productivity low) and then return to maker schedule.
> I use the same trick by blocking out my whole afternoon every day, and find that it works really well. It turns out that most meetings have no particular time that they need to be scheduled for
That doesn't work as well if you need to meet with people in other time zones.
