I keep one afternoon a week where nobody can reach me. No calls, no plans, no leaving the house if I can help it.
For the first year I apologised for it constantly. I made it sound like an errand so it would seem reasonable.
What I have learned since is that most of my good ideas arrive in those hours, and none of them arrive while I am being useful to somebody. Attention needs somewhere empty to land.
You do not need a whole afternoon. You need a stretch of time nobody else has a claim on, and you need to stop describing it as selfish.
Put it in the calendar with a name that sounds important. It is.
