Your Open Door is Costing You: Stay Responsive Without Losing Your Strategic Time

Your approach to leading is to create an team culture where people can come to you wihtout hesitation. You want to be available to your team leaders when they need you. You know the pressure they're carrying: the patient complaint that landed the wrong way, the team conversation that didn't go the way anyone hoped, the budget constraint that won't loosen no matter how they turn it. It matters to you that they feel supported, and you let them know you’re available and have an open door. They know you’re in it with them as they absorb the daily weight of the work.

Yet, you're also the one accountable for the strategic priorities that only you can move forward. And the time you need for that work is perpetually interrupted by the very openness that makes you good to work for.

That's the paradox: wanting to be available to your team and needing the mental space to think and work strategically, are in constant tension.

You already know protected time matters — you've read the research. Gloria Mark's landmark UC Irvine study found it takes an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to fully return to a task after an interruption, even a short one.

So if we already know what to do, why does it still feel like a Groundhog Day loop of operational bonfires and team dynamics? Why does it feel like the harder you work, the further behind you get on the things that really matter?

Because identifying protected time and holding it are two different skills. The first is fairly straightforward; most of my clients have blocks on their calendar a month out. The second is where it gets tested, in the moment: the director who apologizes but really needs five minutes before she walks into a board meeting. The manager working through a hard family conversation that's still sitting with them. The colleague who found a way around your assistant to reach you directly, because they know you'll pick up. There's an endless, often legitimate-sounding stream of claims on your attention, and answering immediately almost always feels easier than asking someone to wait.

You're excellent in these moments; it's likely part of why you've kept being trusted with more. But the pattern has a cost: your energy, your creativity, your capacity to move the priorities only you can carry. And underneath it, if you're honest, there's a quieter fear worth naming that stepping back from the open door somehow means you've stopped being the leader who shows up for her people. It doesn't. It means you're finally leading from all of what you're accountable for, not just the part that's easiest to be needed for.

So how do you actually hold a block of protected time?

Start by defining it. Decide which day, which hours, are reserved for the work only you can do. Most leaders can settle this part in an afternoon.

Then get specific about what earns an interruption. Sort what interrupts your day into three situations: important and urgent, important and can wait, not important or not yours to respond to. Most of what interrupts you belongs in the second or third domain; you just haven't had the opportunity to slow down long enough to define it. Once the distinction between types of interruptions is visible, use it to guide your decisions in the moment and support you in more confidently holding your time, or releasing it.

Next, decide who and what situations make the short list to interrupt, the two or three serious enough to justify breaking the block. Then tell people what you're doing. Your team members who currently have open access to you need to hear, directly, that you're trying something different: what you need from them, when you're reachable, when you're not. This is also your opening to redirect some of what comes to you, inviting people to think it through with a colleague first, or bring you their thinking rather than the raw problem.

If you have administrative support, give them the same guardrails you're implementing and ask them to help you hold the time. Share clearly with them what counts as urgent enough to interrupt, and what doesn't.

Protecting this time doesn't make you less available to your people. It gives them what a quick answer from you never can: practice building their own judgment about what's urgent and what can wait. And it gives you evidence, not just hope, that things hold without you in the room.

Treat this as an experiment, not a policy or rule. You have a hypothesis about how much protected time you need and when it fits your week. Practice will tell you what holds, which interruptions are truly unavoidable, what your team needs in order to problem-solve without you, and what you can make progress on with the focus time once you've kept it.