“Focus hours” and “Talking to users hours”

I found out that I find talking to founders on WhatsApp and creating communities for them is so boring for me.

To demonstrate this point, I’ll tell you the story from the beginning.

I did 12 info sessions, each for a group of about 100 students, then sent a message on the batch WhatsApp group which led to a lot of the students that attended the info sessions to reply to me privately and discuss their ideas with me, which I found interesting and fun. But the number of ideas that I’ve heard and discussed were a lot to the point that I started to reply late to anyone who wanted to discuss their idea with me. I felt so bored and procrastinated doing it a lot!

I think part of the reason I started to not be excited to discuss ideas on WhatsApp anymore was because the messages came at random times. Let me explain. I have my week divided into two parts, the first part which is the days of the week I have to go to college. I return home from college around 5-6 pm and let’s say I at most finish having dinner at 7pm. I sleep at 10pm, so I have around 3 hours to do deep work (like programming, planning, marketing, or anything that I do setting on my desk, requires focus and is not easy to do). 

3 hours is not a lot of time to do my deep work, it’s barely enough to get done. So I find it distracting that I would have to open WhatsApp and respond to all of these discussions, which will reduce my focus time to maybe 2 hours or less. Which will decrease my feeling of accomplishment and will bring me down and lower my spirits.

I think on the other days where I don’t have college I could give them 1-2 hours at the end of my day to discuss students' ideas and answer questions. But during my work hours I find it so distracting and makes me mad since I know I might not be able to finish my deep work and feel this sense of accomplishment.

I didn’t only procrastinate discussing ideas with students privately on WhatsApp but I also heavily procrastinated creating a community to give advice to students who needed it to update the ideas they submitted.

So the solution is I should dedicate more time to talk to them without having the guilty feeling that I won’t be able to get that sense of accomplishment after I get done with my deep work. I need to divide my time between deep work and talking to students.

I’ll close WhatsApp internet all the time except:

On weekdays, I’ll talk to them and try to finish as many conversations as possible before 7pm (before I start working), and maybe after 10pm (when I finish working) if I want to.

On days I don’t have college, I may open WhatsApp and talk to them at 5 or 6pm if I feel like I need a break from deep work, and I’ll return to work again at 7pm.

Somedays I will give more time to talking to students if I need to communicate something. For example, if there are a lot of questions that need to be answered on a weekday and I really think it is worth it to use my 7-10pm focus hours to talk to students, I’ll do this. But I think this will rarely happen. But what will happen most of the time is that I would use 3 focus hours from a day that I don’t have a college on, to communicate something to the community that needs to be communicated.