Office hours: availability with boundaries

A manager with an “always-open door” has no time for their own work. It sounds welcoming, but in practice it means focused work gets chopped into fragments between interruptions — and after each one you have to re-orient to what you were doing. Office hours flip the logic: instead of “anytime, but fragmented,” you offer “two windows a day, but fully present.”

A typical scenario

Tomas leads a team of developers and had a reputation as a manager who was always available. In practice that meant people dropped by his office with anything — from a strategic decision to what the password on a shared account was. His day was chopped into fifteen-minute pieces, and his own tasks were left for the evenings.

After introducing office hours (11:00–12:00 and 15:30–16:30), nothing fundamentally changed about how many questions he gets — but when he gets them did change. Mornings and afternoons now have blocks when no one asks him anything, and the whole team — plus people outside the team — knows it, because the windows show up on his calendar. Small things that used to arrive immediately now wait an hour or two — and half of them resolve themselves by then.

How to do it

1. Announce two fixed daily windows when you're available to anyone with anything, no appointment needed — say, 11:00–12:00 and 15:30–16:30. Two hours a day is enough, not the whole day.
2. Outside these windows, a simple rule applies: things that aren't urgent go in writing (email, chat, a shared document) and get handled when you have room. Handle genuine emergencies by phone or in person anytime — office hours aren't about letting a fire burn until the afternoon.
3. Put the windows on your calendar as a recurring event labeled “office hours — come with anything,” so colleagues' scheduling assistants can see them too when booking a meeting with you.
4. In the first few days, a team used to constant availability will test the boundaries — that's normal. Hold the windows consistently but politely: “happy to go over that at 3, I'm finishing something with a deadline right now.”
5. After a week or two, the team adjusts and starts sorting on its own what's urgent and what can wait for a window — a side effect that saves them time too.

The best tools

• Calendar (Google Calendar, Outlook) — a built-in recurring event is enough for the whole team, and people outside it, to see the windows.
• Status in Slack or Teams — set an automatic message outside the windows (“Focused work, I'll reply during office hours — for anything urgent, call”).
• Calendly or a similar booking tool — useful if a lot of people outside the company contact you and you want them to pick an open slot within a window themselves.
• A shared document for questions — a simple table or note where people jot down points for the next office hours between windows, so they don't forget them.

What you get out of it

• Time: roughly 2 hours a day of focused work that interruptions used to chop up — over 10 hours a week.
• Better decisions: you answer questions with full attention instead of in a doorway, which shows in the quality of the answer.
• A calmer team: people know exactly when they can reach you and don't have to guess whether they're interrupting.
• Your own productivity: the rest of the day is genuinely yours — planning, strategic work, things that otherwise never had room.

Pro tip

Questions that survive unresolved until office hours resolve themselves about half the time — a colleague figures it out in the meantime, or finds the answer elsewhere. That's a feature of the system, not a flaw in it.