Support operations run on availability. The premise of the job is that when something arrives, someone picks it up — and if you are the escalation path, that someone is often you.
Which makes the standard advice about focused work fairly useless. Block four hours. Turn off notifications. Disappear. You cannot disappear when the reason you exist is that people can reach you.
Two hours, not four
I stopped trying to carve out a morning and started protecting two hours on a fixed day. Small enough to be defensible, long enough to finish something. Same day every week, so nobody had to remember.
Announced, not hidden
The reason it survived was that everyone knew about it. Not a quiet block in my own calendar — an announced one: Tuesday, nine to eleven, I am on the policy work, anything urgent goes to this person, I pick up everything else at eleven.
A hidden block gets interrupted, because from the outside it looks like you are just slow to reply. An announced block gets respected, because people can plan around it. The visibility is the mechanism, not the calendar entry.
Only work that removes future work
The rule was strict about what went into it: rewriting an ambiguous policy line, fixing the help article that produced the same ticket forty times, writing up the bug in a form Product could act on. Never queue overflow. The first time I let the block absorb the backlog it stopped being a block and became just another two hours of the same thing.
The honest limits
Some weeks it did not happen. A real incident beats a calendar entry, and should. What mattered was that it was the default rather than the exception. Three weeks out of four is roughly a hundred hours a year — and essentially everything I changed structurally in thirteen years came out of those hours, not out of the other two thousand.