If hospital visits are important for the Novartis CEO, those should be sacrosanct — just like dedicated, uninterrupted time for research and writing should be sacrosanct for a college professor. And if these important activities are losing ground to e-mail overload or incessant meetings or what-have-you, the solution isn’t to throw up one’s hands, or to give up on the more important activities, but to TAKE CONTROL of the calendar — just as you say.

Steven Covey had the right idea in “First Things First”: *block out* the time in your calendar for what’s most important, even if (or maybe especially if) there’s less urgency attached to those tasks. Otherwise, the noisy but less-important urgencies of the week will crowd out the deep work that really gets us somewhere.