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About the author
Alicia Taylor is a productivity researcher and coach who has spent over a decade studying how knowledge workers can achieve deep focus in distraction-filled environments. She holds a master's degree in cognitive psychology from the University of California, Berkeley, where her graduate research focused on attention management and the cognitive costs of task-switching in workplace settings.
After completing her graduate studies, Alicia spent five years as a product manager at a major technology company, where she experienced firsthand the productivity crisis facing modern knowledge workers. The gap between what the research said about focus and what actually happened in open offices, Slack channels, and back-to-back meetings inspired her to develop the Time-Blocking Method. She refined the approach through her own practice and through coaching dozens of colleagues who were struggling with burnout and fragmentation.
Alicia left the tech industry in 2019 to found Focused Outcomes, a coaching and consulting practice dedicated to helping individuals and teams build sustainable deep work practices. She has since worked with engineering teams at Fortune 500 companies, creative agencies, and startups, as well as hundreds of individual clients ranging from writers and researchers to executives and entrepreneurs. Her clients consistently report a two-to-threefold increase in deep work hours within the first six weeks of adopting the method, along with significant reductions in stress and burnout.
Her writing on productivity, focus, and time management has appeared in *Harvard Business Review*, *Fast Company*, and *The Atlantic*. She speaks regularly at conferences and corporate events, where her presentations blend rigorous research with practical, actionable strategies. Her workshops on time blocking have been attended by thousands of professionals across more than a dozen countries.
Alicia lives in Portland, Oregon, with her partner and their two dogs. When she is not writing or coaching, she can be found hiking in the Columbia River Gorge, practicing piano, or testing her own productivity advice by working on that novel she has been drafting for the past four years. She believes that deep work is not a luxury reserved for a privileged few—it is a skill that anyone can develop with the right system and consistent practice.
