4 Ideas to Help your Team Slow Down and Find Flow
Ever catch yourself at work just going, going, going? Breathless, anxious, running out ahead of your feet like a startled Scooby Doo?
I do. And I hate that feeling. I see it (feel it, really) in leaders I work with. The urgency addiction. The state of overwhelm. We all have this feeling every now and then. But when it’s your normal state of being, that’s a big problem.
We can lower the temperature. Find ease amid the daily dramas and routine urgency. Get into a flow and feel confident about your and your team’s pace of getting things done. Even, and this sounds grandiose: Help myself and others have a better relationship with Time itself, as they create better work environments for themselves and their teams.
So your team can croon sinuously like Mick Jagger: “Tie-aye-aye-ime is on my side.”
Here are a few actions to consider, to help yourself and your team be thoughtful and realistic about time. They can help you move through your days less freaked out over your busy calendar and to-do list. And maybe with a little more energy left for yourself when work is over each day and each week.
Civilized scheduling. No more wall-to-wall meetings.
I love this one, because it can be initiated by fiat: “From now on, every hour-long meeting will be 50 minutes long. Every half-hour meeting will be 20 minutes long.”
The idea is simply to be realistic. People need transition time between meetings, whether they have to move physically from one place to another, or whether they are jumping from one online meeting to another. Go to the bathroom. Take care of a quick action item from the meeting, before their next one starts. (So satisfying!) Text their teenager back.
At first, this change will need to be reinforced. At one place I used to work, the group was encouraged to leave the room at ten minutes till the hour, regardless of whether the agenda was complete. That was awkward, but people who ran meetings got better quickly at planning the time and facilitating efficiently.
Slightly shorter meetings are an opportunity for everyone to tighten up their meeting game: Speak efficiently, on topic; be prepared to make decisions.
Do this one! If not organization-wide, in your main team. It’s just civilized. It will smooth out the stressful and abrupt transitions we get with wall-to-wall scheduling.
Create team agreements on personal phone use during the day.
We all know our personal phones are addictive and contribute to attention-shifting throughout the day. Which makes it harder to get into the flow of work, and keeps us jumpy and anxious.
It is also true that we need our phones for some things. Many of us use our phones to do our work. Colleagues text throughout the day about work. We also have family and friends texting us or calling us throughout the day. Some of these messages can’t wait
Talk about it with your team, in the context of developing ease and flow, and supporting focus to get your work done well.
The agreements you come up with will be different based on the type of work you do. At the least, you can remind people that phones, while useful and necessary, and also a nice brain break from work sometimes, keep us reactive and hyped up and distracted.
If you want to go further, you could agree on when to text, and when not to, within the team. You could establish a “phones in the drawer” rule for certain times of day, or times when people need to focus on one task. Lots of options.
Set electronic messaging norms.
Most organizations I work with have multiple chat and messaging tools: email (as tired and overused as it is), Slack or Teams messaging, texting (see above). And nobody knows how to use any of them in the best way, because everybody uses them all differently.
In your own team first, figure this out. Hear everyone’s preferences and arguments about which to use for what, then come up with your agreements.
Which platform will you use for fast back and forth about daily work, e.g., “we had to reschedule today’s meeting” and “are you finished with the report that’s due today?”
Which platform is for info dumps and more complicated communication?
For all of the ones we use, what is our turnaround-time expectation? 2 hours or 4 hours or same-day for our soonest/quickest messaging? 2 days for email?
Experiment as needed, until everyone feels they are getting their messaging needs met to do their work, and so people feel okay about closing their email or ignoring Slack for chunks of time.
4. Add movement and healthy behaviors to meetings.
As much as our work habits may try to deny it, we are people with bodies. Bodies need to move. Take advantage of talking time to add movement time. It’s the only type of multitasking I recommend.
Movement in meetings should be offered as an option, not forced. For one thing, different people have different mobility. For another, some people are shy about their bodies.
Plan walking meetings of two or three people, on the phone or in person.
For yourself, build a habit of three slow deep breaths to reset before and after each meeting, as part of your transition from one thing to the next.
Encourage people to move, stand, and stretch during meetings. Model these in-meeting behaviors to make them normal. When it’s normal, it won’t be distracting.
More ideas to come in two weeks to help you feel like tie-aye-aye-ime is on your side, including how to talk about time and time pressure in your team. Let me know if you have more ideas for improving ease and flow.
Find more ideas on managing urgency in two recent related blogs, about questioning the source of urgency and talking about urgency with your team.
Time is real. It’s not going anywhere. It marches on! We can make it less of an enemy and more of a friend. As the golden age sci-fi writer Ray Cummings famously said, “Time is what keeps everything from happening at once.” And that’s a good thing.