I want time to be more of a friend at work, less of an enemy that I’m always struggling against. The vision: Me and my team crooning Mick Jagger’s famous line: “Tie-aye-aye-ime is on my side.” And feeling that, believing that.

This is a continuation of my last article “Four Ideas to Help Your Team Slow Down and Find Flow.” See that article for tactical ideas for the use of time during the workday, things like ending wall-to-wall meetings.

Here are three more ideas that I’m trying in my team. These are all ideas for team discussion. Know that, if you start these discussions, you want to be confident you and your team have the time and space to plan solutions and make changes.

1. Talk about rhythm and flow.

Yes, you can talk about the Netflix reality competition show “Rhythm and Flow” (Chance! Cardi B! T.I.! Talented new rappers!) with your team. There are lots of themes about creativity, stamina, and self-confidence in there. But what I mean here is talking about rhythm and flow between team members. 

Discuss people’s habits and preferences for solo working time and time together: 

• “When do you want focus time, during the day and during the week?” Talk about how different people may need more or less solo focus time, based on their role.

• “When do we want to be available to each other, for impromptu live discussions or getting to intra-team emails and chat threads?” I work with a physician who is known for being available between 11:30 and noon every day of the week. “We get so much done from these drop-in chats,” she tells me.

The team likely will not be able to accommodate everybody’s preferences for balancing time interacting and time to get solo work done. The discussions will still be helpful in revealing how people like to work, and acknowledging that rhythm and flow can be a team goal

2. Talk about urgency, and how busy-ness is not a personality.

A lot of people, me included at times, fall into the rut of thinking that being busy is a virtue in itself. That if I’m busy, I am clearly being productive. It can feel really good to be busy. Busy can feel like safety and belonging: “If I’m super-busy and people notice, I will be appreciated.” Which is often true, but this way of operating can lead us to burnout and resentment, too. 

Busy-ness needs to be examined every now and then. Not just to see if we can share the work in a better way, or to look for efficiencies (both good ideas, too), but taking a look at the feelings of stress and urgency themselves. 

You can talk to your team about busy-ness and urgency: 

• “Where does our urgency come from? How much of it is our workload and external deadlines, and how much is about our own self-imposed urgency?”

• “Do any of us accidentally take busy-ness as a badge of honor?” 

If you prompt this discussion, be ready to hear “It’s just too much work in general, regardless of our emotions and mindset.” You will probably hear that, so you will need to be willing to work as a leader or as the team on that side of urgency too.

3. Talk about emotion contagion.

Our brains are prediction machines with the job of keeping us safe from whatever is coming up. Which is a good thing. 

Humans are social animals. We need each other to survive. This is also a good thing. 

Taken together, though, these two truths about our species means that we catch anxiety and stress from other people. 

If I walk into a room and the two people there are standing in wide-eyed worry, I’m going to get worried too. It’s instant. It’s how we are wired. (On the bright side, we catch positive emotions too. The smiley person does help everyone feel better.)

If you talk to your team about health and wellness, you can add this idea of emotion contagion to one of those discussions. 

We want to be careful when talking about this. We don’t want to tell people they can’t be in a bad mood, or can’t be stressed. We don’t want a team of Stepford Workers, with frozen smiles all the time. I would rather be with an anxious person than someone like that! The point here is to remind the team that we are interdependent, in our sense of ease versus stress, of drama versus flow. We don’t have to just go along with the most heightened stressful emotion in the room. We can help each other return to calm and flow. 

Are these ideas helpful to hear? Important enough to take to your team to talk about as a group? Let me know how you want to carry these ideas about flow and ease forward, and any other ideas you have for getting time on your side.