As the clock winds down on 2016, there’s a growing emphasis for 2017 and the years to follow. And that emphasis is on the importance for knowledge workers to be able to focus in order to do their best work. The tool sets and work environments of the modern “office worker” are maximized for distraction, not for in-depth output. How can teams — big or small — ensure they’re set to be successful by consistently cranking out great work?
In his book Deep Work, Cal Newport makes the case that the people who learn to minimize distractions and increase their ability to focus for long stretches will be the most successful in the decades to come. He lists what he believes are the two core qualities required in order to thrive in the coming years:
The ability to quickly master hard things.
The ability to produce at an elite level, in terms of both quality and speed.
And the key to growing these abilities is to learn to work deeply. What is “Deep Work”? According to Newport, this type of work would be defined as:
Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive abilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.
And his end hypothesis is that this skill is becoming both more important and increasingly rare in our current economy, and those who master it will thrive. As a software engineer himself, Newport understands the importance. This quote from Rands nails it:
If you’re a software engineer, your craft is code and you’re at maximum productivity when you have long uninterrupted minutes and each unexpected visual and auditory interruption is a unique opportunity to completely lose your train of thoughts, context, and hard to recover mental momentum.
How about your team? Do your designers, developers, and teammates in all roles feel that they’re able to do their very best, day in and day out? From our experience, that is not the case for many.
Early in 2016, I spent time doing in-depth interviews with 30 or so Beanstalk customers. When asked what the biggest pain point was, the following comment sums up a common sentiment:
Keeping on top of things (Slack, bots, Beanstalk, Basecamp, Zendesk) is taking more and more time, especially since I wear so many hats on the team. Having multiple tools to manage projects and client communication leads to feeling burnt out. There is a desire to find tools that keep things all in one place.
From what we’ve heard, achieving focus is a difficulty more most teams. If you’re building a product or servicing clients, how can you improve in this area?
At Wildbit, we think about this a lot and having taken many of the following steps.
Establish the culture
First, making any improvements in this area will be very hard if there’s no buy-in from your team at large. Having half of a team attempt to focus while the other half is responding to every email as they arrive, sending DM’s without thought, or stopping by the office or cubicle for any question is sure to lead to failure. While it is possible to make some small changes to your own habits, you’ll benefit far more — and experience less frustration — when this is a team effort.
And (hopefully) it starts at the top. Newport advocates for knowledge workers to sell their employers/managers on this entire concept. And here at Wildbit, we’re fortunate to have founders who understand the importance of doing our best (there’s a reason we have values like this highlighted on our site). When the suggestion was made early in 2016, our co-founder Natalie read Deep Work herself. And it had such an impact that focus was a key theme for our annual team retreat in 2016.
Focus is important enough that the new Wildbit office was designed with this in mind. Designers, developers, product managers, marketers, and writers … we all need quiet and solitude to focus on our tasks in order to product our best work.
It’s why our office was designed with a purpose.
And this is not something that is fixed once, then you’re set. In a recent town hall meeting, Natalie shared that it felt like as a team we were slipping back into old habits. This time around, she asked the entire team to read Deep Work so we’re all on the same page and reinforcing the practices.
In order to have some success with a culture of this sort, the entire team should follow the practices.
Choose the right tools
Once a team has established what is important to them, you can start to look for the tools that can support your priorities. And when it comes to working as a remote team, this requires tools that allow for communication without distraction. As the Internet matures, it’s becoming more clear that how we communicate affects our work and how we feel. As Jason Fried mentions in Is group chat making you sweat?:
We’ve also seen strong evidence that the method and manner in which you choose to communicate has a major influence on how people feel at work. Frazzled, exhausted, and anxious? Or calm, cool, and collected? These aren’t just states of mind, they are conditions caused by the kinds of tools we use, and the kinds of behaviors those tools encourage.
As with many other teams, Wildbit uses a combination of Slack and Basecamp to achieve the goal of communication with minimal distraction. Both services include settings that enable us to keep up to speed on projects and activities related to our work (as well as build bonds with teammates), but without a constant disruption during the workday.
Slack allows you to set yourself to DND (do not disturb), while Basecamp includes several related settings (latest activity, reports, email summaries, notifications, and work can wait. And we’re all encouraged to turn off notifications, quit our communications tools, and even work away from our computers (example: we are all agreed to never use the @here qualifier in our product channels, instead mentioning specific people with their unique handles).
However, the tools are only as good as the resolve of the person sitting in the chair. You twist all the knobs and pull all the levers to minimize distractions, then sabotage your efforts by “checking in” manually. This is why the culture is the foundation for doing consistent, focused work.
Build habits and routines
Last, each individual contributor on a team can help themselves do their best work by creating routines that build habits. After, all the end results of our lives are built on the little things we do with regularity. Or, as John Maxwell puts it:
You will never change your life until you change something you do daily. The secret of your success is found in your daily routine.
At Wildbit, this comes out in different ways for people in various roles.
Artem, one of our developers, has a strict routine for doing focused work, yet still make time to give advanced support to our customers. Each day, he does his project/feature work that requires depth and focus first. Then, he ends each day cleaning out his support queue.
This allows him to use his highest levels of energy on the things that will move our products forward and helping in customers in the long run. But he also gives fantastic support to our customers right now, consistently. And that consistency wins him a lot of brownie points with our customer success team: we know we can count on him following this routine, which helps us provide better support as well.
Another example is our customer success team. With 5 people supporting 3 products, we split our time between proactive success efforts and reactive support efforts. Providing top notch customer support has always been highly valued at Wildbit, but being in the inbox all day can make it hard to focus on a larger initiative.
To ensure that everyone makes the most of their success time, we take entire days to work on success related items. Even further, we try to schedule our focus days back to back so there is less attention residue from the support given in the previous day.
Putting little steps in place can have a big impact over time.
Cultivating an environment that both values focus and produce great work is not an easy task. But it’s a vital one. Most of us are figuring it out as we go, wading through the tools, processes, and sources of entertainment that fragment our attention. Making change in this area requires proactive efforts.
The details above cover some of how we’re achieving this here at Wildbit. If you and your team have fought the same battle, we’d love to hear what’s worked for you. Let us know!