How I Get My Focused Work Done

In management, we can become very “interrupt driven.” We get so used to distractions that we count on them. This dependency can make it very hard to focus when we need to. My calendar fills up with meetings. My unscheduled time is full of people stopping by to ask questions or chat. If I am not careful, I will find myself doing a lot of work at night.

Over the years, I’ve tried many different ways to improve my focused time. Here are the things that work best for me.

Defrag your calendar

Every six months, I review my schedule. Recurring meetings tend to accumulate over time. This periodic review makes it easier to identify meetings that are no longer necessary. I also will try to reschedule my recurring meetings so that they group into blocks. That 30 minutes or an hour between meetings is a waste of time. It isn’t enough time to work on anything significant. Grouping my meetings gives me larger blocks of time that I can use for focused work.

Block out your focused and loosely structured time

Now that your calendar has larger blocks of time add recurring calendar entries to protect parts of your week for focused work. For me, I need at least two hours to engage in a task, so I don’t block out less than that. Ideally, I will block out more.

Putting it on the calendar prevents other people from scheduling you in that time. Likewise, I also block out time for unstructured work, like reading e-mail. Reading e-mail or returning phone calls work well in those one-hour blocks between meetings. Having dedicated unstructured time also means that I’m not tempted to do unstructured work in my focused blocks.

Do make sure you leave some gaps in your schedule to allow folks to add in a meeting if they need to. I made the mistake of filling my calendar almost entirely for a while. People started to ignore my free/busy time because they couldn’t find any empty meeting slots.

Set out a “do not disturb” flag

In an open-plan environment, create a sign, so people know not to disturb you.

I have a weird lamp on my desk. People know that when the lamp is on, I am trying to concentrate. For the most part, they will let me focus. When I worked in an office, I would put a post-it on my door with a note asking people to send me an e-mail unless it was urgent.

Get out of the building

Sometimes to get focus you need to go elsewhere. I will sometimes go to a nearby cafe, co-working space or a library if I need a few uninterrupted hours.

Turn off the notifications

There is a reason that you see this advice shared often. I turn on “Do Not Disturb” on my mac and my phone. I have a separate Chrome “Person” that only has the extensions I need for focused work and no notifications enabled. I quit all apps that are not the ones I need for my task. My phone goes in my pocket. I don’t want any electronic distractions.

If I have to write something, I will sometimes do it longhand on paper first to eliminate distractions. Writing on paper works exceptionally well for me if it isn’t a topic I am excited about but need to get done. Once I have the first draft on paper, it is much easier to edit and refine on the computer without being tempted to do something else.

Set a goal and reward yourself

We are so unfocused these days that gamifying your focused work may help. For example, when I finish the first draft of this post, I will spend 10 minutes on Twitter to reward myself for getting it done without interruptions.

Set aside a whole day for your focused work.

It is sometimes challenging as a manager to have an entire day clear. If I have something vital to do, especially something time sensitive, I will clear the whole day to focus on it. Usually, I will also get out of the building to avoid other work distractions. I give myself a one-person offsite with the goal of getting something done. I turn on my “out of office” e-mail responder with a note letting people know that I am working off-site and asking them not to disturb me unless it is critical. I will also schedule these “focus days” up to a quarter in advance, to make sure I have them in case I want to use them.

Clean your desk

Cleaning the clutter in your eye-line is also very common and useful advice. Things tend to accumulate on my desk: mail, tchotchkes, magazines, books. When you are trying to focus, they can be distractions or the general clutter can be a distraction. You don’t need to clean your desk thoroughly. You just don’t need to see that stuff. Put it all somewhere you can’t see it when you are trying to focus.

Clean your computer desktop

Just like your physical environment can be a distraction, your virtual one can be too. All those files on your desktop are like a big to-do list of fun things instead of the work you need to focus on. Create a “clutter” folder and move everything into it.

Create your focused playlist

Some people like to work in silence. I find that music helps me focus better, especially in busy environments. I have different playlists that help me focus on various tasks: reading, programming, writing. For reading, I like ambient music. For programming, it is post-rock and electronic music. When writing, I favor modern classical music. You may prefer silence or music may help you. One important thing for me is that the music that is on my playlists is music I know well. I find listening to new music can be too distracting for me in these situations.

Start with a mindfulness exercise

Especially on my focus days, I like to start with a ten or twenty-minute mindfulness exercise to help me clear away the other things on my mind and help me focus on the task at hand.

Make your exhaustive to-do list

One of the exercises I like from the “Gettings Things Done” book by David Allen is exhaustively writing down everything you can think of that you need to do. It is very freeing for me. I find that if I need to remember to do something, it will nag at me the whole time I am trying to focus. If I write it down on a piece of paper or in a to-do app, it helps me put it aside for a while so I can focus.

 

These are all things that I do that help me focus. I hope that you find some of them useful. I’d be interested to hear other tips that people have as well. Please leave a comment with your focus tools.

Answering some questions about Agile Transformation

I was given a set of questions from a consultant working with a company about to begin a transformation to Agile. They asked if I record my answers for their kick-off meeting. That video is above, but I had written my thoughts down as well for clarity, so I am including that text as well.

How hard it can be to implement an agile model in a company where the old model was more hierarchical and conservative?
It can be extremely challenging if only part of the organization is interested in making the change. If the rest of the company are expecting detailed plans and delivery date commitments and the product development team is working with a more iterative approach, that will create a lot of organizational friction. For any agile transformation to be successful, the whole company has to be supportive and committed.

I don’t think that company hierarchy is necessarily an impediment to a successful agile transformation. As long as the responsibilities and expectations of leadership adapt to the new way of working and that leadership is also committed to the agile transformation. Many organizations with more traditional hierarchies build their products successfully with agile methodologies.

What would be your advice for this team to successfully implement the model? What should they be aware of? Basically, the DOs and DONTs.
Do commit to making the transformation, and understand that it won’t be easy. This will be a culture change for your company. Any culture change follows a path where the excitement of making the change is followed by a period where the individuals and teams struggle to understand how to be productive in the new model. During this time (sometimes called the valley of despair), it seems like the best idea would be to go back to the way things used to be. Push through this time and don’t give up. Bit by bit, things will improve, people will figure out how to operate in the new world and you will end up in a much better place.

One of the ways that teams make the transition to agile is to use a known structured methodology like Scrum. At first, the processes and ceremonies will feel strange and not what you understood agile was supposed to be like. Stick with it. As your teams get better at agile thinking, you can start to decide which elements make sense for you and which you may want to change or drop altogether. Each of these things has a purpose, and understanding the purpose and the value when it works well is important before you decide not to do it. Teams that abandon the parts of the process that they don’t like early on often end up with a very poor understanding of agile. They gain very few of the benefits and may be a lot less efficient.

What are the foundational measures they should follow in your opinion?
Like any organizational culture transformation, there should be some time spent by the whole organization understanding why there is a need to make the change, what the expected outcome from the change is and what the plan is. Time should be spent to make sure that all parts of the organization (especially the teams dependent on the team making the change) are committed.

If there is a smaller team that is mostly independent, that team might try to pilot the switch to agile first, to develop some expertise ahead of the rest of the organization and learn from their experience.

What should they anticipate to succeed?
Anticipate that this may be a longer process than they expected, but the effort is worth it! Anticipate that the change may too big for some people to make, and they may choose to leave or try to prevent the change from happening. Anticipate that it will get progressively easier over time.

Other relevant points you might find useful.
I have been working Agile exclusively for almost 20 years after having spent the first 8 years working in a more traditional way. The reason that I have continued to work agile is that I have seen no better way to deliver software efficiently. I am inherently pragmatic. If I saw a better way to work, I would switch immediately. I haven’t found any yet.

The hardest part of adopting agile is learning the agile mindset and understanding that it doesn’t mean abandoning quality, accountability, documentation, process, planning or tracking to deliverables. It is about finding the right amount of each of those things for the project and no more.

In the end adopting agile is adopting a culture of continuous improvement. A culture of always looking for better ways of doing what you are doing. The way we practice agile today is very different from the way that we did it five years ago. Its adaptability is part of its strengths. It’s fluidity also makes it very difficult to learn. It is absolutely worth the effort though.

I wish you the best of luck on your journey!