Business or busy-ness?
At Surevine have evolved a sort-of ‘heads up, not heads down’ culture. That seems necessary for us because:
- We work in a radically de-centralized fashion. Most Surevine people spend most of their time working from a workspace set up in their home (none quite cool enough to have made it as a #featuredworkspace on Lifehacker yet), or else they pitch-up at a local co-working hub. We need to keep ourselves plugged into all the communications channels out there to keep the vibrant, vital sense of team spirit we enjoy.
- We develop Social Software, which seems to be the fastest-paced, most exciting domain you could be develop software for at the moment. To keep ahead of the game means we need to be hyper-aware of all the great ideas which are constantly blossoming in this fertile environment.
But with that hyper-connectivity comes a cost: we have a constant stream of interruptions. Most of the time that’s fine, and they are only subliminal distractions, we’ve mostly learned to filter. But context switching can be painful. We need to concentrate hard, and hold lots of context in our head, to tackle some of our more challenging software development problems, and the slightest distraction can mean we have to start from scratch.
That’s why, emboldened by the Rework book written by the guys at 37 signals, we decided to initiate an experiment into interruption free time. Here were some of the issues raised, when we decided we might like to try this, at a recent company meetup:
- What if our customer wants to speak to us? Customers are our number one concern, shouldn’t we drop everything to speak to them?
- How do we know that people working solo at home are still OK, haven’t had an accident, if they don’t ping the team periodically?
- Won’t it be more difficult for those working in client-facing roles to avoid scheduling meetings which clash with the time?
- How do we ensure that other team members don’t get offended, and take the silence as some rude form of ignorance?
- How do we prevent it from undermining the culture of ‘heads up, not heads down’ which is positive most of the time?
People were quick to respond with ideas:
- Even for those clients for whom we have agreed a fixed SLA and response time on support, no customer is, so-far, expecting an immediate response in person to a query.
- We always have this problem, as people have very flexible working arrangements: some working very early in the morning, some very late at night, and others are in different time zones. We don’t have a way of looking out for each other 24×7.
- Those of us who seem to spend more time in meetings or travelling than at our desk are still able to co-ordinate with the people we are meeting, and it essential that we do this, simply by blocking time out as busy in advance in our Calendars.
- The best way of ensuring that no-one internally has differing expectations about our availability is to all be adhering to the same discipline at the same time, that means interruption-free time is sacred, co-ordinated and something which we all co-operate in.
- This seems more of a challenge, and the best way to tackle this seems to be to raise the risk and ensure that we talking about and understanding it
What we meant by interruption-free time:
- Either a whole day (we haven’t been that brave yet) or a number of hours (at least two) spent with no interruptions – with everyone respecting the same period (has to work for people in other countries too)
- Switching off all forms of notification or interruption including (but not limited to): our internal Intranet tools; Twitter; LinkedIn; Facebook; RSS feeds; Skype; e-mail; desktop widgets; IM and Calendar/alerts etc…
- For some reason, the hardest dsicipline appears to be the phone, but in the same way as the Surevine switchboard takes messages if we are unavailable, switching off the phone (to ensure we don’t get SMS messages either) only means that the messages go through to voice-mail and we can respond later, not that the opportunity is lost for ever
It is early days for the experiment, but to me, it already feels like a real treat, something special, cherished and much anticipated. We’ve found ourselves “banking up” activities for our quiet time: those activities which require deep, concentrated thought, and would take orders of magnitude more time to do with distractions.
Will try and keep you posted…
Tags: attention, co-working, discipline, hyper-connected, interruption, notification, quiet, silence, time management, workspace
15 February 2011 at 10:01 pm |
Sounds really interesting. Currently I resort to hiding from people, but properly organised and agreed sounds like the way forwards.
Untreated to know how it goes…
16 February 2011 at 5:59 pm |
Sounds like we might have the opposite problem…with remote working it is all too easy to hide (or appear to be hidden, even unwittingly) most of the time, so we have evolved a way of working that means we are always keeping others informed of what we are currently up to…will try and update this thread periodically to let you know how it goes
16 February 2011 at 11:16 am |
I’ll be interested to hear how everyone settles into this system and what the optimal length of interruption-free turns out to be. I can imagine a full day being a bit too lonely or stimulation-free to feel like you’re part of a team.
I recall you used Yammer or a similar internal-style-Twitter tool for the team? Do you still use such communications to enable people in various locations to know that today Stuart is working on X, for example?
16 February 2011 at 6:04 pm |
I think you are right about a full day. After the silence yesterday the internal comms were more full than usual of chatter which I think was a pent up need to communicate. We are sticking to two hours at the moment, and for some of us, that seems like infinity, for others, we are just getting into gear. One of the issues is that each of us seems to have a “best” time of day for working and fixing the same two hours means it is during some peoples most productive slot, but not others.
We still use internal-twitter-style tools and I would go as far as saying I don’t think we’d be able to work without them – they are an absolutely essential part of the way we work. We use them to sort of “clock on” and “clock off” with the team, and say what we are doing now and next, and also to cry for help. Most people update at least once an hour (except in focus time, or when they are in meetings)