I’ve already written that I’ve been a fan of 37signals (we use their product Basecamp!) and now their new book, ReWork (we gave away 2 copies even!), and as a result I’ve decided to put some of their thinking into action.
I mean, what good is it that you simply read good stuff and not actually do any of it? And the fact that I can actually implement some of this is a testimony of how cool my team at 8BIT and how they allow me to lead culturally the organization.
So, as a result my team has decided to do a “communication blackout” every single Thursday.
The simple fact is that “interruptions” kill productivity. And I know, for myself at least, that any interruption requires an additional 15 minutes or so to “get back on track.”
Lame! Enough of that! So we’re doing something about it.
What this means is that every thursday we will not do the following:
- Schedule any meetings.
- Conversate or converse in our “back channel.”
- No skype.
- No phone calls.
- Email each other directly about projects.
Essentially anything that would disrupt our work is off-limits (except if one of us dies or something obviously cataclysmic…).
We’re going to experiment with this for a month and see how it goes. I’m pretty excited and I have a feeling it’s going to produce some super-positive results.
What are your thoughts?
What do you mean by “back channel” Does this include social media? Great idea tho, great idea.
our team uses yammer to discuss business, projects, and just jibba-jabba…
Interesting. Does that “communications blackout” include all email, Twitter, Facebook, blogging or responding to blog comments? Or just internal communication?
We aren’t throwing ourselves into the dark ages
. We’re just minimizing some of the channels that often compete for our attention in addition to our primary tasks..
Great idea, I could get a whole weeks worth of work done and take the rest of the week off!
Story: A slaved over a lab report for an hour and got half of it done. Then I left my two friends (who were doing the same lab, at the same time) and finished in 5 minutes.
Focus.
So what if you have to tell someone something? Write it down and tell them on Friday? Your Drafts folders are going to get a lot of use on Thursdays!
Funny! This isn’t a hard and fast law. Like if I’m working on something for Standard and it overlaps with something Jared is working on, it’s totally anti-productive – and, as such, converse to this whole idea – to avoid it.
It just means that I won’t be conversing with the majority of the team on the back channel or Skype or something.
I love the idea. You guys should do it 5 days a week.
peace | dewde
Starting now, you’re doing it seven days a week.
Well if you do his then I think you should go “whole hog” and not do SMS, tweets or anything that detracts from what you are working on.
Obviously if you’re working on a FB page for example then it may be tough to ignore all side distractions.
So what were the results of this test?