Extreme flexibility needs great maturity
Summary
The most mature async-first teams should be able to work without a prescriptive schedule. But if the team is new and people haven’t practised asynchronous, deep work in recent times, you may need a prescriptive rhythm for the team.
Adopt two simple practices.
Make the first half of your days meeting-free.
Keep Fridays meeting-free as well.
This’ll give you a few benefits.
Deep work is hard. You do the hardest work in the morning while your mind is fresh.
The rhythm helps the team build their deep work skills.
Coordination and synchronisation becomes easy because you now have a predictable schedule.
When the team reaches a high maturity with asynchronous work, you can move to a truly flexible schedule.
The holy grail of remote work is when you combine location independence and time independence. For those of you who’ve followed this website from the start, you’ll know me as a flag bearer for flexibility. What’s the point of being async, if we can’t choose the hours that work best for us?
So yeah, time independence is the north star. But can every team be there from day one? I don’t think so. Just like Spiderman said, “With great power, comes great responsibility.” Similarly, I think extreme flexibility needs great maturity.
As Spiderman may have said, “Extreme flexibility needs great maturity”
At the start, there’s chaos
Most of us are familiar with Tuckman’s model of group development.
Forming - we get together as a team.
Storming - we then discover that teamwork is harder than we expected.
Norming - we discover our equilibrium and start functioning as a team.
Performing - we deliver at a high level of efficiency.
Until the team reaches the norming phase, there’s inevitable chaos. Of course, I use the word ‘chaos’ loosely. It doesn’t have to be people going nuts, but it’s fair to say that every team has its teething phase, however short. And that begs the question - what’s the best way to work in this storming phase?
To get past the storm, lay down the norm
Teams get past the storming phase by laying down some work norms that everyone must follow. These can’t be optional. The longer you leave these to imagination and choice, the longer the team thrashes around. If I were to set up a new team, then I’d assume an async-first way of working. I’d lay down some core practices to enable this approach to work. But let’s be honest. Asynchronous work is still the exception when it comes to work styles. So if you’re setting up a team in 2023, you can’t expect that everyone’s skilled at working this way. You need some sensible defaults.
We’ve discussed earlier that shapeless days aren’t a badge of honour. We’ve also seen how calendar matching can be a costly exercise. So the design of team defaults must provide some guardrails. Here are some questions we must ponder over.
How do we nudge people to set aside contiguous blocks of time for deep work?
How do we create time for productive, synchronous activities, such as pairing?
How do we make it easy for people to synchronise with each other, occasionally?
How do we help the team build a rhythm with productive work habits?
A predictable rhythm is a sensible default
With all this said, let me say something that’ll make me seem like a charlatan, a turncoat or a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Choose your favourite insult, but hear me out. I believe that when people who are inexperienced at asynchronous, deep work get together in a team, it helps to prescribe a common, working rhythm. Here’s what I propose as a sensible default.
Keep your first half free of meetings.
Keep Fridays for focus. No meetings, just deep work.
Make deep work a team priority by making 24 hours a week, meeting-free
Should there be exceptions to the rule? None, except two.
Pair programming is a productive synchronous activity, so that gets a free pass.
Urgent and important matters such as production outages get a free pass too. These, you’ll agree though, should be infrequent.
I understand that some of you who believe in extreme flexibility will cringe at my suggestion. Let me try to explain my perspective further.
Deep work is easiest when our mind is fresh
If you’re used to an interrupted, shallow way of working, you’ll find the transition to deep work hard. You’ll have to focus on a problem for several contiguous hours. There’ll be new skills for you to practice - writing, reading, and distraction blocking. You’ll grapple with wicked problems that’ll often be on the edge of your capabilities. It’ll take willpower to stay on this course. And your willpower is freshest at the start of the day, especially if you’ve had a good night’s sleep.
“If you want to get the most out of your day, do your most important work—your ONE Thing—early, before your willpower is drawn down. Since your self-control will be sapped throughout the day, use it when it’s at full strength on what matters most.”
To make my point clearer, let me illustrate the flip side. If you make your second-half meeting free and do meetings in the first half instead, you’ll be mentally exhausted by the time you begin deep work in the second half. In contrast, if you get meaningful work done in the first half of the day, you can approach any meetings you have in the second half, with a sense of positivity.
The more you focus, the better you get at focussing
Make deep work a team sport
Deep work, like any other sport, takes practice. If you’ve learned how to play a sport before, I expect that you’d have built a rhythm around how you practised it. When you do something at the same time every day, it becomes a habit. It takes 60-odd days to build a habit. Soon after you build a habit, you can summon the skills you learn from it, on demand. It’s how practising a sport every day, at the same time, allows you to summon those skills at match time; regardless of when you play that match. We want to get to that point with deep work where we can switch on and off when we please. But we won’t get there without building a rhythm to our practice first.
Synchronous collaboration is easiest when you can predict availability
Repeat after me. “Async-first is not async-only”. Every team needs to synchronise. They can use it for paired work, to make decisions or to build a team culture and strong work relationships. Teams should be able to rely on each other’s availability for such kind of synchronisation. When you block the first half for deep work, everyone knows that this time is unavailable for any meetings, except people who decide to pair. It also gives the team confidence to book necessary meetings in the second half. You still should make meetings the last resort, but when you need them, you know you won’t have to play calendar Tetris.
The other benefit of these predictable meeting hours, is that they’re few. The moment you reduce the “meetings-allowed” hours in a week, from 40 to 16, it’ll force everyone to prioritise the meetings that are truly necessary. For everything else, you’ll have to devise an efficient process or go async. People who’re not part of your team will also learn about what meetings you’ll attend and the meetings you’ll avoid. In your own little way, through your behaviour, you’ll cast votes for your company’s async-first culture, .
But predictability is inflexible, no?
Yes, and no. My suggestion of core hours is certainly inflexible compared to a libertarian approach where everyone decides their schedule. I’m all for that if every team member is skilled at asynchronous work. Here’s the minimum maturity you need for extreme flexibility.
Everyone should be able to turn on “deep work mode” for themselves, on demand. This, by itself, takes months, if not years of practice.
Your team must follow basic, async-first collaboration protocols without fail. No exceptions. This requires a bias for action, respecting the response times for each comms channel and using the task board diligently.
Each team member must be skilled at the four async-first superpowers.
Writing
Reading and comprehension
Distraction blocking
Independent work
The team must have a shared, objective reality through a combination of its handbook, its audit trails and other documentation.
You and your colleagues should be able to function with minimum meetings. What’s “minimum”?
No more than 4 hours a week for an individual contributor.
No more than 10 hours a week for managers.
My unscientific guess is that it can take a team anywhere between six to twelve months to get to this state. Until that point, a predictable rhythm can help the group get past the storming phase, establish their norms and experience the confidence of successful performance. Once you reach this maturity level, it’s happy days! You don’t need core working hours.
But even if you aren’t at this level of maturity, core hours can be flexible. Here’s how.
You can start your day early if you like. The idea is to do your deep work first and shallow work last. It doesn’t matter if you start at 9 am or 7 am if you can commit to giving yourself four straight hours of deep work with a fresh mind.
If you need personal time, you can take it from the second half and extend your work day. You can also start your day early, do a spell of deep work, finish your errands and attend meetings in the second half. If you’re not pairing, this is fine as well.
Nothing stops you from doing even more deep work in the second half. Just because these hours are available for meetings doesn’t mean you can’t reclaim them for deep work! Plan your time a few days ahead. If you see free time in your afternoons, you can use it as focus time. Be flexible if someone needs you, but otherwise, that time’s yours.
So all’s not lost when you implement core hours on your team. It’ll help everyone get into the groove of asynchronous work and it can be a stepping stone to extreme flexibility.
As I conclude this article, I want to share the principles behind the idea of setting a predictable rhythm.
Focus when you’re fresh. Exhausted minds struggle with deep work.
Give yourself and your team the time to build the “deep work muscle”.
Make yourself easy to synchronise with, when your teammates need you.
If you can appreciate those principles, you’ll see why some teams can benefit from a prescriptive schedule, before they graduate to a flexible one. I’m still a flag bearer for flexibility, but I hope you agree some nuance helps when we make the argument for flexibility!