Thread by @gregorywitek

This week I had a retro with my team and everyone shared that they were feelling more productive and found it easier to focus. It wasn't rocket science to make it work, but I thought I'd share a few tips how we made that happen: 🧵

1. First, we got rid of standups. We replaced 15min morning standups with Slack messages that everyone sends when they start working in the morning. I covered this topic in the past: notonlycode.org/ive-moved-to-a…

That means no matter if I start work at 8am or at 9.30am, I can start actual work without having to soon jump on a call just to say what I did yesterday.
Standups are the worst.

2. We limited a number of team meetings to 2 a week:
- on Monday morning we discuss new tickets, plan the week, and share any team updates
- on Friday afternoon we demo what we've done during the week

Everything from Monday noon to Friday afternoon is about deep work.

No more trying to get something done during 30min break between one meeting and another.

3. Time of the meetings - besides reducing a number of meetings I ensure they happen either in the beginning of the day or towards the end, so that people can block a large span of time in the middle the day for their focus time

4. We limit number of people in the meetings: if we need to discuss a certain feature, we include people working on it; if another team wants to discuss something with us we send 1 person who later updates the rest; usually it's me or our PM

5. We are allowed and even encouraged to say "no" to meetings. I told my devs: if anyone invites you to a meeting, it's up to you. If you feel it's worth being there, go ahead, otherwise let me know and I'll make sure it's taken care of

In the past we had a number of meetings where we all joined the call that had maybe 5min of content that was relevant to us. No more.

6. I encouraged people to block focus time in their calendars and mute notifications, so that they can focus on the actual work without being interrupted. I don't expect anyone to be responding to Slack messages immediately

7. We manage internal tools and sometimes our users need help. We set up a daily rotation, so that there's always one engineer who replies to support requests, while others don't have to worry about it and can focus on their work

8. 1-1s: I have a weekly 1-1 with everyone in my team. I asked each team member what time is the best for them, so that I don't schedule it in the middle of their focus time, and I adjusted my schedule to make it possible.

1 month later we all (me included!) feel more productive. All it took was telling everyone "I value your time, so make sure you can focus on your work and let me handle the distractions"

As for me, I told to a number of meeting organizers "if you need something from me, let me know before the meeting, otherwise I'm not joining". I also started blocking focus time in my calendar, and it works really well.

Now comes the hard work - some meetings will start to creep in, people will be asking for more of our time, and for some immediate attention. But now the team is aware and protective of their time, so we have the tools to handle that and stay on track /🧵