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Synchronize workloads
Slow productivity is a way of measuring useful effort that is now much more focused on the quality things you produce over time as opposed to your visible activity in the moment. So here are some concrete ideas for actually implementing slow productivity within your organization.
First, you need to make workloads transparent and external. Have an external and transparent place where that work goes first. This shouldn’t just be something that gets emailed to an individual contributor and it’s now on their plate. It should be a central list. This could be cards on a virtual board. It could be a shared document. The technology doesn’t matter. But we have a clear place where we’re listing here’s the things we think we want to do.
Next, you want to keep track very clearly of what individuals are doing. And here you want these lists to be pretty small. I’m a big believer in poll-style methodologies where everyone has a small number of things clearly mounted on a board somewhere. Here’s the two things I’m working on right now. And as soon as someone finishes something, they pull in something new from that master list of things that we want to do as a team, as a group, or as a company. These types of workload management systems are going to prevent overload, prevent overhead tax from piling up, make people much happier, and get work accomplished much quicker.
Structure communication
Another idea I would throw out is let’s get much more structured about the communication that we have to do because what we want to avoid is administrative overhead, this communication fragmenting everyone’s schedule. We don’t want a culture where as soon as I think about something important for our team, that I immediately send it out in a cc’d email message or on a Slack channel. We don’t want a culture where these unscheduled messages are haphazardly arriving at all times. So we have the structure of this communication.
There’s two easy ways to do this. First of all, individuals should have office hours. If not every day, at least every other day. Here is time where you know I’m available. And if you have something you need to discuss with me, just wait until my next office hours. Jump on the phone. Jump in my office. Jump on Zoom. We can figure this out in five minutes. Couple that with what I call docket-clearing meetings. So if you have a team that’s working together on a regular basis, have a shared document where every time anyone on that team thinks of something that someone in that team needs to do or a problem that needs to be addressed or a nontrivial question that needs an answer, you throw it on that shared document, and we’ll call that the docket. Then two or three times a week, you have a docket-clearing meeting where the whole team gets together, and you go through that list one by one.
Now what this gives you is the peace of mind that if I think of something, it won’t be forgotten. But what you’re gaining here is avoiding instead taking that same idea and shooting it off on an email right away, which has to generate a response email. And then you have to see that and then you have to respond to it. And now that one idea is creating message after message and inbox checks and cognitive context switches and attention residue. You eliminate all of that. So structuring how you communicate will take the administrative overhead that remains and contain it in a way that is going to be much less negatively impacting people’s ability to actually get things done.
The pace at which important things are finished is going to go up. The quality of what you’re producing is going to go up. And the happiness of your employees is also going to go up. This is going to become a much more sustainable work environment, and you’re going to feel that both subjectively and in terms of hard metrics like turnover.