In a world full of distractions, it’s easy to lose focus and under-deliver.

A culture that creates a safe space to focus on complex tasks can make all the difference.

The time spent on any task can be broken into 3 parts:

• Ramp up — You’re getting into the game.

• Deep work — You’re actually delivering the value.

• Wind down — You’re already distracted or wrapping up.

As such, the same task will take significantly longer if you’re constantly being interrupted.

Distractions vs No Distractions

Let’s check these two people as examples:

• Jade works remotely on an async workflow and has notifications disabled.

• Bryan works remotely, but Slack is busy and everything is urgent.

In a scenario where both have these 3 tasks to do:

• Jade will have completed all 3 tasks in an 8-hour period.

• While Bryan will work extra time to complete only 2 tasks

Why is that?

Because Jade had more uninterrupted Deep Work time than Brayan.

Those 4 interruptions that Brayan suffered amounted to an actual loss of 3 hours of productive work on the tasks assigned to him.

This is why I aim to reduce meetings in my teams so that everyone can get more stuff done, simply by wasting less time in “Ramp up” and “Wind down” caused by interruptions.

For instance, that’s the reason I stopped using Scrum, and adopted a lighter-weight process that’s more async-friendly.

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Originally published at remote-work.io on December 14, 2022.