Optimizing the week for team focus

Most productivity advice, including my own, focuses on personal output. It rarely considers how to boost team performance.

Recently, I’ve revisited how my whole team can become more productive. Long-term readers might remember meeting-free Monday, a successful experiment my team still follows today.

On this occasion, I wanted to increase the amount of focused work happening across the entire week.

I’ve written before about the surprising benefits of two hours of focus time on a personal basis. However, despite encouraging my team to adopt this, it felt like it wasn’t clicking.

I discovered the problem was that everyone had different focus times, often interrupted by others. One person defended their mornings, while another preferred that time for all their meetings.

As the team leader, my calendar was more respected than others, so it took a while for me to spot this was an issue.

Once I saw the problem, the solution was simple. I sat with my team, and we agreed on how to structure our days for maximum collective productivity.

The result was a set of rules, enshrined in a Confluence page:

1. No meetings on Monday (the existing rule).

2. No meetings between 11am-2pm unless a customer demands it.

3. No UK-only meetings after 4pm.

4. Avoid calendar blocking outside of 11am-2pm.

As a global company, we had to allow time to speak with colleagues in Asia and the US. This meant we couldn’t block our mornings or later afternoons.

It turned out 11am-2pm was the best time to guarantee minimal distractions, since Japan had finished work and America was still asleep. This then provided two hours of focus each day, plus an hour for lunch.

We agreed to minimise calendar blocking outside of 11-2pm. Keeping a clear calendar helped others to book necessary meetings. Note how this violates normal productivity dogma, including my own previous posts. However, within a team, blocking your entire day with planned work doesn’t make collaboration easy.

To avoid interrupting dinner with late calls, we agreed to keep our early evenings free to speak with our US colleagues. This meant forbidding UK-only meetings after 4pm.

We’ve been running these rules for the past three months, and the reaction is universally positive. One team member noted this was the best change we’ve made to date, perhaps more powerful than meeting-free Monday.

It turns out everyone is striving for some quiet time to focus. If you are part of a team (or, even better, leading a team), try having a similar chat and agree on effective ways to work together.