Implementing Time Lock

Or how we decided to take the time to actually work

This adventure all started one gray morning. Prior to that day, and for several weeks, morale in our team was not at its best and we were on high pressure to deliver lots of new features.

Then, my team leader asked me on Slack if I had time for a “quick and urgent meeting” with him right now and our project manager. I said yes and a couple of minutes later, we were talking about the situation.

My team leader was exhausted. He said never had enough time to work on stuff that needed his attention because he was always getting interrupted by everyone (support team, QA or even us). He confessed that it wasn’t sustainable and even said that he thought that maybe the job of team leader was not for him anymore.

That alarm call was nothing new for me because as a member of the team I had felt the same way for some time. He asked us: “What can we do right now to fix this problem?”.

This is when I proposed to implement the famous “Alone Time” or “Time Lock” that is suggested in my favorite book, “Rework”.

If you don’t know what a Time Lock is, well it’s a fixed period during the week where people actually do their work. They get off of Slack, close Outlook, put some headphones on and concentrate on their work. No one is allowed to interrupt people during Time Lock even if you are in the same team. Only critical production emergencies that can’t wait 4 hours are allowed to break the rules.

The idea behind the Time Lock concept is that with each interruption, your brain needs 20 minutes or so to get back to work and get back in the same state you were before being interrupted.

Our “quick and urgent meeting” ended up taking 2 hours. We decided to try other things as well but I’ll focus on the Time Lock aspect for this post.

We decided to implement the Time Lock in our team only, but we let other teams know that we were going to try it for a couple of weeks. We chose Tuesday and Thursday mornings from 8 AM to 12 PM. We even put a message on one of the TVs near our team to warn people not to disturb us.

The first time we did it, it was awesome. I did more work in those 4 hours than in 2 or 3 days while being constantly interrupted. It also made people talk a lot in the office. Some were skeptical, some didn’t understand, some even said that their job wasn’t compatible with this technique. It was making a lot of noise! First thing we know was that 1 month later, all teams of the IT department adopted it, it was backed by the direction and revealed to the rest of the company in a clear email stating the rules of the Time Lock.

The moral of not only our team but the whole floor changed a lot after this in a very positive way. There is something comforting in knowing that you have a reserved time slot during the week to do your things and be sure that you will not be disturbed. It was also very nice that my little idea was taken seriously and did so much good to the company. I was more than pleased to know that the direction was behind us and encouraged out-of-the-box ideas like that.

It’s now been 3–4 months and it’s still going very well. We have to remind some people from time to time that they must follow the rules, but other than that, it’s pretty awesome. I’m pretty sure it increased productivity, and the morale of everyone has never been better!

So thanks to Jason Fried and DHH for letting me know about this technique and all the other ones in their book, Remote. It is nice to see that working can be both fun and productive.

If you liked that post, please click on the❤ below! Also, you can choose to follow me to never miss one of my post. Thanks!