How I Lied to My Team and Became More Productive

I’ve held many job titles over the years. Yet, despite what my LinkedIn says, I’ve really been doing the same thing in all of them: I build stuff — I’m a Maker. Yeah, I know…cue the eye rolls. 🙄 🙄 🙄 — Regardless, it’s true. Chances are you’re a Maker, too.

Lately, I’ve been finding it difficult to make stuff. I’ll make a list of things I hope to build by the end of the week, and when Friday comes I am disappointed and surprised by my lack of progress. Now, some of this was because I disqualified “manager stuff” as candidates for “Maker’s work”. That aside, however, I was still generally displeased in my progress at the end of each day…with one exception — flying.

I take a cross-country flight each month to visit my team in San Francisco. I fly Virgin America and sit in the same exit aisle seat (9D to be exact) each time. By the time I land, I’ve accomplished more in those six hours than any given 8–10 hour workday. It’s not the flight that increases my production, though. Trust me…I even ran a week-long experiment where I recreated that environment and played the sounds of the exact aircraft I fly on through my noise-cancelling headphones. Rather, I believe it’s the confined working area and the slow-to-non-existent Wi-Fi connection. In short: no distractions.

Repetitive context switching is a creativity killer.

Here’s what an average week looks like for me:

That’s actually not that bad, right? I’m only in meetings 15 hours a week. That should leave me a little over 60% of my week for making stuff, right? Not even. Most creative work requires at minimum a few hours of uninterrupted focus. Repetitive context switching is a creativity killer.

Maker’s Hours

My hunch was that the periodic distractions were overflowing into my focus time…breaking up my concentration. I decided to test if I would be more productive by setting aside “Maker’s Hours”, free of all distractions.

For this to work, though, I’d need to completely remove my availability during Maker’s Hours, eliminating the possibility of occasional interruptions. I told my team about a new self-experiment I was testing: I’d be working as usual from 11:00a-3:00p. I would then quit for the day and return to my office from 11:00p-3:00a for “Maker’s Hours”. Of course, that last bit was a lie. I had no intention of working until 3:00 in the morning. I would just turn off email, Spark, TeamTV and ignore all incoming notifications.

The result? I totally increased productivity on projects where I was the sole contributor. Meanwhile, my collaborative projects suffered. I would see a question come in at 3:05p on my phone and I had to ignore it until the next day.

The following week, I continued my experiment, but made a few tweaks to make myself semi-available to my fellow collaborators (although, NO meetings). Was I more productive? To be honest, I’m not sure. Productivity in the creative business can be a difficult thing to measure — but I felt more productive…by a long-shot.

At the least, I hope it helps debunk the myth that “focus work” is a selfish luxury.

What I Learned

Job titles don’t always accurately define what we do. Often, they trick us into behaving contrary to what we’re actually trying to accomplish. It’s easy to guilt ourselves (or each other) into some imagined requirement of “availability”. By making a conscious effort to decouple from traditional schedules and limit our general availability, we can significantly increase our productivity. An additional byproduct is the reduction of unnecessary or redundant meetings.

Want to test it out for yourself? Here’s what I recommend:

1. Figure out what kind of Maker’s Hours schedule you want to adopt. For me, that was aligning my “always on” hours to match the first four hours of my team’s office time. You may find something different works best for you.
2. Let your team know. This is huge. If they don’t know your schedule, how can they honor it? Who knows, they may want to adopt a similar strategy.
3. Make yourself unavailable for meetings during Maker’s Hours . For me, that was as simple as setting a recurring meeting during those hours every day. Caveat: there will be times when you need to bend this rule, depending on your comfort level and special situations.
4. Tweak notifications during Maker’s Hours. Here’s what I did:

• Turned off email
• Switched Spark to only show me “Favorites” (people and groups I collaborate with during Maker’s Hours).
• Put my phone in “Do Not Disturb” mode.
• Joined my team’s TeamTV channel. There’s a neat option to go into “busy” mode when you really can’t be interrupted (the equivalent of putting your headphones on in the office)

In conclusion, if you’ve noticed an increase in communication and a drop in your productivity, this experiment might provide insight. Make sure you tailor it to what you want to accomplish, and ask yourself how you feel about the experiment. At the least, I hope it helps debunk the myth that “focus work” is a selfish luxury.

Upper-right is “busy” mode in TeamTV…for when you really need to be left alone.

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