Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout

by Cal Newport

This approach can also be adapted for teams in the form of a related strategy that I call docket-clearing meetings. Like office hours, these meetings happen at the same times on the same days, each week. Unlike office hours, they’re attended by your entire team. During these sessions, your team churns through any pending tasks that require collaboration or clarification. The group moves through the tasks one at a time, figuring out for each what exactly needs to be done, who is working on it, and what information they need from others. An easy way to organize these sessions is to maintain a shared document of tasks to discuss. Team members can add items to the list as they come up in between meetings. One thirty-minute docket-clearing session can save a team from hours of highly distracting inbox checking and back-and-forth emailing. It’s hard to overemphasize the sense of relief granted by these two simple synchronization methods. When you separate work from the ad hoc conversations that surround it, what you’re left with might not be all that intimidating. Merlin Mann discovered that even highly technical task management systems couldn’t banish the sense of overload increasingly afflicting twenty-first-century office workers. The cure isn’t to be found in smarter task systems, but instead in a return to something simpler, and more human: regular conversation.