In a previous post, I wrote about Slack fatigue, unfolding my thoughts on how using a chat application as the main medium of collaboration can turn into an energy and productivity drainer, while working remote. On this post I am drawing a plan, taking action and finally committing to make it work.

Leaning back and observing how a day’s work looks like, I could categorize the time spent at work into the following basic themes:

Meeting ceremonies: Recurring events such as daily standups, management meetings, retrospectives. Things on your calendar.
Getting your things done: Big chunks of work with people of your team or alone. Focused time to get a project or task done. Delivering value within the sphere of the role you’ve been hired for.
Supporting mode: Sharing expertise, advice and feedback to people usually from other departments/roles that might need occasional input and support, to get their work done.
Leisure breaks: Small breaks within the day for water cooler discussions, reading a blog in the net, watching an interesting video a colleague shared, lunch breaks. Time to take some steam off and/or opportunities for learning something new. Growing your craft.

Those four themes usually match with two main categories of collaborators:

Your inner circle: People of your team, sharing the same agenda and common goals/projects, a common roadmap or backlog, things you are all accountable for.
Your outer circle: People from other teams/departments, sharing the same company objectives but different backlogs/roadmaps or team goals.

For developers, a great example of an inner circle is a Scrum team. Providing tech support to Customer Support team, filling out that employee survey from PeopleOps team or having skip level one-on-ones with the CEO is part of your outer circle.

All those interactions commit to the success and prosperity of the company and are labeled important. But at the end of the day, you are made accountable to your manager for “your” work. For crossing out that backlog items of “your” team.

So you come to a point where you need to pick priorities. Select how to make the most out of your precious time at work. Given the points above, you could eventually be spending your day like this:

Having meeting ceremonies and getting things done with your inner circle.
Providing support and feedback or having leisure time with your outer circle (inner circle included).

It is becoming a challenge when you fail to manage and constraint the outer circle from draining important time and energy away from your inner circle, leaving you with a feeling of unfulfillment.

Looking back at the end of day or coming to a standup with your team the day after, you might find yourself in the uncomfortable position to say: “I apologize for not being able to make much progress on our tasks, but my day was full of meetings yesterday” or “customer support had sooo many questions and needed my help and I got out of time”. Well, you’d better find that balance..

So here are my 6 tips to remediate the situation.

Tip1: Take the most out of your ceremonies

Ceremonies are things in your weekly or monthly calendar. Recurring events, like standups, sprint plannings, retrospectives, an all-hands meeting with the entire company, a management bi-weekly sync-up. People usually organize and plan their day around those meetings, they know they are happening, it is part of the working routine.

You and your team has made a contract with time, so make sure you squeeze every second. Come prepared, respect your team’s time, make that meeting matter and not delegate progress to another meeting because you failed to come ready for it.

Tip2: Challenge that meeting

“Meeting” is inherently a word with a negative disposition. “Honey, I had a great day today, full of meetings!” said no-one, ever. Meetings within your inner circle can be a tool though. While being remote, getting in a video call with a few teammates, sharing screen, doing pair programming and solving that damn thing that is troubling you the last few days, can be a great and fulfilling experience. It emulates physical interactions of getting together in a room to deliver something, set a closure to a cumbersome project, feel that accomplishment.

On the other hand, meetings from the outer circle can turn into a major distraction, a motivation killer, a waste. “Do you have 5 minutes to get your opinion on this spread sheet?”, “I really need your advice on this, can we get on a call?” and the list goes on. The odds of getting dragged into a meeting without being set in context or just for “staying in the loop” are nightmarish high.

So, challenge that meeting, is it really necessary? Can it be resolved async, via email or a chat thread? Most of the times it can. But, be respectful when you call the shots, when you play in the offense by having the “let’s get on a meeting” ball in your field. Question yourself the same way you challenge others:

Is this meeting really really necessary? Can it be resolved async?
Have I made it clear "why" I need this meeting both to myself and my peers?
Have I set the expectations about the goal and the outcome of this meeting both to myself and my peers?
Is that person really needed in that meeting?
Do I respect the time-box of the meeting? Am I disciplined enough to make sure it does not spill-over, I raise red flags and make it stay on track?

Asking those simple questions can make wonders.

Tip3: Turn off mobile notifications... forever

Mobile notifications is THE trojan horse for work to invade someone’s personal life. Unless there is something mission critical going around, there is NO reason to have mobile notifications turned on for your work email, Slack or Microsoft Teams messages evading your life. Even at working hours, we can always catch up on those messages in our computer screens, no?

Tip4: Mute that channel

If you are using Slack at work, there is that great feature of reading all your unread messages with one go, a great time saver. However, if you are joining various channels both from your inner and outer circle, that screen can easily become overwhelming. Distinguishing important information can turn to a tedious task and a big time waster.

The tip here is to split focus by keeping an open eye on the channels of your inner circle and muting the channels of your outer circle. If they need you, they will find you. After all you are just one @mention away.

Tip5: Set yourself away… forever

Both Slack and Microsoft Teams have controls on setting yourself away, snoozing notifications in the process. If you can live with setting yourself away forever, you can make a big impact on how others perceive your availability. You can respond at your own pace by defaulting to async without regrets.

A colleague is doing this with great success. She is usually very responsive but keeping her status away is setting the expectations right, setting the tone, no hard feelings or misunderstandings.

Tip6: Establish a focus mode routine

Some people might feel uncomfortable with Tip5, keeping their status on “away”, forever. The next best thing is segmenting your day into a continuous exchange of focus and general availability slots. Both Slack and Microsoft Teams support setting custom away messages.

I call this status the “🎯 Focus time” and set it to auto expire after an hour. During focus time, notifications are turned off, Slack is minimized and suddenly there comes THE opportunity to get that thing delivered, either in solo work or by working closely with one or two peers.

At the end of focus time, you can always get back online and check what happened in the in-between. After all, if they “really” need you, they can alway call you on the phone, right?

I hope you enjoyed my tips and got inspired on figuring out ways to make the best out of your working days. I am putting those tips to the test myself. Till next time…

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Nikos Vasileiou
Head of Engineering @ Transifex