Flow State
Hey!
Welcome back to another week of musings. As you're receiving this issue, we're observing President's Day in the US.
I hope you had a restorative weekend! Or if you're observing the same holiday, I hope you're enjoying your free time and short week.
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Things I discovered in the past week
Amazon keeps restricting its Kindle platform. I've been thinking of getting a Kobo Libra to test it out.
Most Companies Experience Weekly Outages from a the State of Resiliency report. It's a good read, and reminder that we need to do better by our customers!
I was thinking of what to write this week, and it occurred to me that I've been so focused these past few weeks that I feel like I'm in the zone of projects and delegation. I've been feeling "in the zone" through multiple meetings that covered several topics throughout the weeks. And while I don't like to admit it, it is due to clarity of priorities and time management.
All high-performing organizations look to develop a flow state among their people and teams.
Benefits
There are a lot of texts written around flow state, but I'll point out some of the benefits commonly associated with it.
You're completely involved in what you're doing because you're actively doing the work and receiving constant feedback on the job. This involvement creates a sense of clarity and timelessness. You don't feel time passes; when you're already in the zone, you get into deep work and can think thoroughly about the problem.
Dangers
On the opposite extreme of having clarity is the creation of hyper-focus. This creates a tunnel vision that might close you to other options or solutions for the problem you're looking at. In other cases, it creates silos, as you or your team are working without outside influence from other teams in the organization.
I'm sure you've encountered an example of someone "disappearing" and coming up months later with a solution to a problem that either no longer exists or the context has changed. Thus, the solution no longer matches the situation.
Our Role to Play
You must provide the team with a clear vision to enable team flow. This generally involves guarding them from changing leadership messages or thinking ahead of risks or blockers during a project.
Another example I've seen is using mob programming, which means the whole team takes one task at a time. It is like an extreme version of pair programming; while it might seem excessive, it talks more about keeping the team in a flow state, engaged, and getting constant feedback through all the conversations.
Another way to enable flow for teams is doing strategies like the ones described by the DORA team in Accelerate. One of the main ideas involves continuous delivery of your software to production, such that the feedback time of your code being produced to see production traffic goes down to minutes.
Help Ourselves
But returning to my "locked-in" state, I feel I got there by focusing on my top three initiatives. That meant everything else needed to be delegated, deferred, or canceled.
This is interesting because, in most cases, I'm still the owner of those projects. However, it takes a different amount of time and effort to delegate and follow up on a task than to do all the project tasks myself. I can schedule these tasks to allow enough time during a given week to work on a priority instead of a delegated project.
Your turn!
How do you manage your flow state if you're always in meetings? Do you have enough time in a flow state during a week, a month, or a quarter? Let me know your thoughts by replying to this email!
Happy coding!
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