Photo by Lisa from Pexels.
It’s good to catch up and thank you for making the time. I know you’re so busy.
We both bristle at this and are quick to correct it. We’re not so busy. Genuinely. Are we doing stuff? Yes. Does the volume of stuff we’re trying to get done outpace the number of waking hours in the day? Sure. Do unexpected bits of life show up at the worst possible time and push the list of things we’d hoped to achieve within the day ever further out of reach? Also, yes.
But busy is situational. It is not a perpetual state of being. At least it oughtn’t be.
We’ve both lived lives where “busy” was an identity. A badge of honor. A point of pride. A clever way, quite frankly, to not deal with any of the rapidly growing pile of things that were hard or uncomfortable or even just mildly unpleasant. And on the other side of using busy as a mask or an avoidance tool, it’s less appealing as a personality trait.
The other problem with busy is that the set of things that never get done are often the most important. That thing you keep putting off because you don’t have the time? Friend, it is very likely the thing that, were it completed, would give you more time. So we go around these loops at work. Too busy to do the things that would make us less busy. Feeling mildly guilty about our human frailty and hoping that some day our robot overlords will take enough of the load so we can finally, finally get to the stuff that matters.
There’s a lot of busyness in business
A lot of organizations run this way. Perhaps you’re reading this from inside one of them. We should say upfront that not busy doesn’t mean idle and it doesn’t mean stagnant. It means we have an answer for how to address the structural flaw of the Eisenhower Matrix where only the urgent stuff ever bubbles all the way to the top of the list.
Our solve for Important but Not Urgent work is a quarterly work week. Once a quarter, every quarter, we clear the decks. We plot work-week timing for the entire year in January. And then really try to treat the time as sacred. This means protecting work weeks from client work. Travel. Standing meetings. External calls. A full week to take down the stuff that falls on the floor when shit gets busy.
We stole quarterly work weeks from our time at Mozilla. Back then, it was dedicated time to get far-flung teams together to collaborate. Less about a solve for the Eisenhower Matrix. And more just a recognition that all work is not equal. And some work needs a wholly different structure and shape to get done.
In the RSG version, work weeks are dedicated space to chase stuff down. Anything from big vision, proactive-thinking stuff. To small, just-get-it-the-fuck-done execution stuff. It doesn’t actually matter. You can have a super-strategic work week in Q1 followed by a super-tactical work week in Q2. The trick isn’t that they are all one thing. The trick is that they happen on a set and predictable cadence.
The core idea behind work weeks isn’t even a Mozilla-specific invention. Lots of orgs have weird carve-outs for the work that never gets done on account of there being too much work to do. Google used to talk about 20% time. Many companies are proud of their no-meeting Wednesdays. Or Fridays. Or whatever. And they’re all trying to get at the same thing.
Good for you
When you tell people about work weeks, sometimes they get grumpy. Like, sure, that sounds great for you and your weird little company where you literally work on making work better. How novel that you and your utopian team get to have this thing to help you do your jobs and not feel like stress pancakes all the time. Neat! But out here in the real world? No, we don’t have that thing you’re describing and no one at my org would sign off on something like that.
Speaking in calming tones for a moment. You already know it. If your org doesn’t have dedicated time set aside for cross-team alignment, it’s almost impossible to manufacture it. And if you don’t have a way to shove very-close-but-not-yet-complete projects across the finish line, they linger. Big projects stall. Annual planning that sounded good in January never gets revisited. Because everyone is really busy.
So those things don’t happen. And for a quarter, maybe it’s fine. But for three quarters running? The crust accumulates. Every project is mostly done. And your team is mostly working on the right stuff. But it’s hard to cross anything off the todo list without a vocal asterisk about how it’s not done done. And the list itself starts to bow with every new addition. Worst of all, your laptop fan starts making that terrible whirring noise every time you open your machine.
That whirring noise is a sign you’re overdue for a work week.
Tab hoarding is not a strategy
You might have your own incredible productivity systems for tracking everything but for us, it’s tabs. Pinned tabs for all the daily stuff, sure. Several copies of the exact same doc open in different tabs across different browsers? Yes, good, obviously. But also a growing accretion of tabs that are more…miscellaneous.
Tabs about government programs around tariff response. Tabs from articles or interviews that we don’t want to lose, but can’t read right now. Tabs for studio kit we need for digital programs, or a new sticker printer we want to test out, or masonry restoration experts we want to talk to. They’re all work-related tabs. Probably several of them will make us better at our jobs, or better informed, or better equipped.
We talk to enough of you to know that many of you have a similar…well. It’s not really a system, right? Similar tendencies? Similar coping strategies? Similar behaviour, anyhow. For some of you it’s your inbox, or your whiteboard, instead of your tab strip, but the emotional relationship to it is the same. The depth of the tab hoard acts as a kind of barometer. Only instead of measuring the pressure in the atmosphere it measures the pressure in your work. The number of things trying to fit into too small a space. Part barometer, part sphygmomanometer.
So the tab strip keeps growing and the pressure keeps rising. And it gets to where the only way you can clear your tabs is to declare bankruptcy, or switch to a new laptop, or hope some wayward browser update destroys your saved state so you need to start fresh. And that shouldn’t feel like a relief but it does? Even though you know there’s good stuff in there. Stuff you want to do. Stuff that would be good for you, and your organization, if you could get to it. But you can’t.
And so, like, you can tell us that you’re too busy. That your company would never make the kind of time we’re talking about. But just so we’re clear, it’s not like the current system is working all that well, either.
How to start a revolution
If you’re in a position to move the entire culture where you work, then we honestly don’t know what you’re waiting for. The collective productivity, engagement, and morale wins of a well-run work week are impossible to overstate. Find a week sometime in the next month or two (it’s summer! at least in the northern hemisphere!) and send this email around to the team and let us know how it goes.
But if you can’t change the org unilaterally, don’t give up. Work weeks can be a very grassroots tool. Even if your organization can’t contain the idea of a work week (yet!), your team probably can. You just have to clear some calendar space.
In practical terms, you really need a full week. It takes the first day just to shake off the noise. There are loose ends to tie up, surprise calendar invites you need to push out, planning and intention-setting and all the rest of it. Even with a full week you might have something that intrudes — an utterly unmovable client meeting on Wednesday or whatever. The full week is how you absorb that hit without giving up all the gains. Find a week. No half-measures.
And we know. There are so many meetings. It’s impossible to move them all. But look. The meetings with your own team are within your collective control. A work week is mutual aid. You all need this work week and if you all lock eyes on it, you can give each other space and grace. The meetings with other teams are harder to push around, but the good news is that those cross-team meetings already have to deal with absences all the time. “The security team is at a conference.” “CS is in training.” “Finance is closing books for the quarter.” This week it’s just your team’s turn to be at a conference. If you can get your own team onside, including your own boss, you can usually get a hall pass for the other meetings as well.
When the logistical challenges here start to make your head spin, just come back to the core. What would you do if you had a week to just clear out backlog? What could you get done with 90 minutes uninterrupted? Talk about it with the team — what is the work that keeps being important, but keeps getting punted? That they know would make everything better if they could just have a morning to get it done. It’s a sign of an engaged team that they give a shit about the places things can be better. As it becomes clear to them that this work week might actually happen, they will start to visibly vibrate with creative energy. You might, too.
When we talk about work weeks, some people are surprisingly committed to the idea that they are impossible. They really want to fight about it, and prove to us they can’t ever have nice things. Okay? Maybe? But we think you can. So can your whole team. And it may seem like a subtle point but, as badges of honour go, a team that gets shit done is way better than a team that’s always busy.
— Melissa & Johnathan
