All the work while crying

The deadline effect and the equilibrium of agile processes.

I’ve been talking about this newsletter to a colleague today. I was able to say out loud the fact that I’m a bit scared and I’m avoiding or sometimes even sabotaging the idea of putting any effort over promoting this space of reflection.

Letizia Sechi, who repeatedly helped me about writing these posts, has told me more than one month ago that I should be promoting the newsletter somewhere else if I want to grow it and feel more connected and feel like I’m creating a community.

I’m not, I’m scared, my imposter syndrome is screaming, I’m scared of who is going to read my thoughts. And I’m also lazy, because of course creating variations of the content for other platforms requires more effort at the moment. Anyway the result is that I created Instagram and LinkedIn pages for Already, Yet two weeks ago and they are empty wastelands.

I hope I’ll be able to put this extra effort sooner than later. Meanwhile, if you happen to read me with some sort of regularity, or you just arrived here, you can help me by promoting this newsletter to some friends, or even better by sending me some valuable feedback for motivation (harsh feedback and critiques are well or even better accepted).

Let's see if I can apply some learning from this week retrospective to make it happen.

Takeaways (TL:DR)

When we have or we introduce urgency into our workflow, we could stress out but we also usually get very productive and focused. Urgency creates focus and can be forced by a correct prioritisation process. Agile practices allow us to virtually generate small and manageable tasks with low risk/value but strong urgency and allow us to create and feed a virtuous equilibrium of focused workload without too much stress.

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Weekly retrospective

Last week was one of those frenzy filled time slots with a huge deadline at the end and a lot to do to met its requirements.

In the end it was a great week of productive and focused work. It is an abused meme — and I’ll share a few instances along today's post — that creative and less creative professionals have a tendency of procrastinating and then get all the things done in a sprint that becomes faster as near to the infamous deadline we are.

I'm sure there are deeper socio/psycho/neuro (logical) reasons behind this, but I also noticed a few things that contribute to the increased levels of performance.

Focused work

The urgency of the deadline is a valuable excuse to ignore the rest of the tasks and we all know how effective it is to give our undivided attention to something. For as much as we like to measure ourselves to this, humans are not multitasking. Context switching was one of the most complained issues in my previous work environment, and is one of the plagues of consultancies although not an exclusive of these kind of jobs.

As we feel the pressure of juggling so many things as the same time as a demonstration of our value, we fragmented our attention and became accustomed at being less efficient overall.

Having a compelling deadline, works as a telescopic lens and reduce our depth of field over a narrower scope of work. This is possible because we also feel less social pressure as the deadline looks like a valid alibi to ignore the rest of our duties for some time.

Of course this works if applied to short, confined periods of time, but it works. It grants you that focus and allows you to deliver, not only in time for the deadline, but often also with a higher quality of outputs thanks to concentration and activation a deep flow states achieved with a reduced influx of distractions.

Procrastination monkey

Of course the increased sense of urgency also works as a stronger motivation to activate our adult self (which I talked about in this previous post) and control our procrastination monkey. I get the same feeling every morning fighting with the alarm at snooze shots. The “deadline” of being late is always the one that easily brings me out of bed, way more than personal motivations.

The renewed sense of control is able to deflect self-induced distraction as well as the alibi of the deadline is able to protect us from external distractions.

Again, the result is a fertile ground for entering flow states of focus and get things done.

Agile practices and induced urgency through prioritisation

I was reflecting over this and I linked this thoughts to agile practices.

I believe the value of agile resides elsewhere. Breaking down tasks and decisions in small chunks, in order to be able to prioritise, reprioritise, let things drop or bring them back with more attention, enabling changes of direction and adapt to the situation is the definition of agility itself, outside of scrum rituals and sprints. Agility and agile practices are of course based on principles that should be able to create order and organisation with less boundaries as possible, strict and rigid processes are the death of this approach.

And yet, if you think about it, breaking down tasks and prioritising them over very short time slots is — consciously or not — a way to leverage that urgency, that deadline-effect that increase focus and productivity. Of course, the great advantage of breaking things down to small, manageable pieces is that you are (not) always balancing the stress of short delivery dates with the relaxation of low risks and low losses in case of failure.

But this is probably another little advantage of working with agile practices and their various evolutions, prioritising small actions on short time span is creating a frequent and regular sense of urgency, that triggers all the sensations and situations I described in the previous paragraphs (and many more, positive and negative).

After all, eustress is actually a thing in medicine.

In conclusion

There are probably more “noble” forms of inspiration/motivation and more healthy practices to stay focused and productive, for sure there are. Virtually creating urgency that doesn't really exist could even look like a shortcut in this sense, but it works. I don't have a strong opinion about it, and probably there's no need to judge, as a matter of facts, it just works. As well as a lot of other things in life to make it good or bad we just need to balance it in some way.

Do you ever create urgency on purpose for yourself or your team in order to trigger focus or productivity?
Which strategies you actuate to create or induce this situation?
Do you manage to balance it and make it a positive framework?
Let me know in the comments.

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Thanks for reading to the finish and see you next week!

Tobia

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