Hey there,

I’ve been thinking a lot about deep work recently.

It’s something that’s vital for people in scaling businesses to have space to do. The cognitive costs of context switching and lack of uninterrupted thinking time can really affect productivity, creativity and strategic thinking.

But as businesses scale rapidly, preserving the focused attention and deep work capabilities of teams against increasing communication overhead and distractions becomes much harder.

I took a look at Microsoft’s latest Work Trend Index and the stats illustrating this attention economy problem for growth businesses are pretty sobering:

• during typical work hours, employees are interrupted every two minutes on average by meetings, emails or messaging pings. Factoring in activity outside of core hours, and the total reaches an almost unbelievable 275 daily interruptions.
• More than half of meetings happen ad-hoc rather than being scheduled in advance.
• Microsoft’s data shows spikes in frantic multi-tasking right before meetings, with a 122% increase in PowerPoint editing activity in the 10 minutes leading up to a meeting start time as people scramble to get their stuff ready.
• After hours chats are up 15% year-over-year, with 58 messages now arriving before or after traditional work hours on average.
• Late night meetings after 8pm have risen 16% annually as more work happens across time zones.

That sounds like pretty much every growth business I work with.

But that led me to think about the hidden cost of all this activity. While on the surface as a founder you might see this level of activity as a symptom of the growth your business is experiencing, but the hidden shadow of that intensity is something you need to think about.

It’s no surprise then that nearly half of employees report their work feeling chaotic and fragmented, with over half of leaders describing the same experience.

The cumulative effect of all this is what Cal Newport calls “solitude deprivation” – a state where we spend almost zero time alone with our own thoughts, free from external inputs and stimuli.

This quote from his book Deep Work sums things up nicely: “Researchers have found that it takes an average of 25 minutes to recover from an interruption and return to the original task, if you do at all…which means we’re never caught up with our lives.”

I’ve certainly experienced this jarring contrast between days with long, uninterrupted stretches for focused deep work versus those with frequent context shifts and multiple Slack and WhatsApp chats happening at the same time.

On the former, my thinking is exponentially richer – ideas have time to marinate and evolve with nuance. With the benefit of thinking time I come up with better insights that and make innovative connections between things that I just didn’t have the headspace to do on busy days.

On the latter, my fragmented attention means that my cognition is surface-level and lacks depth.

There’s a real loss there that comes from constant intensity. It’s hard to quantify but it’s definitely there.

So if you extrapolate that loss across your workforce, your business is missing out on a lot of valuable contributions from talented folk who are just too busy to think deeply about their work.

Growing a business is hard work and teams are always going to be busy. But savvy founders get smart about how they design their business operating system to give people some space to think.

Give people space to think properly about the job you’re asking them to do. They’ll do a better job and enjoy it more as a result

So what could this look like in practice?

I recommend founders start by looking at meetings and communications tools (Slack, WhatsApp, email, Teams etc).

These are the big two areas where your business growth sucks people’s attention away.

Meetings are probably an unavoidable evil for most businesses, but being more planned and intentional about the purpose of meetings really helps. Having clear outcomes that you want from time spent together is simple to do, but surprisingly rare in practice.

Setting company-wide “deep work” periods where meetings are banned and communication expectations are minimal is also worth a try – think things like “No meetings on Wednesday afternoons” or even full deep work days on Fridays.

You might also try allowing your teams to go off-line for chunks of time by setting specific windows when they need to be available to collaborate with others for meetings, calls and Slack. Outside those times, they are free to concentrate on their work.

I’ve also seen success with companies putting in batch communication cycles.

Rather than responding to every Slack alert or email immediately, founders can encourage set schedules for batching communication – like checking messages at 9am, 1pm and 5pm only. Team members can disable notifications in between.

Having a “red alert” channel with alerts left on that’s used when there is a genuine crisis can play a part too.

Founders running companies with their own offices can also think about the physical environment promotes opportunities for deep thinking. That might be small drop-in offices, quiet rooms or booths with sound-absorbing furnishings.

As a founder, the way you manage your time, availability and space for deep work sets an example for your teams.

If you model the work behaviours you want to see, that makes more difference to what happens across the business than most founders realise.

Let’s be realistic – no company can eliminate all interruptions.

But you can be proactive about how you design your operating system to reduce cognitive load.

Being thoughtful about workflows, communication norms and how you use comms tools to optimise for team focus can yield huge dividends as you scale.

That’s it for this week. I’ll be back next week with three interesting links for founders scaling their businesses that I’ve spotted recently.

best,
-sw