Cal Newport

All right.

A couple things I'll tell you right off the bat.

Make workloads transparent.

Who is working on what?

Do not let that exist implicitly implied by a bunch of messages and static, you know, stack Slack channel transcripts.

Here is a central place where we keep track of who is working on what task.

The central place needs a holding pin for things that need to be done eventually but that no one is working on.

Do not play the game of all potential work has to be distributed among people.

And now you have each individual with these huge workloads that are unworkable at any moment and they have to kind of figure out how to juggle all these things and try to make progress on some but not others.

Keep the workload transparent and have a place for things that need to be worked on but no individual is working on in the moment.

have clear work in progress limits for how much any one individual should be doing.

Two, you need docket clearing meetings at least twice a week.

These are meetings where your team gets together and you review a shared document where when anything new pops up on any team member's plate as something that needs to be discussed or potentially done, an issue to be handled, a task to pursue, there's a shared document called a docket where you put it.

So it's off your mind.

You don't email it out.

You don't jump on a Slack channel.

You don't call an impromptu meeting right there.

You put it in the docket.

It's a shared Google Doc.

Two or three times a week, your team gets together and goes through that Google Doc thing by thing.