Ron Friedman

And that's not the same thing as collaboration.

If you look at the most successful collaborators, what they tend to do is they tend to cycle between deep work

and then collaborative work to fine-tune those ideas.

And just to take a step back, so what are the super teams actually doing differently?

The first key strength that we found, and we found three of them, the first key strength is that they do a better job of getting more done by better managing their time, energy, and attention.

And I'm sure that's an idea that is hugely appealing both to you and to listeners of the show because you're so good at identifying these great productivity tips.

That's what they're doing at the team level.

I think at most organizations, people are left to scavenge for focus time alone.

And what we found is that, in fact, a lot of the productivity tips that people use to create opportunities for deep work end up slowing down the team because one person's deep work is another person's bottleneck.

And so if everyone is individually focused

incorporating these productivity tips like they're turning off their email or they're batching their email or they're turning off notifications, that tends to slow the team down.

The best teams are collaborative in their approach to focus.

They're doing things like setting aside dedicated focus blocks for

90 minutes where everyone can focus together without having to respond to emails.

Or they're doing things like meeting free days where people have the opportunity to just really get things done without having to constantly be interrupted.

And so the best teams are taking a team approach to solving this focus problem.

One of my favorite tips in the book is something I call meeting guidelines.

And meeting guidelines are a simple fix to unproductive meetings.

So here's what meeting guidelines mean.

It means getting clear with your team on what deserves a meeting and what doesn't.