Employing Differences, Episode 64: Can we take a break?

Karen: 0:09

Welcome to Employing Differences, a conversation about exploring the collaborative space between individuals.

Paul: 0:16

I'm Paul Tevis.

Karen: 0:17

And I'm Karen Gimnig.

Paul: 0:19

Each episode, we start with a question and we see where it takes us. This week's question is, "Can we take a break?"

Karen: 0:28

So if your instant answer to that was, "no!" we should talk. What we're really pointing to here is that if you are running so tightly, or you know, so many deadlines, or so much going on that there is no breathing space for your organization or your community, probably you're actually functioning below your capacity in terms of output. Also, likely below your theoretical ability for quality, for efficiency. There's a lot of things that if you're always going full out all the time and not taking a break, that you won't get the same kind of outputs that you're probably aiming for.

Paul: 1:18

Yeah. The technical term for running below 100% capacity is slack. We're not talking about the the messaging app here. But there's actually a fair bit of study and research in a lot of different systems about the importance of slack in improving overall productivity and ability to get things done. In some of the workshops that I teach, I occasionally talk about how a freeway and I happen to live near Los Angeles. So inevitably, I'm thinking about the LA freeways that a freeway operating at 100% capacity is a parking lot. It is as full of cars as it possibly could be, and none of them are getting anywhere. And so lots of systems actually, when they try to operate, as they get closer and closer to 100% of capacity, they fall over. This also shows up in computer systems and in servers, where you start to get above about 80% capacity, and you get into what's called a buckle zone, which means that they start to respond slower and slower and slower. They start to take more time to swap between things, and it just kind of falls over. And what's fascinating is that even people who understand how those systems work still try to operate human systems at 100% capacity. We don't think about the value of building in slack to the ways that we work, even when we know these things. It's a continual frustration that I kind of have with other people and with myself, because I do it to me. I schedul myself and I book myself out, and then I'm exhausted. And what I and others discover is that when we do that, we have no capacity to respond to whatever comes up. And so there's a bunch of things about how taking a break isn't just about sort of that recharge, that I need to get the energy back. It's actually about making sure that we have enough breaks that we're actually able to continue operating without falling over and falling down and breaking down and breaking apart.

Karen: 3:39

So I think then this begs the question, what do we do with a break? Which may be literally just stopping work, go on vacation, you know. So those sorts of things, hopefully are built into cycles that people are taking vacations and holidays and things like that, and we just stop. And so that's a more obvious one. But I want to sort of get into thinking about what else might we do with slack? So if we're functioning as a team trying to get the thing done, what are we doing with that lightened load space. And I think that the first thing to be really clear about is although we'll talk a little bit about what to do with it. One of the really essential defining elements of slack is that it doesn't have a goal.

Paul: 4:32

Yeah, I worked in an organization once where they kind of tried to build this in in the engineering teams, the product development teams where they had a practice they called Future Focused Fridays, which was every other Friday was supposed to be sort of set aside for unscheduled just figure out whatever you want to work on. If you want that's professional development, if you want to be getting better at stuff. If you want to create some space for to do some innovation around "Hey, we're working on things." What was fascinating about it was that there was one group of people within that organization the software engineers who held pretty closely to like,"Hey, we need to not schedule anything on this because it's Futured Focused Friday." But the QA engineers, were inevitably using the future focus Friday to catch up on all the downstream work that had been landing on them. And so at one point, I remember that having this dialogue, or help having this dialogue between a couple of people on a team, like suddenly realizing that like QA engineers didn't get Future Focus Friday, because of the way that that worked. And so one of things I always watch for is if we're trying to create slack, do we actually have it? Or are we just actually catching up on all the things that we didn't get done that we were scheduled to do? Because if that's the case, we don't really have slack in the schedule, we don't really have that space. We're pretending that we do, but we don't.

Karen: 6:00

Yeah, I think that's such an easy trap. It's certainly what happens to me. So if we're not gonna use it to catch up on our work, and we're not simply like leaving town, taking a total vacation, putting our feet up on the beach, whatever, what are we doing in that space? We talked about a recent episode about play, and I think that's a big piece of it. I think it can also be sort of experimentation. It can also be relationship building. So it might be a long lunch out with the team where we're just chatting about things with, again, no particular objective, but we're just spending some time together. So I think it can go on a lot of different directions. And really, the secret, I suspect, to making good use of slack is to be fairly curious about self and others and think, "What would feel good to do in this time?" What would feel engaging, what would feel, possibly creative, possibly innovative, but even that, you probably don't want to push too far. What just feels like relational, engaged kind of space, or alternatively, space with enough quiet to relate and engage with myself. It might not be with others in the team, or it might. It might be with myself. But what feels like that? Which could be reading up on something I was excited to learn about that I thought I might apply to my work. It could be, you know, going down a road of playing out some piece of programming or experimenting, or "Let's see. I don't know that we're really ever going to build this thing, but where does that thing go?" Or in a team or even a community it could be? We're just gonna get together with some markers and some paper and see what sticks. Were just going to start drawing and writing things, and where are we with that? With, again, no particular objective, but some place to kind of let ideas flow and engage with each other.

Paul: 8:12

Part of the reason we're talking about this topic this week, is that this is kind of a slack week for me. I've had a bunch of work that I've been really focused on the last few weeks, and that kind of finished up on Friday. And I was sort of looking and I realized this would be a good week to kind of do as much unstructuring as I could. And I will admit, yesterday, I spent a bit of time catching up on stuff meant to get done previously. But what I tend to do in those is pay attention to what I'm energized by. For me, it's about following the thread. When I get to that point, okay, cool. Like, I don't have anything, you know, really scheduled out for this day or that day or whatever. For me, it's a show up and see what happens. What pulls me towards it? And what is giving me energy by doing it? So I'm very much kind of pay attention to and if I find myself going, "You know, I was thinking this afternoon that I'd maybe read this book and try to catch up on it. I've been meaning to want to read this book for a while, I've got some space to do it." And I get two pages in and I'm not feeling it, "I go great, I'm going to do something else." For me, there's also a piece of that, that's about recognizing and kind of restoring my autonomy. That if we feel our schedule is dictated to us and we're having to had to do all these things to get to this point, then in that slack space, it's very much about the "I'm gonna do what I want." I get to do what I want. I can reassert some control. So those are kind of two of the things. And in groups. I think that's actually important to give people within the group everybody has the autonomy to decide what they want to do. And so if they want to do stuff together, that's great. And if they don't, that's great too. And also, to encourage them just whatever, whatever is restorative, whatever is giving you energy, whatever you're finding yourself drawn to do, do that.

Karen: 10:13

Thank you bring up an interesting point. And that the piece about how, "Well, yesterday I did a bunch of catch-up things, and now I'm in my slack time?" That might be a thing to schedule. If you're finding that your slack days or windows are getting filled in with catch-up, then what that says to me is that perhaps you need to schedule a catch-up day and then a slack day. Something that actually builds that piece in. Because I'm like you. I'm not going to do slack well if I'm feeling buried in catch-up.

Paul: 10:50

One of the things that plays into this is noticing what is the useful rhythm for yourself and for your teams and your organizations to create that. Maybe it's an every other Friday thing in your team. Maybe it's a two days every quarter sort of thing. Maybe it's a week, every however often, and then maybe you kind of go, "I know I was planning on doing it, but here's what it is." Really try to create some space around that, create some awareness of it. And recognizing that it's also going to change depending on the work and stress load of what's going on. And that that's okay. Like, it is one of the things where oftentimes we think we should be able to be at that sort of steady state of productivity. We get into the groove, and once we get there, and once we get that solid, right, then we can just keep that up. And we talk a lot in the Agile space about this idea of sustainable pace. That we're operating at a pace that we can kind of keep going forever, we're not burning people out. And sustainable pace isn't actually smooth and linear all the time. Sustainable pace actually has its ups and downs as well. I do a lot of study and work actually around physical strength building. One of the things that I've encountered in some of the work that I've done, the things I've been digging into in that is actually the ways that our bodies respond to these periods of basically over-stress and recovery. Because we're always kind of trying to ramp up, we will get to a point where that ramp becomes unsustainable, and then we end up taking a break, not when we decide to, but because our body has decided it's going to break down, and we're going to have an injury and then we're going to, we're going to really reset. Whereas the the actual sustainable version of that isn't linear, it's actually very wavy, where you have these higher peaks and lower valleys, and your body adapts in a very different way. And I think for me is maybe way more resonant with the way that we work, the way that that teams work. The way that the work that we do is it's never straight and linear. It's way up and down. And I think, for me, it's been an important realization that that's okay. And that that's actually normal and natural. And that's a useful way to approach it. So you can't always say we're going to work for four weeks, and then we'll do this thing. You also sometimes need to be able to go, "You know, those four weeks are going to be really busy. And they're really critical. And that's okay, so what are we going to need to do to build in to recover from that, so that we can continue to operate sustainably as we go from there?"

Karen: 13:43

Yeah, I was thinking that the similar thing of my daughter's trapeze artist training school. They have a couple of things. One is that, in a seven day week you know, circus kids are pretty interested in keeping at it. And they tell them they need one day a week that is not only no circus, but no work. And then every seven or eight weeks, they have what's called Rest Week. It's named that; it's on the schedule. They still gather and they still do things. They keep some cardio going and some different pieces, but they are not doing heavy training in their area. Because if they don't honor those things and if you want to be a professional circus performer, a pulled muscle's a very big deal. And so that there are really a lot around this what is healthy for us as a team, as a unit, as a group, and as individuals. And I think our bodies are very aligned with our brains. I think we need all of that built in, in the same way.

Paul: 14:48

Yeah. And and I think that's also just sort of about looking at the planning horizon. We're not training for next week. We're training for 10-20-30 years from now. And it's a similar thing in organizations and teams and groups. Productivity is a long term play. If we can continue to perform at a very high level over a long period of time, that's great. Sometimes that means that next week isn't going to be particularly productive. And I think we can get so focused on, "I have so much to do. There is atremendously long list of things that I needed to do. And so if I'm not productive all the time, I'm not making any progress on it." And, and that way lies burnout, that way lies sort of relationship breakdown, that way lies all of these different things. So what we're really talking about with this idea of "Can we take a break?" is really around making sure that we're working in a sustainable way, that we're actually able to absorb and process the stresses that we've been going through, and maybe even learn something from them.

Karen: 16:05

So I just want to track a little bit of where we've been. We started with, "Can I take a break?" and noticing that if the answer is no, then we need to work on this, because breaks and slack time are really essential. If we don't have slack, we have a couple of things. One is we get the gridlock, parking lot kind of situation, and the other is that we get injury. And whether that's conflict and relationship injury, or physical injuries actually can happen, we don't keep our productivity and also we just get sludge. We just get bogged down. And so in order to avoid all of those things, we are proposing that you want to schedule in and very intentionally take time that we're calling slack time, that doesn't have a particular goal or objective attached to it that really is engaging, where we are interested, where we are energized, where we are excited, and following the energy to wherever it takes us. And that having a certain amount of that maybe it's every other Frida, maybe it's something else but having a certain amount of hat built in and built in in a way that it doesn't get eaten u by catch-up day and doesn't turn into the the default "when I can catch up on things" but is actually true, honore slack time to follow the thin s that excite us will actual y in the long run mak us more productive, more effici nt, more healthy, and more abl to meet ou

Paul: 17:33

Well, that's gonna do it for us today. Until next time, I'm Paul Tevis.

Karen: 17:37

I'm Karen Gimnig. And his has been Employing ifferences.