The DRS team had an interesting conversation at our fortnightly ‘The Way We Work’ meeting this week around the purpose and value of some of our routines and ceremonies and I was reminded of a couple of articles that I’d read earlier in the week:

Distributed teams are rewriting the rules of office(less) politics: distributed teams are rewriting the rules of officeless politics, which talks about the “cohabitation annoyances” that come with sharing the same space and the tyranny of the tacit expectations and norms that might not have anything to do with work itself. The article focuses on remote working as a solution to those challenges and it’s an option that members of the DRS team are increasingly adopting, not 100% of our time, but an afternoon or a day per week spent working from home, from Tonsley or from Vic Square in order to create some time for deep, focused work.

And related article, Quit Social Media. Your Career May Depend on It makes the point, in the context of using Social Media, that the ability to concentrate without distraction on hard tasks is becoming increasingly valuable in an increasingly complicated economy.

I think periods of deep, focused work are vital if the DRS team are to produce high quality outcomes for our customers, and I’m looking forward to our ongoing discussions about the best way for us to engineer a space and approach to our work that allows us to respond to customer demands in a busy, often frenetic environment, whilst still ensuring that we are able, and are comfortable as a team to allow each other to create a personal space for uninterrupted work.