Full Focus Friday (FFF) to reach clarity again?

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We all know that feeling: every day is spent on urgent topics, chasing time, trying to catch up on everything. The result: feeling constantly behind, and not being able to work on what’s important (but not urgent).

Personally, I don’t like to have all those “important” topics not being taken care of. All those “if only I had time” topics clutter my mind.

So I decided to test something I called FFF: Full Focus Friday. I blocked out a full Friday to work only on topics I decided.

:high_voltage: Rules:

  1. let your team know in advance
  2. block out the calendar
  3. make sure everyone knows you are still available for urgent topics that can’t wait, your “experiment” shouldn’t impact the team
  4. allow yourself only two (short) moments to check emails, Slack, and your Asana Inbox during the day
  5. absolutely no meetings, not even a coffee break with the team

:white_check_mark: Setup in Asana

  1. a dedicated project called FFF
  2. a dedicated section in My Tasks
  3. a rule to send any task in this section to the project
  4. a dropdown in the project to organize the list with options like “Big Boys”, “Quick Wins” and “Bonus”

:magnifying_glass_tilted_right: You shouldn’t work on something you usually do in a normal day. For example, if you write a newsletter every month, this is not a good candidate. But cleaning out a project, updating your LinkedIn profile, revamping a project, work on your vision…

:person_shrugging: So how did it go for me?

Glad you asked. It was “so-so”.

I started the day with a running session outside to get the blood pumping. Then moved on to the “Quick Wins” and it took me about 2h to tackle them all. It was already 11.30am.

I took an hour to catch up on emails and Inbox, I was afraid of a client needing something urgent. Followed by lunch and an important call with my co-founder.

My afternoon started at 1.30pm. Until 4pm (when I got the kids from the school), I was able to tackle a few bigs topics, and also spend another hour on emails and Inbox.

:telescope: Conclusion?

The main issue is that your business doesn’t stop running, so your emails and Asana Inbox fill up. I “lost” 2h that day just to stay in touch before the week-end.

However, the big benefit was that feeling of “skipping school” mixed with “there is no limit, I have the entire day ahead”.

I was able to tackle long standing issues, and that got me pumped up and motivated. BUT it didn’t really help my team, it was a very “self-centered” experiment.

Who wants to try?

Bastien, Asana Expert
iDO (Asana Partner: Services & Licenses)

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Interesting experiment, indeed!
I’m thinking of implementing something like this on Wednesdays.. :thinking:

I recall @Bryan_TeamKickstart , you practise something similar to this, right?

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@Richard_Sather - yes, and it’s the only way I ever get those important but not urgent things unstuck and also when I work on the operations of my company. I’ve adjusted it though to be 11am Friday to 11am Monday.

Priorities for Fri/Mon blocked off time:

  • Ops improvements
  • Important but not urgent work
  • And, now, as of last week, sprint planning for our apps

Though, I’m confident @Bastien_Siebman and you would still run circles around me in how you run your businesses. :slight_smile:

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If you had been on vacation, you would have somehow dealt with this reality while not doing the “stay in touch” part. So what if you applied that here?

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Because coming back from holiday is a stressful time and hard to deal with. So I didn’t want that “refreshing” FFF routine to turn into something stressful…

I discussed with the team this week and everybody agrees that missing a day will “cost” you between 1h and 2h when you get back to catch up. That’s crazy isn’t it ^^ so if you miss an entire week, that’s 5 days, you have between 5h and 10h of work to fit into your existing week just to catch up. No wonder it can take a week or two to catch up when coming back. And that’s a low number thanks to Asana…

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It is crazy. What would it take to fix that problem? That could be a real game-changer. What if you delegated more to your team so that they could make decisions and take more actions while you’re gone so you don’t have to deal with such a backlog? (This is probably veering into a whole separate discussion topic…)

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This is only possible if you can access everyone else’s email inbox… I know a partner who centralised everything into one person’s hands: this person receives all requests. If she is away, she can give the keys to someone else during her absence…

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This is very interesting indeed to see you write about it @Bastien_Siebman
I have been operating with NMF for about 5 years and I swear by it.
NMF = No Meeting Fridays.

It requires discipline and strategic approach when you start. I would say do not give up on it just yet.
Persevere for at least 3 months. This is when you will start getting ROI on this approach, after which it becomes business as usual.

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2 days to catch up on holiday stuff is such a waste.
This approach contributes to team’s wellbeing. A holiday does not mean the work does not get picked up and will need urgent attention on your return.

In fact, having that approach is a determinet to a business’ operational resilience.
Finding a mechanism to empower the team returning from holidays to fall straight into the oeprating engine is far more productive in my opinion.

THings that happened during holiday should naturally be picked up by any cycle of work (operational or project).

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I feel like this works ok until you realise you are client facing in the team, and important clients might require a meeting on Friday…

Actions could be picked up, but you still need to catchup on what was decided…