The Retrospector

The dynamics of a team can be a very fragile thing. As with many things, when properly maintained it can be a very powerful machine. How do you maintain your team? One good way is to help create an environment for each member to reach a fully concentrated state.

Many people have terms for being in a state of total concentration. A state where you are able to focus completely on the task at hand without distractions of any kind. A state where you are the most productive you can possibly be.

Generally speaking, I’ve known most technical people such as programmers, architects, system administrators, or designers to be much more productive when they’re able to concentrate. This probably holds true for a great deal of non-technical employees where a high level of concentration is needed to do the job, but I’m in IT…so that’s what I’ll write about.

So, I’ve managed to quantify 5 steps to helping your productivity machine get to that most optimized state of efficiency. For the next week or so, I’ll be posting the steps in a series for the following topics:

0. Coin a cool term for being fully concentrated
1. Identify how your employees concentrate and perform
2. Create a process where team members are most effective
3. Encourage collaboration in the group time, and support total isolation for the individual time.
4. Create the appropriate atmosphere
5. Don’t be afraid to change and experiment.

The first item may sound pretty unnecessary as a step of its own. Basically, everyone on the team needs to be on common ground with terminology. Managers, peers, and even business users need to understand what it is you’re talking about when you talk about your schedule. The other reason I threw this in here is because it’s probably the shortest piece of this series, and sort of makes for a semi-humorous intro to the rest of the steps. So here we go…

0. Coin a cool term for being fully concentrated

Some terms that I’ve heard to describe the total state of concentration where people can really produce some of their best work are:

• Crankin’
• Totally Focused
• Spewing (as in spewing code)

And probably the best of them all, and one I’ve been using since I first heard it:

• In The Zone (something I only ever heard used in sports-related descriptions for someone that was “on fire” and just couldn’t mess up.)

Now, I have to admit something. When I hear that someone is “In the Zone” I can picture a number of strange scenarios. The best analogy that comes to mind is someone being in the end-zone after making a touchdown at a football game. The person has struggled very hard to get there, and is at a total performance peak. Things are going well, and any slightest penalty could totally slow down momentum of the team as a whole even after one or two people took the ball to the end-zone.

Scientific people, engineers, doctors, etc. all need to be able to reach that “on fire” state where they just perform flawlessly with no mistakes and total coordination of their thoughts in order to really produce. Why wouldn’t you want to help get your team members to be able to focus and perform in the same manner? Stay tuned for more steps on how to help your IT team concentrate…

In the meantime, I’m really curious what other names people call their “zone”. What do you say to someone when you’re in the middle of concentrating on the super-difficult piece of code you’ve been working all morning to get your head around? How to you let someone know you’re going to go get “in the zone” for the afternoon and don’t wan’t to be interrupted? How many of you turn off your phone’s ringer when you’re busy like I do? Continue on to Part II.

Tags: concentration, productivity, focus, IT, team+building, management