I am an avid reader, and one that I read that received a permanent spot on my office bookshelf is Reimagining Workplace Well-being by Jessica Grossmeier, PhD, MPH. Given our team’s focus on our vision “Don’t Let Grants Stress You Out,” the connections between our workplace purpose (helping YOU!) and also ensuring that our team is working at a sustainable pace and not just avoiding burnout, but thriving individually and together, is something that I am always thinking about and learning from other about.

One of the things in the book that was not a surprise and connected with a lot of what our team looks at in our Agile in Nonprofits work was that, on average, a person is interrupted every 11 minutes at work. Every. 11. Minutes. (Somedays it may feel like more!?!) It is hard to get into “the flow state” with writing grants for our team or for you to provide meaningful feedback on the work we share with you if everyone is getting interrupted every 11 minutes.

Our team has been playing with a few things to try and combat the issue of interruptions on achieving a flow state of work – we have had Freedom Friday’s for nearly 2 years, where we try to avoid meetings so we prioritize deep work, we call out in Slack when we are going to focus on deep work and have a special emoji next to our status, and we recently have started to schedule deep work time so it is visible to the team for our plan and to avoid having meetings scheduled over that planned time.

I would love to hear what practices your team or organization has in place to minimize your interruptions and increase your deep work focus time. Comment below, it would be great to know your unique way of having deep work time.

Regardless, you are welcome to follow along on my reading adventures on GoodReads as I do review most of the business and team dynamics-related books that I read. If not, no worries, you can be sure some of the nuggets of what we are reading end up reflected in these notes each month!