With this Tidbit, I want to leave you with a tool that I have seen help take teams from being always busy and getting nothing done, to teams that had space to breathe while consistently shipping customer value. With that, your Tuesday Tidbit...
Be less busy; get more done.
If you’ve worked at Ramsey Solutions long enough you have encountered the question “are we embracing slack time?” It’s part of the Ask Kanban Game that helps teams learn great questions they can ask during a Standup. Slack is, simply stated, a buffer you create in your day by not filling every moment with work. Before you freak at the idea of “not being busy, even for a minute” just stop and consider the last time you had a meeting that ended at the same time another started. Now imagine that second meeting is on the other side of the building. How likely are you to walk there in time for the start of that other meeting? Oh, you’re a speed walker? Now imagine you had to go to the bathroom and you got stopped in the hallway by a friend. If only you had a five to ten minute buffer, or slack, in your schedule so you could breathe.
All the work we do carries with it unforeseeable events that inevitably make a task take more time. The more tasks we try to pack into our workflow system in the name of efficiency, the more we actually log jam our workflow when any of these inevitable unforeseeable events occur. The less work you have started, the less unforeseeable events you add to your system. But, having the discipline to do less work and instead schedule buffer time is easier said than done.
Earlier this year, I was walking a team through the idea of embracing Slack and they decided to change the word “embracing” and instead ask “are we PROTECTING slack time?” I love this because it helps to illustrate that slack is something that the healthiest teams intentionally insert into their systems and then protect using a series of progressive questions when deciding “what should I do today?”
After I had a similar conversation with a different team, the following list of “slack protecting questions” was created and I want to share it with you guys so you too can start inserting and protecting slack in your own workflow.
Slack Protecting Questions
To help my team, I ask myself these questions, in this order, throughout the day:
Do I have work in flight I can finish?
We favor finishing over starting. It gets solutions to the customer. Your first priority is always the problem you're currently solving (At Ramsey, we use Jira cards to visualize this work). If you’re blocked, consider how to remove the blocker. If you have nothing in flight or can't progress your work, move to the next question.
Can I help the rest of the team with something?
Ask your teammates if there's anything that you can do to collaborate or lend a hand. If there's nothing you can do to help and you have headroom in your work in progress, or WIP limits, feel free to pull in a pullable ticket from a previous column. If there's no room to help progress in-flight work, move to the next question.
Is there un-started work I can begin?
If there is room within a column’s WIP limit, feel free to pull in another ticket from your current backlog of work the team has committed to start. If the WIP limit is saturated, move to the next question.
Can I help get work ready?
Look in the team’s idea backlog and help refine those ideas into work that your team can discuss. If there's nothing to decompose in the backlog, ask your Product/Request Manager, Tech Lead, or Designer how you can help move discovery efforts forward. If you can't do these things without distracting the team, move to the next question.
“But Tristan, couldn’t we always be refining new ideas?” Great question! Ideas are plentiful. What we mean here is to help fully validate an idea the team already has queued. The rule of thumb here is still to try and keep a near term, just in time focus. If you find yourself refining ideas that don’t quite fit the current objective or focus, don’t force it. Move to the next question.
Should I get out of the way?
This is when you actually reach “slack time” activities. Slack Time is when you are out of options to move your team's work forward. At this point, the best thing for you to do is to get out of the way. Make sure your slack time doesn't distract your team or create extra work for specific disciplines. Most people mistakenly jump here right after question 1. If, as an example, you are a fast copy writer, imagine how often you would be in “Slack Time” if all you did was ask question number 1. (I’m not picking on writers. I know it because I am one.)
Ideas for Slack Time activities:
Personal development time. Learn something. Make a presentation. What can you be doing to grow yourself and your team?
Time to think. AKA whitespace time. Take a walk. Find a quiet place to sit without any notifications and just write or think. Whiteboards are your friend here.
Time to research or “spike” an idea. Try out new patterns and tech. Poke at a new feature idea. Look into removing an old dependency. Try to make a change to an area of the application that you don't know well, just as a learning exercise.
Work on the system, not in it. Can you automate something? Improve linting, add pre-commit hooks, setup tests to run on CI, introduce a new code formatter.
Dependency updates that don’t have QA impact. Test runners, linting tools, or anything else that doesn’t have impact on how the app/site functions is a candidate for slack time. (Engineering heavy example)
Create documentation. Share what you have learned.
Improve test coverage. Add tests or improve existing tests.
Learn about a different discipline. Sit with designers, writers, or copy editors (oh my). Attend a different team's standup. Ask to sit in on a leadership, marketing or product management meeting. Great way to keep a pulse on what is coming up!
Get to know your domain. We should all strive to be experts in our domain. Comb through your domain (systems, sites, apps, infrastructure, tooling, etc.) and study it. Search for unintended side effects and hidden issues. Try to break something. Push the boundaries.
I hope this helps you guys unlock the idea of Slack in your system. As always, I welcome your feedback, pushback, observations, questions and concerns on this and any of the other Tidbits. A big shout out to Adrien Liard for the Slack picture above. I highly encourage you to go check out his Limit Work In Progress blog.