The Best Teams Aren't the Fastest Ones!

“The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.” — Terry Pratchett

A few years ago, one of my executive leaders announced: 'Speed is essential. Faster is better.'

More meetings. More updates. More Slack messages. More check-ins.

'Churn out more. More is better.'

As a manager, I thought my job was to keep things moving. Fast. Forward. Never stopping.

Then I started noticing something strange - The busiest teams weren't producing work that was any better than the calmer teams. 

Many times, it wasn't simple but wasn't rocket science either. 

You can't solve complexity by moving faster. You solve it by thinking intentionally. 

Somewhere along the way, many organizations started treating responsiveness as productivity.

A Slack message arrives - We answer.

An email appears - We respond.

A meeting invite lands - We accept.

By lunchtime, we all have the satisfied strut of hard working, busy people. 

But we haven't necessarily moved anything meaningful forward.

Cal Newport calls this the "hyperactive hive mind." A state where constant communication replaces concentrated thinking. And once I learned to recognize it, I started seeing it everywhere.

One of the most valuable lessons I took from Deep Work is that focus is no longer the default.

It's a choice. And increasingly, it's a rare one.

I remember working with a designer who was struggling to make progress on a particularly complex workflow.

There was a genuine pause in the pace. 

PMs kept adding requirements. Nothing seemed to click. 

Gradually, there was a frenetic increase in the number of 'check-in meetings' throughout the day.

The designer was asked to produce an iteration for review daily. Everyone was working harder. Nobody had the mental space to think deeper.

So I suggested she try something simple - Every morning, she blocked her calendar, put a Do Not Disturb message on the back of her chair. Turned on the DND on her Slack, put onm noise-cancelling headphones. No phone calls. No notifications. Just two hours of 'Deep focus' time. 

And it worked. The PMs were still given their updates, the iterations were meaningful, and the complexity was articulated intuitively. Within a week, she was able to sign off on the project successfully. 

The breakthrough didn't happen instantly, but because she was allowed the uninterrupted time and mind space to think freely.

We don't have to be busy!

Researchers from the University of California, Irvine found that after an interruption, it takes an average of more than 23 minutes to fully regain focus. There is a reason your brain feels exhausted after a day of jumping between messages, meetings, documents, and reviews.

Think about that.

Every notification isn't just a distraction. It is a unnecessary modern scourge of technology. As people managers, you have to be cognitive of how much distraction your team can handle.

The most valuable people on my teams were rarely the fastest.

In a previous post, I had mentioned how the most successful people in my team were the ones who paused long enough to ask:

• What is the problem we are actually solving?

• Who is affected if we get this wrong?

• What happens six months from now?

• Is this the real problem, or just the visible one?

Those questions create leverage. And that almost always beats speed every time.

This changed me

Over the years, I've become less interested in how busy people are. Everyone can appear busy, what interests me more is knowing if they are moving the needle on things that really matter. 

Often, that means:

• Fiercely protecting their focus time.

• Reducing unnecessary meetings.

• Encouraging thoughtful disagreement.

• Prioritizing clarity over urgency.

• Helping people zoom out before they dive in.

As a leader, my job is no longer to create motion, but to create an environment where my people can think, uninterrupted. 

Because while tools can accelerate work, they cannot replace judgment and the human ability to strategize on the move.

Takeaway

• Activity is not the same as progress.

• Deep work is becoming a competitive advantage.

• Context switching quietly destroys focus and creativity.

• Strategic thinking remains one of the most valuable human skills.

• Great managers don't just manage work. They protect the conditions required for good thinking.