I’m a huge nerd when it comes to the process of creative work (with an even nerdier focus on podcasting). I read a lot of books and articles about creativity, how to create and ship your best work, and running companies in non-traditional ways in order to better facilitate creative work.

Right now, it feels like the universe is trying to tell me something important in this regard. The same messages and themes are popping up in multiple places. For example…

1. I recently took a week of vacation and found it really hard to stop checking messages and truly unplug from work.
2. I read two great books: Deep Work by Cal Newport and It Doesn’t Have To Be Crazy At Work by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson.
3. We had our annual Pacific Content staff retreat, where we unplugged for three days and had an amazing time together as a team, socializing and working on a team-building project.

Here’s the BIG MESSAGE that I think life is trying to tell me right now:

Constant connectivity is not conducive to great creative work.

I know this is a somewhat obvious insight. However, constant connectivity is the default working environment for almost everyone.

Even though it hurts our creative work, it’s really hard to move away from this default, because there are built-in cultural expectations that everyone should be connected all the time, that we should respond to messages immediately, and that pretty much everything is urgent(!) and on fire (!!) all the time(!!!). If you don’t reply right away, you’re clearly a slacker – business moves at the speed of light and everyone needs to keep up… all the time. Newport nails what it’s like to work in the default zone:

“A culture of connectivity makes life easier in that it creates an environment where it becomes acceptable to run your day out of your inbox — responding to the latest missive with alacrity while others pile up behind it, all the while feeling satisfyingly productive.”

Needless to say, if you’re running your day out of your inbox, you’re not likely to be doing your best creative work. So whether you are a creator or a manager of creators or the owner of a business that produces creative work, if the goal is for you and your team to produce your best stuff, there is huge value in rethinking our default working environments and cultural norms.

Fried and Heinemeier describe today’s default office environments as “interruption factories” and ask readers to consider this:

“When was the last time you had three or even four completely uninterrupted hours to yourself and your work?”

I’m guessing for most people reading this, the answer is a LOOOONG time. The Basecamp clarion call is to “give people the uninterrupted time that great work demands.”

Newport’s book focuses on the same themes. We too easily and unconsciously spend the majority of our time doing “shallow work” like responding to email and instant messaging, checking social media, and participating in unnecessary meetings. The way to create truly great work is to create an environment that facilitates what Newport calls “deep work.” He even has a nifty little equation to describe it:

High-Quality Work Produced = (Time Spent) x (Intensity of Focus).

Intensity of Focus can’t happen if you’re constantly responding to emails, texts, and chat messages.

Our recent company retreat was an amazing example of this. We watched a fantastic new documentary about “industrial musicals” called “Bathtubs Over Broadway.” We then split into four teams and had several hours to write, rehearse, and perform our own industrial musicals. The results truly blew me away — I could not believe our team staged FOUR musicals that were so sophisticated, funny, and well-executed in such a short period of time.

Newport summarizes all this succinctly:

“To produce at your peak level you need to work for extended periods with full concentration on a single task free from distraction.”

That’s exactly what we did with our industrial musicals. And it was magic. The challenge for us is to move from an unplugged staff retreat back into the real world of making amazing podcasts in an environment currently filled with chat, email, video calls, and meetings.

So how do Newport, Fried, and Heinemeier Hansson suggest accomplishing this shift to a new way of working on a day-to-day basis?

Make deep work an intentional priority

Newport has built his calendar around deep work. Deep work is the foundation of his days, months, and years. He suggests many different ways that people can approach deep work, but all of them are intentional. Deep work does not happen by accident. You need to create boundaries (i.e. windows of disconnection), build a suitable environment, and prioritize deep work in your calendar.

Asynchronous communications

For the team at Basecamp, they made a lot of very intentional decisions about how their company works. Most interesting to me, they limit interruptions by mostly prioritizing asynchronous communications. I LOVE this quote:

“Following group chat at work is like being in an all-day meeting with random participants and no agenda. It’s completely exhausting.”

Basecamp has very consciously created a cultural expectation that immediate responses are not required unless something is truly urgent. You can focus on your most important work first and check the messages later. (And no one will judge you for it!)

Small decisions = big impact

Another brilliant idea: Basecamp treats their company as their most important product. And that means iterating the company and the way it works with the goal of constant improvement. Some of the ideas that they have implemented in this pursuit:

• They don’t require people to share their location. Staff can work from anywhere and location doesn’t matter.
• They don’t have notifications about who is online or offline. It doesn’t matter.
• Team-members with specialized knowledge have limited “office hours” when co-workers are allowed to ask questions and advice so that they are not interrupted unpredictably or too often.

Get a life

Constant connectivity + people working in different locations and time zones makes a default work day that bleeds into early mornings, evenings, and weekends. Yet both the Basecamp team and Newport very strongly emphasize the need to disconnect from work at the end of the day and on weekends. After 5 or 5:30pm, they shut work down and focus on their families, their hobbies, and relaxing. They don’t work weekends. Why? Time away from work makes their work better and their LIVES better.

Culture starts with leadership

Leaders and business owners are often the worst role models. They are the ones sending late night emails, early morning chat messages, working on weekends and vacations, etc. I’m 100% guilty as charged. I had several people tell me that it didn’t seem like I had much of a vacation because I replied to messages and chat. So change starts with showing leadership and setting new norms that support deep and creative work. (I have some work to do on this front…)

What will you do to make more of your best creative work?

All this is easy to say and hard to do.

Just in the last couple of hours writing this blog post, I’ve received 14 text messages, 5 phone calls, 17 emails, and have a backlog of about 50 Slack messages. The call of constant connectivity is strong.

To resist it, the environment and culture in which great creative work happens needs to be consciously designed and defended. What are you willing to do to make a change?

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