Focus Fridays transformed how we work. We changed our leadership rhythm to reduce chaos, boost output, and protect deep work time.

Life is hectic at Yonder, a B2B SaaS company, especially because we promote a do-whatever-it-takes mentality. We go above and beyond to close a deal, and to make and keep a customer happy. No matter if it means a tender presentation on Sunday morning in the Middle East, an urgent hotfix release on Friday afternoon, or an extra on-site meeting to discuss and solve issues a customer might have with our product.

So far, so good. Running like crazy is the right attitude for startup life, but can you run relentlessly? I don’t think so.

That’s why we have updated our leadership rhythm recently, to regularly allow some time to get stuff done.

The Tool: Our Leadership Rhythm

The term “leadership rhythm” is borrowed from the “battle rhythm” in the military, which describes the frequency and synchronization between all the leadership meetings.

Following an off-site discussion with my CIO, I used a recent town hall meeting to explain to our team how our new leadership rhythm works:

The week starts with the Executive Team Meeting on Monday morning, followed by parallel team meetings in all teams. In this way, information from the executive team meeting can be distributed across the entire team very quickly, and at lunchtime on Monday the entire team knows the priorities for the week.

Monday afternoons and Tuesday mornings are reserved for face-to-face meetings between the team leaders and the team members. They are our tool of choice to discuss the work of each individual, and also personal topics.

Every second week on Tuesday morning, we hold a planning priorities meeting between the product and IT teams to discuss and define the priorities of the next sprint.

So now it’s only Tuesday lunchtime, and the majority of the coordination work for the week is done.

Comes Wednesday, comes interaction day. In our hybrid work setup, Wednesday is the day when most people come to the office physically, so we don’t want to spend this entire day in Zoom calls but be able to interact with each other. Remember, time blocking might be an awesome technique to get stuff done individually, but it makes you inaccessible to your team.

Furthermore, to make the progress of the current sprint more visible, we hold an extended daily standup on Wednesdays. During this meeting, the IT team explains the progress, and the product team gives an update on what’s toasting in the sales and customer world.

So, with all the coordination and interaction that already took place until Wednesday evening, what shall we do with the rest of the week?

I propose to get stuff done.

The Result: Focus Fridays

Getting stuff done is best done when it is crystal clear what everybody has to do, and when you aren’t constantly disturbed by office banter, phone calls, and other urgencies.

That’s why we introduced Focus Fridays. Generally, team members work for themselves on Fridays, not disturbing other team members with calls, Slack messages, and questions. Remember, there are four other days of the week to coordinate yourself, and most of the questions that come up on a Friday can be put on the agenda of one of the team meetings or F2F meetings on the following Monday.

Focus Fridays have two core benefits. First, people don’t have to work on weekends to be undisturbed (which happened often before we introduced Focus Fridays). Second, people have a fair chance of getting their stuff done until Friday evening. In this way, they can use the weekend to rest and recover. Startup life is hectic and tiring, so it is important to have some rest regularly.

The Limitations: Urgencies Follow Murphy’s Law

Outages never happen on a Monday morning, but rather on Fridays around 15:00. The same is true with additional information requirements in a tender process — they usually reach us on Fridays, because our customers want to get stuff off their tables before the weekend.

It is pretty clear that in a startup, urgencies need to be addressed even on Focus Fridays. With a little bit of organization and discipline, rules can be set up so that the key players are still reachable on Focus Fridays in case there is an urgency.

But remember that when there is an urgency every Friday, you’d rather sort out the root causes of those emergencies before setting up work processes.