How can a rooster help you to stop working overtime?
At the end of the working day, I hear a rooster’s crow and then jump around for five minutes doing a silly dance in my living room.
It helps me to timebox my working hours and increase efficiency. It sounds a bit crazy, right? Let me share how I got there.
All solutions are starting with facing the problem. And sometimes, when the problem is ours we might be the last ones to see it.
For quite some time now, I have noticed the pattern of having trouble to just close my laptop after my working time is over. By the afternoon I usually get warmed up, at full speed and I really want to make something of all my ideas and action items in my to-do list. Who would say that inspiration can be a problem?
I sat down and thought about the root causes. I found several ‘whys’ behind it:
- Lately, I didn’t have enough focus time during the day when I can really produce things that matter to me. My working hours were filled with remote facilitation — jumping from meeting to meeting, doing small action here and there, quick sparring, and helping a colleague. All that had one thing in common: it is shallow work. It doesn’t necessarily mean that it is not important or beneficial, but very often it is not the best use of our resources. To all interested in this topic, I can warmly recommend the book “Deep Work” by Cal Newport. This book truly revolutionized my attitude towards focus and distractions.
- I often don’t have a conscious decision upfront until what time do I work, so I decide it ad-hoc (and we all know how that ends).
- Even if I decide to work until certain hours, I don’t have any clear trigger that the time has come, especially in the home office setup.
Can you relate to some of those challenges?
I believe that lack of time to focus on what really matters and produce value is the trigger for a chain reaction that culminates in unconscious prolongation of working hours. In order to tackle this, I started an initiative together with my amazing team of agile coaches to ensure focus and work in progress limit for us as a team (More on that in another story!).
Still, while the lack of focus time was making it all worse, I was honest enough to myself to admit that changing that will not miraculously transform everything.
Therefore, I decided to tackle the things that were fully under my control: my working time. And here, a rooster comes into play.
As a first step, I committed to my working hours. I decided to have a hard stop at 17.30.
However, I tried that approach before and it didn’t quite work — I would often just forget about the time, being really deep in my tasks and the next time I would look at the time it would be already evening.
I suddenly got the simplest idea: I can put myself an alarm for the end of the working time. Everybody who knows me knows that I am not a fan of alarms. So that is why I thought it is an amazing idea, to really shake me up. And I decided to went for what seemed to be one of the most irritating and unexpected sound - a rooster yelling loudly: cock-a-doodle-doo (or ‘kukuriku’, depending where you are coming from 🙂).
I promised both to myself and to my partner in life (and in crime) that whatever happens, and whatever I am doing I will just close my laptop whenever rooster starts with its “song”. It is hard to think about it as a song, but I am doing my best to keep the positivity.
I was aware that this hard stop may have different downsides:
- It might leave me with some half-finished tasks, undocumented genius thoughts, unread Slack messages, and a messy browser with a bunch of tabs that are open for “later”.
- Having a hard stop might impact the number of things that I am being able to deliver.
- The abrupt ending might leave me without peace of mind at the end of the day, as we know from the research our brain is more likely to remember and want to come back to unfinished work than deal with problems you’ve already handled (This interesting effect is a robust finding in psychology and it is called Zeigarnik Effect).
Thinking about these unwanted effects, I realized that they are actually an amazing motivator to change the way I work:
- Fixed working hours will help me to prioritize and really use the maximum of my time working — it is quite easy to be productive when you can just add working hours! What we are actually doing there is spending the resources that we don’t have in order to avoid prioritization and hard decisions like saying ‘no’ to tasks, or sometimes even harder, saying ‘no’ to people. It is something like going into a negative balance on your credit card because you cannot decide what not to buy.
- The negative experience of an abrupt stop will help me to start wrapping up earlier. Sometimes it will mean saying no to other tasks and interactions.
- Even if I don’t manage to wrap things up — and I am quite sure that will still be days like these, I want to create a habit that helps me to shake off the thoughts about unresolved tasks in my private time. That is when I introduced a dance after a rooster sound. I choose a lively song, turn the volume really loud, and make all kinds of crazy-jumping-maniac movements in my living room. I do my best to engage my partner in it, for extra fun. And it works! Five minutes of energetic reset. I am a firm believer that there is (almost) nothing that 5 min of jumping around and a silly dance cannot improve.
Although simple behavior often cannot solve the root causes, it can move us from being stale to being active, from being responsive to taking responsibility. Also, it has secondary benefits: if we change one part of the system, we affect other parts by nature. We start noticing simple facts that we didn’t see before (e.g. that our resources at work are limited, although working overtime can mask it well). These seemingly small changes help us to gain momentum to create lasting positive effects.
So, at the end of the working day, I hear a rooster’s crow and then jump around for five minutes doing a silly dance in my living room.
What is your move?
