I wrote an internal Slack bot that my team uses to coordinate “deep work sessions”. It creates a thread, we say what we plan to do for the next 45-90 minutes (the time is up to the person who invokes the bot), and then we have an understanding that we will all be unreachable for that duration. When it’s over, the bot prompts everyone to say what they did. It’s simple, but I find it to be effective at squashing distractions and getting real work done.
I see a lot of people do this voluntarily through online services with strangers. Even my neighborhood Facebook group was coordinating one of these at a cafe with a lot of interest.
Yeah, it was modeled after doing an in-person session like that and realizing that I liked it. Nobody is forced to do it, but by doing it over Slack they are aware that it's happening and know to expect not to expect an immediate response from those participating.
Not the OP but a reminder to "tell me what you did in the last 45 mins" is definitely some level of micro-management. Daily check ins can be reasonable for a high velocity project... every 45 mins seems overkill unless you are war-room / disaster response mode.
If a team needs this frequent check ins there is either a misalignment of goals via too many cooks (PM/PO) in the kitchen, or there is a serious lack of trust in the team from the top down.
It was modeled after “deep work” sessions I have participated in the past (with non-colleagues) where saying what I worked on at the end was a useful reflection and to get in the habit of not (e.g.) getting sucked into responding to an email that came in during the session. I can understand the skepticism of it, but the value is in writing them not in reading them. It's not required and some people don't do it.
