How do teams maximize productivity while in a virtual environment? Actually, we have never been set up to be more productive.
Today we speak to Jeremy Redleaf, the founder of Caveday, a social community where people unite globally to get focus work done.
I went into "the cave" a couple of times over the last few weeks and got more done in three hours than I typically get done in a week.
Jeremy Redleaf is a storyteller, entrepreneur, and ginger. He is the head honcho at Brackets Creative, a co-founder of cave day, and the founder of Odd Job Nation. He makes films experiences and companies in service of making people feel more alive.
One day Jeremy was struggling with a writing project. He found that he was never writing long enough. He blurted out that he needed a “cave day.” He made up some rules and went off the grid for a whole day by himself. With two collaborators, Jake Kahana and Molly Sonsteng, they created the social format, Caveday.
Caveday is the world’s most focused community where entrepreneurs, artists, creators, business owners, teams, and employees commit to focusing on their projects for one, two, or three hours at a time.
To get people to focus together requires particularly aggressive facilitation. It requires a group dynamic, where someone’s empowered to say, we’re going to do this thing now! Jeremy suggests that team members facilitate their own caves by designating someone as the facilitator and doing the following:
(1) Set an amount of time for everyone to focus on singular work
(2) Share with the team what you will work on
(3) Check-in at the end to hold people accountable
On Caveday, teams have achieved great success together, individuals have written Oscar-winning screenplays, books, poetry, and made incredible progress on their projects.
Incredible freedom to do what is really important in your life comes from the discipline of setting aside a few hours to do deep work.
Why is it so hard to focus?
“Our brains are wired to avoid existential challenges. So, if I'm writing the next great novel, when I don't know the answer, my brain goes, Danger, danger, escape, escape! By creating the Caveday environment, we're all in this together. We prompt people to share some of the vulnerability what's going, what's going on for them, as they do their work, we're allowing people to co-regulate and stay out of that danger zone, stay out of that hypo arousal or hyperarousal, those states that get us out of our ability to function and tackle the work we need to do.”
The ability to have the corner office, to have a place to truly focus, has been reserved for top management. Now that we are remote, we have given the gift of focus to many layers down in the organization.
Keys to working in a remote environment are:
1. Share when you are on and off the grid
2. Share how you work
3. Share what your life is like
4. Share when you do your best work
5. Share how you expect people to escalate an emergency
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