Time and Space to Think Produce Better Performance
I recently visited a client of ours on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, and the trip came back to me as I reflected on time and space and how people work best.
On my way to their offices, I was keen to walk through their new facility, the result of a team effort between design consultants and efficiency engineers. The client had been excited to show me around, and I could tell that they were proud of the result.
It had an open floor plan, sightlines of the harbor everywhere you looked, an Italian-made barista-grade coffee machine, plus a table tennis table in its very own room. Someone designed the place for people to be together all of the time — and that was the point.
“We built it for collaboration,” my tour guide/client stated. “It’s to bring our people closer together.”
I nodded, because it really was a lovely space and they meant well.
The Introvert’s Voice
But there was a quiet voice in the back of my head — the introvert’s voice.
It was the same voice that has kept me sane through thirty-five years of policing and twenty-five years of delivering professional coaching and facilitating team and leadership workshops.
It was asking a simple question: where does anyone actually think in here?
I know how I work best.
So, if you put me in a room full of people all day, I can perform, teach, facilitate, and hold the energy throughout the workshop.
But once the session is finished, I then need a closed door and forty-five minutes of nobody, or I’ve got nothing left to give the next room.
I love to facilitate. I feel I have developed a certain level of competence in this area. After all, I am a Certified Speaking Professional – so my peers have confirmed that I can educate, entertain, and inspire. And while I am there, at the front of the room, in workshops, one-on-one coaching, and keynoting, I am 150% focused on the humans in the room.
But as soon as it ends, my drive home is always in silence. I am recharging and refueling, Phil.
The Best Way to Work Is The Way that Works for You
Does this sound the least bit familiar? I have a feeling that it does, because many of us have felt the same tension. We all know how we work the best – what brings out our best ideas and personal performance.
For years I half-believed that made me the exception — the one who couldn’t spend time with the always-on, the open-plan, the “just text me” crowd.
It turns out I had it backward.
And so, do many, if not most, of our workplaces.
We confused “together” with “productive.”
Somewhere along the way we decided that collaboration means constant contact.
The Art of Gathering
You may well be familiar with Priya Parker’s brilliant book, The Art of Gathering. And if so, you can be forgiven for telling me that ‘community’ is what makes work worth doing — and you would be right, and so is Priya Parker.
Priya’s seminal work is often read as a case (or a cause) for coming together. Still, if you read it closely, you will also see that it is really an argument against the purposeless version of coming together.
You will likely have experienced them yourself: the standing meeting that nobody questions, the ‘huddle’ called out of habit or as an instant response to something with little thought given to its need, and those offsite meetings with no clear reason to exist.
She and the focus-time research are pointing at the same enemy from opposite ends — one is against constant contact, the other against empty assembly.
Neither is a cheerleader for the always-on energy.
A Place for Solitude
Solitude and gathering were never designed to be rivals.
Protect the quiet, and you don’t starve the community — you give it something worth gathering for.
But in many workplaces, the focus remains on more meetings, more communication channels, and more little green dots showing that everybody is online, and therefore available.
The thinking is that if people are talking to each other all day, surely-to-goodness great ideas will naturally follow.
Extroverts Need Quiet Time Too
But it’s also, for a lot of us, actually exhausting — and not just for the (us) introverts.
When every hour is interruptible, nobody gets to the bottom of a hard problem.
We skim. We react. We bring half a thought to the meeting because that’s all we had time to form.
And here is the part I didn’t expect: it isn’t only draining on the quiet ones.
It’s quietly draining the team and, in turn, our performance.
Protect Focused Work
What triggered this week’s article was reading a new piece in Harvard Business Review by social psychologist Ron Friedman that put words to something I have felt in my bones for decades.
His team studied more than 6,000 knowledge workers to identify what separates genuinely high-performing teams from the rest. What he found didn’t surprise me a bit. It isn’t the perks or working remotely versus in-office. What moves the needle is not even a modern technical advancement.
High-performing teams protect focused work
That is why the office tour stayed with me. The best teams do not just gather well; they also make room for thinking.
Not the table tennis table.
Not the coffee machine.
Not maximizing the hours people spend bouncing off each other.
The teams that pulled ahead were the ones that gave their people the time and the quiet to think deeply, solve problems on their own, and then bring something worth having back to the group.
As Friedman puts it:
Collaboration depends on giving people the conditions to think — and then contribute a better idea.
Read that again if you’re an introvert, because it’s the sentence I wish someone had handed me at age twenty-five — or twenty, if I am truly honest.
Your need for focus isn’t a personality flaw you’ve been managing around the edges of “real” teamwork. It’s the raw material of teamwork.
The quiet is where the contribution gets made.
Early Adopters of Truth
Those introverts among us have been early adopters of a truth that the research has now caught up with. The fact is, you cannot pour from an empty cup, and you certainly cannot bring a well-thought-out idea to a meeting or a conversation without the mental space to shape it first.
If you are a reader, books such as Quiet, ThinkBait, Hyper Focus, In-distract-able (currently on my reading table), and Finding Focus could help expand this idea further.
Time and Space: Three Actions You Can Take This Week
You don’t need a renovation. You need a bit of discipline about how the hours get spent.
1. Build a focus block and defend it as you would a meeting.
Put ninety minutes on the calendar, mark it busy, and treat it as if a critical client were in the room — because, in a sense, the most important one is your own best thinking.
If it isn’t protected, it doesn’t exist.
The calendar is where your real priorities show up, not the mission statement on the wall.
For myself, I block off a complete day each month for deep thinking and content creation – and I know that if I don’t do that, it won’t happen. I am not perfect at it, but the practice makes a big difference in what I produce. Time in my “bubble” is the protected time when I give growth the best chance to occur.
2. Give the team a shared quiet.
Individual focus time works better when it isn’t some hidden mutiny against the norm.
Try a meeting-free morning or an agreed-upon window when nobody expects an instant reply.
When you set the expectation that quiet is a team standard rather than a personal escape, introverts stop apologizing for it, and extroverts discover they needed it too.
3. Turn down the always-on.
Not every message needs a green dot and a two-minute response time.
Agree, as a team, that a thoughtful, slightly slower response beats the instant, half-baked reply every time.
You’ll be amazed how much of the “urgent” was really just habit.
This week’s challenge
Protect one block this week — ninety minutes, door shut, notifications off, one hard thing to think about — and notice what you actually produce when you’re not being interrupted every eight minutes.
Then do the braver thing: tell one colleague you’re doing it and why. You might permit them to do the same.
The best amenity in your office was never going to be the coffee or the table tennis room.
It’s the quiet you’re allowed to protect— and the trust that when you emerge, you’ll bring something worth sharing.
