The typical day in the typical office goes something like this:
This day is long and busy, but it’s not necessarily productive. Every meeting, email, and phone call fragments attention and prevents real work from getting done. Taken together, these interruptions are a wasp’s nest dropped into the picnic of productivity.
There are stacks of studies about the cost of interruption. Researchers at George Mason University found that people wrote shorter, lower-quality essays when interrupted in the middle of their work. Researchers at the University of California, Irvine, reported that it takes on average twenty-three minutes for distracted workers to return to their tasks. (We plan to read more of these studies, right after we answer this text message.)
No doubt about it: Fragmentation hurts productivity. Of course, nobody wants to work this way. We all want to get important work done. And we know that meaningful work, especially the kind of creative effort needed to solve big problems, requires long, uninterrupted blocks of time.
That’s one of the best aspects of a sprint: It gives you an excuse to work the way you want to work, with a clear calendar and one important goal to address. There are no context switches between different projects, and no random interruptions. A sprint day looks like this:
You’ll start at 10 a.m. and end at 5 p.m., with an hour-long lunch in between. That’s right: There are only six working hours in the typical sprint day. Longer hours don’t equal better results. By getting the right people together, structuring the activities, and eliminating distraction, we’ve found that it’s possible to make rapid progress while working a reasonable schedule.
Sprints require high energy and focus, but the team won’t be able to give that effort if they’re stressed out or fatigued. By starting at 10 a.m., we give everyone time to check email and feel caught up before the day begins. By ending before people get too tired, we ensure the energy level stays high throughout the week.
This step is obvious, but important. The sprint team must be in the same room Monday through Thursday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Friday’s test starts a little earlier, at 9 a.m.
Why five days? We tried shorter sprints, but they were exhausting and didn’t allow time to build and test a prototype. We’ve experimented with a six-week sprint, a monthlong sprint, and a ten-day sprint. We never accomplished significantly more than we did in a week. Weekends caused a loss of continuity. Distractions and procrastination crept in. And more time to work made us more attached to our ideas and, in turn, less willing to learn from our colleagues or our customers.
Five days provide enough urgency to sharpen focus and cut out useless debate, but enough breathing room to build and test a prototype without working to exhaustion. And because most companies use a five-day workweek, it’s feasible to slot a five-day sprint into existing schedules.
Your team will take a short morning break (around 11:30 a.m.), an hour-long lunch (around 1 p.m.), and a short afternoon break (around 3:30 p.m.). These breaks are a sort of “pressure-release valve,” allowing people to rest their brains and catch up on work happening outside the sprint.
Inside the sprint room, everybody will be 100 percent focused on the sprint’s challenge. The entire team must shut their laptops and put away their phones.
In a sprint, time is precious, and we can’t afford distractions in the room. So we have a simple rule: No laptops, phones, or iPads allowed. No virtual-reality headsets. If you’re reading this book in the future, no holograms. If you’re reading it in the past, no Game Boys.
These devices can suck the momentum out of a sprint. If you’re looking at a screen, you’re not paying attention to what’s going on in the room, so you won’t be able to help the team. What’s worse, you’re unconsciously saying, “This work isn’t interesting.”
Going without devices can be uncomfortable at first, but it’s freeing. And don’t worry. You won’t be completely cut off. To make sure nobody misses anything important, there are two exceptions to the no-device rule:
1. It’s okay to check your device during a break.
2. It’s okay to leave the room to check your device. At any time. No judgment. Take a call, check an email, tweet a Tweet, whatever—just take it outside.
We also use devices for some specific purposes: when we need to show something to the whole team, and on Thursday for prototyping. See, we’re not so mean.
Let people know ahead of time that the sprint will be device-free, and also let them know that they can step out of the room at any time. That escape hatch allows busy people to participate in the sprint without losing track of their regular jobs. The combination of a clear schedule and no devices gives your team a huge supply of raw attention. To make the best use of that time and attention, you need a good workspace. It won’t have to be fancy, but it will need some whiteboards.
BadgerCo (again, not the company’s real name) had one of the nicest offices we’d ever seen in San Francisco. A prime location in the SoMa neighborhood, a remodeled building with exposed wood beams, polished concrete, and lots and lots of glass. But there was one problem: the whiteboard.
For starters, it was tiny. Three feet wide at the most. The surface was grayish pink from being written on and erased so many times, and that dingy haze would not come off, no matter what we sprayed on it. BadgerCo also suffered from a common workplace ailment: worn-out whiteboard markers. The result was gray ink on a gray background . . . not a recipe for visibility.
The whiteboard’s small surface area hampered us. We drew out a map showing how customers would discover BadgerCo’s new mobile app, and it filled almost all of the available space. Then BadgerCo’s head of engineering started explaining how their subscription plans worked. The plan structure was important stuff, so Braden did his best to capture it on what was left of the whiteboard.
But there just wasn’t room. For a few minutes, Braden tried to MacGyver his way out of it, writing cramped words in the margins and even taping notebook paper to the wall. Finally, we called time-out and walked to Office Depot to buy some of those giant poster-size Post-it notes. It cost us about an hour and a half and taught us an important lesson: Check the whiteboards before the sprint starts.
• • •
Why did we burn 90 minutes with BadgerCo just to get more writing space? We’ve found that magic happens when we use big whiteboards to solve problems. As humans, our short-term memory is not all that good, but our spatial memory is awesome. A sprint room, plastered with notes, diagrams, printouts, and more, takes advantage of that spatial memory. The room itself becomes a sort of shared brain for the team. As our friend Tim Brown, CEO of the design firm IDEO, writes in his book Change by Design: “The simultaneous visibility of these project materials helps us identify patterns and encourages creative synthesis to occur much more readily than when these resources are hidden away in file folders, notebooks, or PowerPoint decks.”
At minimum, you’ll need two big whiteboards. That will provide enough space to do most of the sprint activities (you’ll still have to take photos and do some erasing and reorganizing as you go) and enough to keep the most important notes visible for the entire week. If there aren’t two whiteboards already mounted to the wall in your sprint room, there are a few easy ways to add more:
These come in small and giant sizes. The small ones have a lot of unusable space down by the floor, and they shake when you draw on them. The giant ones cost a lot more, but they’re actually usable.
IdeaPaint
IdeaPaint is paint that turns regular walls into whiteboards. It works great on smooth walls, and less great on rough walls. One word of advice: If you use IdeaPaint, be sure to paint all the walls. If you don’t, it’s just a matter of time before somebody writes on the non-IdeaPaint wall by accident.
Paper
If you can’t get hold of whiteboards, paper is better than nothing. Those poster-size Post-it notes are pricey but easy to arrange and swap when you make mistakes. Butcher paper provides serious surface area, but sticking it to the wall requires serious ingenuity.
Ideally, you should run your sprint in the same room all day, every day. Unfortunately, that’s not always possible. We’re surprised how many tech companies make space for foosball tables, video games, and even music rooms—all fun but seldom used—yet can’t dedicate a room to their most important project. If you have to share your sprint room, try to get rolling whiteboards that you can take with you. Don’t let the team’s “shared brain” be erased overnight.
Even if you don’t have a conference room to yourself, you can always make an ad hoc space for your sprint by using rolling whiteboards as partitions. It’s kind of like you’re a kid again, building a fort out of chairs and blankets. Tape stuff to walls, move around furniture—do what you have to do to create a good workspace.
Before starting your sprint, you’ll need a bunch of basic office supplies, including sticky notes, markers, pens, Time Timers (see below), and regular old printer paper. You’ll also need healthy snacks to keep up the team’s energy. We’ve got strong opinions about which supplies are best, so we’ve included a shopping list at the end of the book.