How to Reboot Collaboration in a Remote Team Without Being on Zoom All Day

Become a team again with only a few hours each day.

Remote teams today have it harder:

• Misaligned time zones & cultures.
• Days full of endless Zoom meetings.
• Reliance on ticketing systems to “collaborate” with teammates.

It’s no wonder I see team members craving “solo” work to escape it all.

But solo work destroys the flow of value.

• Customer problems take longer to solve.
• Tasks get completed, not working solutions.
• Knowledge stays with individuals, not spread across the team.
• Defects stay hidden until the pieces crash together at the end.

Working alone ends up making it harder for teams to be successful and exhausts them.

I’m not saying teams can’t pull a rabbit out of a hat and deliver value when its members work solo. Many survive working like this by grinding it out. But relying on a hat trick to deliver value is no way to survive long-term.

And organizations suffer, too.

• You miss deadlines consistently.
• Work piles up faster than you can get it done.
• Your stakeholders wonder why nothing ever gets finished.
• Customers see your team as a black hole where all requests go to die.
• Users find workaround solutions because they can’t afford to deal with your team’s slow pace and poor quality.

How do we fix this?

You can reduce the suffering and simplify the life of your team with one powerful teaming secret.

And you can do it:

• Without being on Zoom calls all day.
• With diversely skilled team members.
• Without giving up individual “alone” time.
• With a few hours of overlap across time zones.

Over time, I’ve built up a technique for solving this problem: the 1–1–1 Framework for Extreme Focus and Flow.

It’s potent for productivity, helping one of my teams achieve more in a month than in two years. Unbelievable, I know, but true. This team had folks spread across the company, applying their unique skills on many teams. Getting everyone in the same room at the same time to focus required bribes and threats. Not really, but you get the point.

Spinning plates, working alone, and waiting on others sucks the life out of flow.

So, let’s remove the veil of mystery over this framework.

The 1-1-1 Framework for Extreme Focus and Flow

Focus requires a target.

In my experience, when we have too much in flight, we waste time, effort, and energy. This could stem from serving on many teams, having many goals, or starting all requests at once.

It’s a losing game of:

• Costly errors
• Divided focus
• Context switching

Everything takes longer and requires unnecessary effort when teams work like this.

The 1-1-1 Framework provides a quick fix to collaborative woes. It involves three elements:

• 1 Team: Each member fully dedicates to one team.
• 1 Goal: A single clear target for the team.
• 1 Item: The team completes one valuable customer solution at a time.

Boom! Instant productivity at a steady, relaxed, sustainable pace. I can feel all the stress of multitasking leaving my body just thinking about it.

Reveal pure lean flow by taking it up another notch (1-1-1+1).

You can achieve more breathtaking results by adding 1 to the 1-1-1 framework—1 task per item in focus for the team.

All the brilliant minds now focus like a laser on one task. This allows for better decision-making, higher quality, and knowledge cross-pollination. Focus amps up to the extreme, and all the benefits get turned up to eleven.

Your value flow will reach the mirage we always chase—finishing sooner with less effort.

If this sounds too good to be true, let me tell you another real story.

I had a data science team who applied this single-task approach. What used to take the team six months to deliver changed to less than two weeks. Defect-riddled work became defect-free. The team used to stress out, jumping between tasks to help each other. Now, the default was helping each other to get tasks done with quality. And stakeholders and customers loved it.

Do you think this team kept up this practice? You bet it did.

The 1-1-1 (+1) Framework for Focus and Flow will bring peak, easy delivery of value to your team.

Teaming Methods: How we make all this work.

I apply three methods for teaming within the framework.

The team can use and combine these as they want based on the work at hand.

The only constraint is one goal, team, item, and task (for pairing and mobbing). Let’s dive into the nuts and bolts of these three methods.

Method 1: Individual Scatter-Gather (Many Minds, Many Keyboards, Many Tasks).

This method is akin to divide and conquer.

You still only have one team, one goal, and one work item in focus. But you can have many tasks in flight, up to one per teammate.

The technique works great for simple, known tasks that you can divvy up, such as end-to-end testing.

One thing to watch out for: don’t let individual activity wander too far for too long.

It’s not the typical scatter-gather that you see in the wild where everybody’s off to do their own thing for long periods of time. You want to keep team shared understanding strong. So, you need to reintegrate the individual work back into the team mind often. I have seen every two hours work best for teams in the same time zone, and once per day for teams across many. But each team can figure out what works for them.

The key is to gather on a frequent basis—at least daily.

Also, don’t limit the scatter to individuals. You can scatter individuals, pairs, or mobs. What are pairs and mobs? I’m glad you asked.

Method 2: Pairing (Two Minds, One Keyboard, One Task).

Pairing has two team members sharing one keyboard to work together on one task.

It most often follows a driver-navigator pattern.

A strict style of doing the pattern has the navigator guiding the smart typist at the keyboard. Nothing gets typed unless instructed by the navigator. Navigators guide at a level of detail that matches the experience level of the driver. The pair switches roles at a set time interval or an event like starting a new task.

Pairs usually play around with how strictly they follow the pattern.

I’ve found many advantages of pairing on my teams:

• Knowledge pooling from both brains.
• Rapid Cross-pollination of knowledge.
• Better defect prevention and detection.
• Cross-functional problem-solving from many perspectives.
• Higher-quality decision-making (two minds are better than one).

All these benefits add up to delivering potential value sooner, and who doesn’t want that?

Warning: I’ve noticed the high-bandwidth collaboration of pairing wears you out. It’s intense and exhausting to collaborate like this. So, doing it in short bursts helps.

If you like the results of pairing, wait until you try mobbing.

Method 3: Mobbing (Many Minds, One Keyboard, One Task).

Mobbing occurs when more than two team members (up to the whole team) share the same keyboard for the same task.

It follows the same driver-navigator pattern as pairing with one addition—the mob. The mob exists to help the navigator guide the driver. You now have every mind and capability on the team coming together to focus. Frequent rotation continues. But now members rotate between the mob, the navigator, and the driver.

Again, like with pairing, the team can play around with how all this works based on their context.

I love mobbing. I’ve found it takes all the benefits of pairing and shifts them into overdrive. You are bringing the entire system of work into the room to focus on one task at the same time with a quality mindset. With mobbing, you no longer have to wait to get your teammate’s input—they’re right there.

Mobbing is the purest expression of lean flow I’ve ever used.

Why you will not be on Zoom all day.

Without the waste of context switching and solo work, you can relax.

Many teams using the 1-1-1 (+1) framework tell me they get more work done in a few hours than they get done in a week. Some say they get more done than in two weeks.

So, if you can now finish one to two weeks of work in a few hours, you can afford to slow down and collaborate at an easy pace.

This is precisely what my teams do. And it works well for remote teams spread across time zones (as long as there is 1–3 hours of overlap). They collaborate in the time zone overlap using mobbing and pairing. Then, they scatter, pair, or mob with local teammates until they gather next. It works great.

Relax a bit with all the time you have gained back. You’ve earned it.

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That’s it. Energize your remote team collaboration with the 1-1-1 (+1) Framework for Focus and Flow.

Give it a trial run and commit to it long enough to see transformative results. It might take you a beat to let go and reorient. But it’s worth it.

The power of one requires many:

1. One team, one goal, one item, and, if you dare, one task.
2. Many minds focused in unison on one thing at a time.

Harness the power of one, and reboot collaboration with your team, today.

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Go deeper here: Watch a 30-minute video I created on these concepts. You will find more material not covered in the article about the 1-1-1 (+1) Framework for Focus and Flow.