I am a product manager at a high-growth startup and I spend an hour working offline each week.

Here’s the secret: It’s my most productive hour of work.

I walk into my favorite coffee shop around the corner. It’s busy, but not loud. It mostly echoes the sound of the espresso machine mixed with the light beats the barista put on through her Spotify playlist.

I get a tea (coffee makes me hurry) and settle into work. With a notebook. And a pencil. And have my most productive hour of the week.

If you’re anything like me or one of the other hundreds of thousands of people in remote-first work culture, you’re constantly bombarded with notifications.

It’s easy to feel productive while Slacking with your colleagues, answering questions, removing blockers from engineers, and sharing the most recent meme with friends at work.

However; this activity is rooted in a hurry and false productivity.

Hustle culture tells us that we need to optimize our workstreams and be as productive as possible all the time.

Simple logic will tell you that’s just not possible. Or at least not sustainable for a long period of time.

Bringing peace into the workplace starts with bringing peace into your role.

If you are feeling hurried, rushed, and unable to be thoughtful, you will bring that into your interactions with others and the work you deliver.

My hour of offline work-time is spent making connections between cross-functional departments, reflecting on my past week, past interactions, and ways I can bring more peace and thoughtfulness into the following week.

As a product manager of a fast-moving & growing startup, there are an innumerable amount of requests, ideas, and asks that come your way. The easiest route is to take all the requests as they come, blindly create stories out of them, and start telling engineers to build these ill-defined, un-validated solutions.

The wise route is to regularly understand the root problem associated with all these requests, make connections across areas of the business and across different products, and really get yourself into the shoes of your customer.

I draw a lot of charts with a lot of arrows and circles around words. There are multiple colors involved. Sometimes I doodle. It doesn’t look pretty (I could never get into beautiful bullet journaling), but it works.

This is the best way that I have found to emerge from the “vortex” that work can sometimes become. If you yourself can become peaceful during the storm, you can usher peace into the storm. If you become hurried, anxious, and frantic, you’re ushering that hurriedness into the chaos.

Block it out.

“Thinking time”

60 min, 45 min, even 15 min.

Yourself, your work, and your colleagues will thank you.