Liminal Space
What Is Liminal Space? Liminal space refers to the place a person is in during a transitional period.
This past week was an odd one for me from multiple angles. I’ve started to improve my calendar management, so I set larger timeframes to focus on a single topic.
From time to time, it felt odd that I had what felt like free time; I felt guilty. I caught myself jumping to Slack or doing some random task different from the purpose of my allocated time.
Whenever I caught myself doing this, I forced myself to return to what I had designated the time for.
One thing I noticed when returning to the designated topic was that I either needed to have all the context or research done. That prompted my procrastination or made me jump because the task suddenly felt larger.
During those transitional periods, from focus to procrastination or vice versa, I started to think about what got me from one activity to the other.
Ask your peers
I also took the opportunity to ask around, with my peer group, if they had lived things in this way. In some cases, some folks are generally overwhelmed with meetings. They’ve learned to focus in shorter timeframes and get things done this way.
In other cases, people made explicit efforts to create the time to focus, either every afternoon or morning, whatever worked for them. In general, they had to acknowledge and agree with the teams they worked with to set the meetings in specific time frames, etc.
Some of these options are either not sustainable or possible due to external constraints like teams being in multiple time zones or “urgent” things that need to get resolved.
Unstructured time
A more significant organizational failure is if the same people are always overwhelmed in meetings or required to solve problems.
I wonder how many are incorrect expectations on both sides, leadership assigns someone as the lead for a large project, but they not be expected to be so hands-on. Still, on the opposite side, the person generally works on those terms. Instead of enabling teams to solve the more significant problem, that person takes a lot of jobs to themselves.
On the other side of the spectrum, at a more reduced scope. Think team-level content. There’s also a similar dynamic at play, where the manager or team lead (or it is the same person) generally has to review everything, or they take the “hardest” issues, or in an attempt to keep their teams “focused on delivering” take any task outside of closing tickets, which could be stretch tasks for any of the other teammates.
One of the things I see from this overload of certain people is that they’re not allowed to have these liminal spaces at all. Or even unstructured time to focus on tasks, think about the future of their team, the system they own, etc.
Your turn!
How did you deal with these spaces where there’s a transition from activity to procrastination (or only unfocused time)? How do you get back on track? How do you return to work? Or are you allowed to have these unstructured times in your calendar?
Happy coding!
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