Every business has a beat

Every piece of work has a rhythm. Every company has one too. So do our own personal lives. I worked out most of what I believe about this in a barber's chair. Stay with me.

My barber is a craftsman, and like a lot of craftsmen he has a tell. Even when he isn't cutting – when he's reaching for the comb, leaning back to inspect the line, or telling me, at some length, about his weekend, or how my hair is thinning – his scissors keep moving.

Open. Close. Open. Close. A little metronome in one hand, snipping at nothing in particular but keeping the beat going anyway. I don't think he knows he's doing it. I'm fairly sure he'd cut worse if he stopped.

There is something fascinating about watching it. The hand knows what the mind doesn't need to explain. The movement keeps going while the attention moves somewhere else. And it occurred to me, sitting there while a man cut thin air, that this is how most work works.

It has a rhythm whether anybody has designed one or not. Your morning has one. Your week has one. A team has one. A company has one. So does a marriage, a five-a-side football team, a kitchen during dinner service and, we'd hope, a particularly good novel too.

There are moments to push and moments to back off. Times when you need to open things up and times when you need to close them down. Periods of exploration followed by periods of execution. Heads-down work followed by heads-together work, followed by heads around a nice bottle of wine work. A sprint, then a breather. A push, then a rest.

We don't tend to talk about work this way. We talk about productivity, doing more with less, cutting costs. Capacity. Utilisation. Velocity. Performance. All very energetic and exciting words. All rather useless at telling whether the scissors are moving in time, and what that might mean.

And once you start noticing rhythm, you see it everywhere. You also notice how many organisations seem determined to eliminate it.

The real rhythm is inside the work

One of the easiest places to hear the rhythm of an organisation is its meetings, mostly because they're in a calendar and easy to see. The weekly meeting, the Monday stand-up, the monthly review. The quarterly planning session. The Friday catch-up which is in the calendar for 20 minutes but always takes an hour.

These recurring events are the time signature of the place. You can almost tell what kind of organisation you're dealing with from its calendar. You can also, tellingly, see what's important to people by what's in their calendar.

Some have a clear beat with a recognisable pattern to the weeks. People know when they will meet, when they will work, when decisions happen and when things are left alone. Others have what might charitably be described as impromptu jazz. Meetings appear at random. Priorities change on Wednesday. Twice. Somebody's urgent request becomes everybody else's emergency and the week is blatted over with panic meetings. The calendar is a sort of administrative random noise generator.

Then people wonder why everyone feels tired.

This is one of those things that sounds trivial until you experience its opposite. A predictable Tuesday is a rather surprisingly good invention. It gives the brain somewhere to put things, and the body somewhere to discuss what matters. The time blocked Thursday for deep-work, kept sacred and protected, gives the ideas and work somewhere to land.

You know that the morning is for this, the afternoon is usually for that, the weekly review happens here, the important conversation happens there, and there's space for emerging work in the gaps you have left. The structure doesn't do the work for you. It simply means you don't have to reinvent the shape of the week before you can start doing it.

This is why routines are often misunderstood. We associate predictability with bureaucracy, boredom and stagnation. But predictability is also what allows variation to become useful. It's how we develop discipline. It's how, in reality, we avoid wasting our human finite resources, as we take ideas towards value.

Music needs a beat precisely because the interesting bit is what happens around it. Jazz would be rather less interesting if every musician had to spend the first ten minutes agreeing on what a beat was. The same is true of work. People don't necessarily need less structure. They need better structure, with space to explore, learn and deal with the inevitable problems that emerge as we do interesting work.

What actually helps (and it isn't more effort)

But meetings are only the bit you can see from the calendar. The real rhythm is inside the work. Almost anything worth doing contains alternating modes. You explore before you decide. You think before you make. You make before you refine. You concentrate alone and then talk to other people. You gather information and then stop gathering information because, at some point, research becomes an addictive form of procrastination.

Creative work makes this especially obvious. There is an open mode in which possibilities multiply. And there is a closed mode in which possibilities are reduced. One asks, What could this be? The other asks, Right. Which one are we actually doing, and let's do them? You need both. Trying to remain permanently open is fun and interesting, but rather exhausting. Nothing gets finished. Trying to remain permanently closed is equally strange yet the norm for many companies. You become extremely efficient at producing things nobody particularly wanted, without stopping to check.

This is why I find the modern obsession with maintaining a constant level of productivity rather peculiar. A song played at one volume isn't more productive than a song with dynamics. A football team doesn't become better because every player runs continuously without a break. A chef who never pauses to taste the sauce is not demonstrating commitment to the craft. And a person who spends 70 hours a week in "execution mode" may simply be executing the wrong thing more efficiently, and not taking a day off always has consequences.

The problem is not effort. It is modulation. No band plays fortissimo for the entire concert. My word, could you imagine what that would sound like, let alone feel like to play like that, for hour. If it did, you wouldn't describe the band as highly committed. You'd leave. And leave a bad review too.

There is another reason this matters. We've become amazingly good at measuring effort and quite bad at measuring recovery. Effort is visible. You can see someone at their desk, you can see the slide deck open, you can hear people talking about work. You can count meetings. You can measure hours. You can check how many lines of code are checked in, or widgets produced, or documents created. You can put activity on a dashboard and colour it reassuringly in the colours of a watermelon.

Recovery, however, looks suspiciously like slacking off. Like doing nothing. Like using company time to read a book. Like chilling whilst everyone else is pulling 70 hour weeks. Which is rather unfortunate if you ask me, because some of the most valuable work happens in the apparent gap between those productive stretches.

The walk after the meeting. The quiet morning before everyone arrives to get your thoughts in order and your mind in the right place. The lunchtime workout that keeps you healthy and reduces stress. The after work beer with a colleague who just needs an ear. The kid's play at three in the afternoon that keeps your pillars of life in balance. The hour in which you stop consuming information and allow your brain to do something with what it has already consumed. The afternoon in which you finally have enough uninterrupted time to come up with ideas about a problem that is making everyone's lives hard.

We often treat these things as slack. As waste. As time to be managed, rather than energy and attention to be cultivated. They may be the mechanism by which ideas become value, if you look at it too narrowly. But a factory with no slack is brittle. A motorway with no spare capacity is permanently jammed and nobody is going anywhere fast. A restaurant kitchen with no room to move is a fire waiting to happen, or a chef about to go postal.

Humans are not fundamentally different. You can squeeze a little more out of a system by removing every pause. But eventually the pauses you removed become mistakes, delays, resentment, poor decisions and people staring at nothing in particular wondering whether to update their CV now, or at home later.

This is the astonishing thing about recovery. It can look unproductive right up until you need it. Then you wished you'd done it earlier.

You can usually tell when the rhythm of a place has gone a little squiffy. People start rushing without knowing why, fuelled by something nobody can really name. Everything is urgent and important, which ultimately means nothing is. Work arrives faster than it leaves, and doesn't stop coming. Distractions are everywhere. Days fill up with governance, meetings and reporting statuses. Decisions don't get made so rework is rife and changes in direction are happening every hour. The same conversations happen repeatedly. The same systemic problems keep popping up with frightening frequency. Customers are unhappy, mostly because the staff are unhappy.

People stop finishing things and become extremely good at discussing them. Plans overtake action. The organisation starts sabotaging itself with gusto. And eventually the organisation develops a sort of fatigue in which people are seemingly working harder than before, but everything feels harder than it should, and tellingly, value is hard to point at.

This is often diagnosed as a motivation problem. It may be. But I suspect it's actually a rhythm problem. The organisation has lost the distinction between push and recover. Everything has become push, launch, drive. Every week is an intervention. Every year is a change programme. Every email is important and sent to as many people as possible. Every meeting requires preparation to defend your position, the irony being that there's no time to prepare. Every project is strategically critical and competing for the same scarce people or resources. Every quarter is the most important quarter we've ever had, and "we'll die reaching the numbers" – I had a boss who actually said that.

After a while, the word "urgent" loses its meaning. The trouble with making everything a crescendo is that eventually the crescendo becomes the background noise, the rhythm is lost and the music becomes something people no longer want to listen to. People don't necessarily burn out because they cannot work hard. They burn out because they cannot find the end of the hard bit, the meaning in the work or the hope and spirit that things will get better.

Rhythm is rarely restored by adding more activity. It is usually restored by removing interference, blockers, confusion, competition, noise. Clarify what matters and create some predictable boundaries. Stop asking people to switch modes every few minutes and protect the periods in which concentration is possible. Give decisions somewhere to happen and allow projects to finish before announcing the next five. Make room for people to recover before asking them to accelerate again.

None of this sounds particularly revolutionary, nor newsworthy, nor, sadly, aligned to how we seem to think modern work must happen to remain competitive. That's because rhythm isn't revolutionary. It's ancient. We've just forgot that we're humans and not variables to be optimised. The remarkable thing is how often we build working environments that ignore something every musician, athlete, craftsman and small child already understands. You cannot sprint forever.

There is another reason rhythm is easy to miss. You can only really hear it from inside. A founder will sometimes say that they can feel something is wrong with the business before the numbers show it. This can sound mystical until you realise what they're actually describing; pattern recognition, developed through proximity.

They have spent enough time inside the system to notice its changes in tempo: the silence in a meeting, the rush of emails, the project that keeps slipping, the conversation that used to happen naturally but now requires a calendar invitation. It's entirely plausible to believe that the reason we're all so busy and working so hard, is because leaders and managers have stepped away from the dance and can no longer sense the rhythm.

The same thing happens with your own work too I suspect. You probably know more about the rhythm of your week than you think. You know which mornings your brain is more useful than other. Which parts of the day bring you the most joy. Which day on the school run is the most political. What meals help you sleep and which ones don't. When you feel your best, and when you don't. Which days work for a good workout, and which one's need you to do something else instead.

The difficulty is that most of us have become rather good at ignoring this information. We let the noise of social media tell us we should be hustling more, or building a side project, or living our best lives, or never taking a day off. We let the calendar conduct the music. We sometimes though, let comfort and feelings override doing the right thing too. Then blame ourselves when the music sounds terrible.

You don't need to become a human productivity dashboard, nor track every metric, nor miss out on the real life happening outside of ourselves. You probably need to pay slightly more attention to the signal you can see and feel, and less to the noise from others.

Start small, in life and work. I've found that noticing the recurring things is a good place to start, especially in work. When do meetings happen? When does focused work happen, or not? Where does work tend to bunch up? Where does it disappear? When do people naturally come together? When do they naturally go quiet?

Then peel back this first layer and take a look below. When do ideas appear? Do people feel safe to share them? When do these ideas get thrown away, and why? When does exploration turn into execution, or is it all about execution? Where is the recovery?

And eventually you start noticing the most interesting rhythm of all: the human one. Who lifts a room and who drains it. Who brings good conversations and who brings drama, gossip and a laundry list of problems. When do people become playful, and when do they stop asking questions.

These things don't appear on a dashboard and even if they did, how useful would that really be. However, they are data. Perhaps better data than some of the things that do appear on those reports.

Learn to hear it

A healthy rhythm doesn't necessarily make work easier. But it makes better work more possible. Possible to concentrate, to think, to make something good. And to recover. Possible to do difficult things without every difficult thing feeling like an emergency or a rush or a panic. And that matters because the point of work isn't to maintain the highest possible level of activity, or be busy, or hustle endless; it's to produce something worth having, something worth paying for, something of value.

So, this week, listen for the rhythm and notice the shape of your own days. When do you push? When do you recover? When are you open to possibilities? When do you need to close things down? When do you feel most alive, or more like your usual self? And when don't you? Notice where your calendar is helping and where it is simply making things messier than it needs to be.

And if you lead a team, listen to its rhythm too. Not just the meetings and milestones but the quieter things, like where work stalls, where energy rises, where people naturally collaborate without being asked to.

Because once you hear rhythm, you can't really unhear it. You start noticing why one place feels alive when you walk through the door and another feels astonishingly exhausting despite everyone appearing to be very busy. You also tend to notice that the best teams aren't necessarily the fastest. They are the ones that know when to accelerate. They are the ones who strive for clarity before busy action, understanding before movement and flow over just hustling to get things done.

You notice that good work has a pulse. Open. Close. Push. Recover. Open again.

My barber has been teaching me this for years. He just doesn't know he's doing it. And yes, my hair is indeed thinning.