Flow Beats Speed

Why unpredictable work kills productivity

1) A real-world scenario

You look at your team’s week and it seems reasonable. The backlog is clear. The priorities are agreed. Then Tuesday happens.

A senior manager asks for an urgent slide deck. A customer escalation lands in someone’s inbox. A dependency from another department is late, so your team cannot move forward. A decision is pushed to “later this week.” By Friday, people have worked hard, yet the actual progress feels thin.

When you ask what went wrong, no one says “We were slow.” They say:

• “We kept switching.”

• “We had to restart work multiple times.”

• “We were waiting on others.”

• “Everything became urgent.”

This is the productivity trap. Many teams do not suffer from low speed. They suffer from broken flow.

2) The underlying pattern

In knowledge work, output is not just about how fast people type or how long they sit at a desk. It is about whether work moves through a system without constant restarts.

Flow breaks for three predictable reasons:

Interruptions.

Every interruption has a restart cost. It is not just the minutes spent on the urgent request. It is the lost context, the mental switch, and the time to regain focus.

Dependencies.

When work relies on others, your team can be ready and still be blocked. Blocked work creates hidden queues: tasks half started, documents waiting for input, decisions pending. This increases cognitive load and frustration.

Priority churn.

When priorities change frequently, teams do not finish. They begin. Work becomes a set of open loops. Open loops are expensive. They generate follow-ups, reminders, rework, and status meetings.

The uncomfortable truth is that a team can look busy and still lose productivity because the work system is unstable.

Flow is not a soft concept. It is a measurable condition of work: how often tasks are interrupted, restarted, or blocked.

3) Why common fixes fail

When teams feel chaotic, leaders often respond with measures that look logical but make flow worse.

Fix 1: Add more coordination.

Extra check-ins, more stand-ups, more status tracking. This creates the illusion of control, but often increases interruption and context switching. The work gets explained more than it gets done.

Fix 2: Push for speed.“

Move faster.” “We need urgency.” This increases multitasking. Multitasking feels like progress but creates more restart cost. The outcome is often slower delivery and lower quality.

Fix 3: Add buffers everywhere.

People start building slack into every estimate. That protects the individual, but it hides the system problem. Work still gets blocked, just later, and the organisation loses transparency.

Fix 4: Train individuals to manage time better.

Personal productivity training helps, but it cannot overcome dependency chains and priority churn. You can have disciplined people in a broken system.

The pattern is uncomfortable: flow problems are rarely solved at the individual level. They are solved by stabilising the system.

4) What actually helps

Improving flow is not about perfection. It is about reducing unnecessary restarts.

Make “unplanned work” visible.

Most teams underestimate how much of their week is driven by ad hoc requests. Track unplanned work for two weeks. You do not need a perfect system. A simple categorisation is enough: urgent requests, escalations, missing inputs, rework.

Limit work in progress.

If everything is started, nothing finishes. Agree on a maximum number of active initiatives per team. This forces prioritisation. It also exposes dependency bottlenecks earlier.

Define decision response times.

Flow often breaks because decisions sit in limbo. Define what “fast enough” means for different decision types. Even a simple rule helps, for example: small approvals within 48 hours, larger decisions within one week.

Reduce dependency friction.

Dependencies are not bad, they are normal. The question is whether they are managed. Improve handovers by clarifying what “ready” means before work is passed on. Use checklists, templates, and clear owners.

Create stable planning windows.

Many teams plan weekly but allow priorities to change daily. A simple guardrail is to protect a part of the week as stable execution time, and restrict changes to defined moments.

Use automation and AI where it reduces restarts.

AI is most valuable when it removes the busywork that blocks flow: summarising inputs, drafting first versions, extracting data, creating templates. But only after priorities and ownership are clear.

5) One reflective question

Where does your team lose more time: doing the work, or restarting the work?

6) And now?

If you suspect flow is breaking in hidden ways, a short Work Friction Pulse can quickly highlight whether interruptions, dependencies, or decision delays are dominant, and which area is worth looking at more closely next.

Take the Friction Pulse