Want to trigger a tantrum in a toddler? Here are the magic words:

“In a minute.”

One minute, as a proportion of a child’s life, is so much longer than that of an adult. A minute, to a toddler lasts forever because of how their brain perceives time.

Conversely, as you grow older, time seems to move more quickly because each day becomes a smaller and smaller proportion of your total time on earth. Elderly parents and grandparents move at a different, more deliberate, pace. Like Ents.

Over the weekend, I was reading about the scientific nature of time. How different cultures perceive time, based on language. In the West, we see time progressing from left to right – the same direction in which we read – but if you grew up speaking a language that reads from right to left or top to bottom, time flows that direction.

And, when we you have one of those life-stopping moments where your life seems to pass before your eyes, time seems to move in slow motion. There is even a theory that top athletes – surfers and football players – are able to make small but crucial adjustments in a split second because their brains perceive time differently.

So how can this help your team accomplish more?

Once I was working with a team that had been struggling to squeeze a year’s worth of work into a short amount of time. They were “sprinting” but the tickets on the board never seemed to get closed. Things just weren’t getting done. Almost all the tickets rolled over to the next sprint. And the next. And the next. More tickets got added each time – this one is just so important, it just has to get added – but it felt like nothing left the board. Clearly the way that they were applying Agile wasn’t working for them.

Then the unthinkable happened.

The sprint accidentally got deleted and all of those precious tickets moved into the backlog.

Oops.

Luckily it happened on sprint-planning day. The person responsible offered to recreate the board with the same tickets. But the team tried a different approach.

Instead of moving all those tickets back onto the board, they selected the few, most critical tickets – just a handful per person – and put those on the board. The boss suggested that they add more – the team was pretty far behind, after all – but we stuck with just those.

And the team finished them all that sprint.

For the next sprint, we followed the same procedure. And those tickets got done.

The team picked up momentum and delivery.

This is how Agile is supposed to work, as opposed to what was happening before. The team still had a long way to go – the tickets needed to be better-written, parsed to fit within a sprint period, and the team needed to practice effective estimation.

But slowing down the demands of each sprint helped them focus and increase delivery.

As managers, there is an infinite number of things on our to-do lists, especially if you are working with a tech team. And we are constantly bombarded by demands on our time, stories demanding our attention, people wanting just a moment of our time, ever-increasing expectations from our bosses. It can be tempting to bury our priorities under a mountain of to-do’s.

When we lose sight of what is truly important and the team starts to feel overwhelmed, it helps to accidentally delete the current sprint, let all those demands fall back into the backlog.

Start with an empty sprint.

Add back selectively.

As managers, this is one way that we can suspend time and get more done.