R/GA’s Doer Day: A Cultural Experiment to Reclaim Focus

“When do we stop talking about the work and actually start doing it?” Back-to-back Zoom meetings and overflowing calendars dominated our workweek at R/GA San Francisco. After talking to the tech lead on my team who posed the question above, we decided to try something bold yet not unprecedented. A cultural experiment called Doer Day was my attempt to avoid implementing a rigid policy while encouraging those with the to work to give some space to those doing the work.

What Is Doer Day?

Simply put, Doer Day is a once a week no-meeting day; in our case it was Tuesday. Once a week, we encouraged our coordinators, producers and executives to avoid scheduling routine meetings such as department syncs, status updates, pipeline reviews, and even client calls, whenever possible. This pilot program was limited to the SF office and lasted six weeks.

This wasn’t a mandate. Urgent conversations were encouraged to continue, team members could still collaborate and engage in conversations. In fact, the point was to allow more time for those kinds of things to happen. The core idea was to encourage focus and remove interruptions that could just as easily happen another day.

It’s important to note that prior to kicking off the official pilot for this approach, we decided that to be successful, we should pitch the idea to all three of the Google Pods at R/GA. We often overlapped on many of these client meetings so we were hoping they’d come along with us and help socialize it internally and with the client.

The Why Behind the Experiment

The R/GA team identified a crucial divide in how different roles operate: Managers and Doers.

• Managers are typically producers, account leads, or technical leadership: those who have the work. Their days are filled with connecting people, planning, and decision-making.
• Doers, on the other hand: designers, developers, writers, strategists are responsible for doing the work. They translate abstract ideas into code, visuals, and compelling narratives.

Managers can often withstand interruptions; their tasks are finite and more durable. But for Doers, productivity hinges on entering a state of flow, a condition that requires uninterrupted focus. Even a brief distraction can break that momentum causing recurring hits to productivity and never achieving the all important “flow state”.

The Goal: Protect Focus, Cultivate Creativity

By creating a meeting-free zone once a week, we aimed to give Doers the environment they need to dive deep into their craft. As a bonus for Managers, it was a chance to become Doers themselves—to tackle their own to-do lists without being pulled into calls or running meetings.

From the deck that presented to the agency as an introduction to the idea” This isn’t about eliminating collaboration—it’s about making room for meaningful, uninterrupted concentration.“

So, Why Tuesday?

After gathering feedback from leads and producers, Tuesday was selected as it was strategically placed after the Monday rush, and not overlapping with the end-of-week wind-down. We started by assuming Wednesday would be the obvious choice (which is when most companies that have implemented this policy choose) but that’s typically when our mid-week client check-ins happened and we didn’t want to disrupt that cadence.

A Thoughtful Step, Not a Panacea

I think Doer Day is a good example of a modern company experimenting with culture, not just process in the name of looking out for each other and the different needs of different roles. It acknowledges that one-size-fits-all productivity approaches don’t actually fit all and experimentation and collaboration is how we get to a happy medium. And, most importantly, it provides space for people to do their best work. But, it was only one piece to a large puzzle that included working from home (pre-covid), setting up war rooms when needed and checking in daily with project managers on the health of their team.

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So, how’d it go?

Buy-in and delivering a reason to believe is everything when trying to influence the culture of a high-performance work environment like R/GA. My “Pod” consisting of Project Managers, Tech Leads, Designers and Strategists were onboard and embraced the mission in good faith and after the six week trial, we unanimously voted to continue Doer Day. Other pods, not so much. The level of success that I found in serving the people of my own team was conversely matched by the failure that I experienced when trying to influence other groups in the agency. That is, until the one time when we started sharing resources.

Around month three of observing Doer Day, some of my people were loaned to another team during a large pitch cycle. The first or second week that passed with no day set aside for deep work and thought, they unwittingly became natural advocates for the concept of Doer Day. They found themselves evangelizing the positive impact it had on their productivity and inevitably grumbled about missing it – this included account managers and producers, not just “doers”. The lead on that pitch ran her own Pod and of course heard the complaints from my team members. Once the pitch was over, (we won the business btw (Reddit)), she told me that she had hoped her pod members had given Doer Day more of a chance (rather than rejecting it outright) when I originally pitched the idea three months ago. She wanted to give it another shot. I wish I could say that everyone on her team embraced the it whole heartedly like my team did but a couple of project managers on one particular work-stream did bound together and made it happen. Roughly ten months later, when I left the agency for another opportunity, both my team and that portion of her team were living meeting-free on Tuesdays.

What did we learn?

The success of the process shift in my pod wasn’t surprising. We talked about it together for weeks before deciding to pitch it to the agency as an experiment and as a group, we were aligned. What I failed to do was inject the same level of excitement and purpose into the leadership of the other pods and for that reason, it was easy to dismiss. After all, change is hard and unless there’s a truly compelling reason for it, cultural momentum tends to win out.

Since then, whenever faced with a need to attempt this level of institutional persuasion, I make sure to go lean on the details and heavy on the Why behind it all. Back at R/GA, I assumed that empathy for the “Doers” was enough to get people on my side but what I now realize is that I should have paid more attention to the needs of those who would be implementing this change, the managers, those with the work. Perhaps that could have looked something like: “if you give your doers one day a week, they’ll be more likely to stay on schedule, the brief will be more adhered to and they’ll be happier, more enthusiastic champions of the work in presentations”. In other words, your life will be easier with a little effort up front.

That’s what my team members did during the pitch and that’s what that Program Manager reacted to. They talked about how the positive outcomes on the work and their own sanity rather than focusing on specifics of the psychology behind how different roles work differently and our need to accommodate. Plus, it was real at this point. It was tangible and my people were talking real experiences – rather than me trying to sell a concept with details and psychology. So, what I might add to the above is that perhaps we should have tried it ourselves first and then brought it to the larger group – rather than saying “We want to do this and we need you to do it to”.