It was late afternoon in the middle of the workweek when my co-worker popped his head above his cubicle and grinned. “Yessss,” he said. He had just received an email: our manager would be out of the office, traveling the following week. My first job out of college was as a software developer for a New York media company, where the unspoken rule was simple: when the cats are away, the mice will play. People tended to slack off a bit.

What felt like harmless office culture back then has evolved into a much broader shift in how people approach work. These days, a wave of workplace trends seems dedicated to gaming the system: quiet quitting, bare-minimum Mondays, and more. Some see the latest buzzword, microshifting, as an act of protest or another way for employees to dial it in. I don’t. Not quite.

Put simply, microshifting is breaking up the typical 9-to-5. It’s doing work in smaller swaths and carving out time for other things, be it a long walk or watching your kid’s dance recital. Done right, microshifting can benefit both employees and organizations alike. But, like anything, it works best with guidance, not in the dark. Before we get into the guardrails leaders should implement, let’s start with the benefits of this latest workplace trend.

The Case For Doing Nothing Sometimes

I’m a big proponent of doing nothing at all sometimes. It gives your brain a break from the constant deluge of notifications, ever-growing to-do lists, and endless scrolling. This is the quiet space where true creativity happens—I have some of my best ideas during long, meandering walks. In today’s always-on, always-connected world, it takes a concerted effort to truly unplug, but it’s essential for restoring energy and focus.

Working in smaller shifts makes it easier to take breaks, even microbreaks of just 10–15 minutes. These increments can boost both productivity and creativity by giving the brain time to reset, according to experts . For me, employees who think creatively, generating innovative ideas and solutions, bring more value than those who simply get stuff done. Sharp, critical thinking is an asset, and I aim to cultivate a workplace that supports that kind of work. In that sense, microshifts are a great idea.

Of course, there are caveats. Here are a few points to consider when introducing microshifting to your team.

Guardrails For Microshifts

In two decades of running my company, I’ve found that employees with a sense of balance are more energized and engaged. They also tend to stick around longer and grow alongside the company. Microshifting can be a great strategy for employees to prioritize balance on an individual level. That said, it can run awry when it hurts team dynamics.

At Jotform, teamwork is fundamental to how we operate. It’s part of the reason I believe in working in the office rather than hybrid or remote. I’ve seen how cohesive teams build momentum and boost creativity. By exchanging ideas and developing solutions together, they’re often more innovative than solo workers. What’s more, when two or more people work toward a shared goal, their brains begin to process information in increasingly similar ways, according to research . It’s called neural alignment, and it can further enhance teams’ creative output.

My bright-line rule is this: communicate clearly about microshifting. Make it explicit that it can’t come at the expense of teamwork. Plan personal tasks in preferred increments, but collaborative work must be scheduled in coordination with others.

Short bursts of work can keep productivity buzzing along. But it’s also necessary to carve out longer, uninterrupted periods of deep focus—Cal Newport’s concept of “deep work.”

“Human brains are not great at context switching. If you want to perform cognitively demanding work, you need to arrange a setting in which your brain can spend time focused on that one task without needing to consider emails, or Slack messages, or online news, or Zoom calls at the same time,” writes Newport.

Another risk of microshifting is that it can gradually weaken our ability to commit to longer stretches of uninterrupted work. It’s on leaders to reinforce the importance of carving out time for deep work. Today’s AI tools can help employees protect that time.

For example, tools like Motion automatically build focus blocks into schedules, prioritize tasks, and adjust calendars to keep deep work on track. You enter tasks with deadlines, priorities, and durations, and the tool adds them to your calendar. If you’re not happy with how your schedule looks, you can easily tweak it and move things around. You’ll receive notifications when tasks are set to begin, and the tool will reschedule if you miss a deadline.

It helps you work according to priorities, like deep work, rather than urgency or low-hanging fruit.

As a leader, I support employees in structuring their day in microshifts, as long as they protect the fundamentals of how we work, like collaboration and deep focus. Every organization has its own priorities and ways of working, so be sure to implement microshifting with those priorities in mind. Otherwise, you risk slipping back into those old cat-and-mouse dynamics.