In short: The big issue of a Design sprint is the emaisl and tasks tsunami after the sprints without the rest that you would have after a holiday week. But you can fix that with shorter sprints and a catch-up blocker.

Email and Task Tsunami

If you do a one-week Design Sprint, it's like taking a week of holiday. When you come back, people have worked while you were doing something else. So you get a tsunami of emails and tasks to do. But... You didn't have a holiday where you come back rested. In fact you come back exhausted plus you have the tsunami. But the bright side, is that you are really doing deep work during a Design Sprint without constant notifications, emails and interruptions.

How to avoid the tsunami or make it smaller

To make it less overwhelming, I try to split the one-week Design Sprint format into two two-day Design Sprints. This way, the email and task tsunami is more manageable when you return.

Add a half a day for catch up

Another tip is to block some time after a Design Sprint to catch up on the things that happened after. So a good rule of thumb could be to block in fact a 2.5 day sprint with two days of actual sprint, and a half a day for catching up and getting back to speed with the rest of the work machine without stress.

Made with AI help
This article is based on an Audio note I made while walking, which was transcribed and clean by the app AudioPen, and I then reviewed it and improved it by hand.