In a relay race, four runners run 100 meters each. Only one person holds the baton at a time. If two people try to hold the baton, they slow down. If nobody holds the baton, the race stops.

9:00 AM: State the Quabat aloud. "For the next hour, I am finishing the proposal." 9:00-10:00 AM: Phone off. Email closed. Proposal hits 90%. 10:00 AM: Pass the Quabat. Send proposal to legal for review. (Now it is their baton). 10:05 AM: Pick up the next Quabat (billing questions). The final hand-off The beauty of the Quabat is that it eliminates guilt. When you are holding the baton, you don't need to feel bad about ignoring your inbox. You are doing your job. When you pass the baton, you don't need to hover. The race is no longer yours.

4 minutes

Try it for one week. Pick up the Quabat. Run your leg. Pass it cleanly. You will be shocked how far you go when you stop trying to run in every lane at once. Do you use a Quabat system in your office? Or do you have a different name for the "one thing at a time" rule? Let me know in the comments below.

A Quabat works the same way. It represents The Problem: The Broken Quabat Most modern workplaces don't use the Quabat method. Instead, we use the "Boomerang Method." You throw a task at a colleague, but it comes right back to you with a question. You start a report, get interrupted by Slack, answer a text, then return to the report.

We live in a world obsessed with "busy." We pile five tabs onto our mental browser, answer emails during Zoom calls, and congratulate ourselves on working 70-hour weeks. But there is a quiet revolution happening in the world of deep work, and it centers on a strange little concept:

If you haven’t heard the term before, you aren't alone. The Quabat is the forgotten tool of high-performance teams. Let’s break down what it is, why it matters, and how to use one before you burn out. In its simplest form, a Quabat (derived from the Latin quabare , meaning "to carry wholly") is a single unit of focused attention. Think of it as a physical or metaphorical baton.