We are experimenting with pomodoro inspired techniques (http://pomodorotechnique.com/) in the team. What we do is that we are doing team pomodoros where we work focused for 25 minutes, without communicating. During the work periods we record all questions and so on that we need to ask, and after the period we communicate and resolve all issues that came up. We don’t do pomodoros all the time, but only when we feel that it is useful. Some days we might do a lot of them and other days none.
What we find interesting is that it has turned out that the important feature is not about NOT communicating during the work periods, but that the communication becomes more focused when we do communicate.
We have added a countdown timer widget to our dashboard to make it really easy to start by anyone.
The timer is also handy for all sort of time-boxed activities in the team.
The code for the widget is available at https://gist.github.com/krichardsson/a2c8ad556caa643f822c