Personal Productivity, Collaboration and Respect

My thesis for today is that our personal productivity is compromised by the way we do collaboration these days and that we all need to learn a new way of working that respects each other’s personal productivity. We also need to find and deploy technologies that foster these respectful working practices. I have written a bit about this in the past but I’m coming more and more to the opinion that the biggest issue is working practice and that the working practice needs to be governed by a very old fashioned word – respect.

The tools that we have today are powerful, but they don’t foster respect.

Take, as an example, the least respectful technology of them all – email. How many of us have been bombarded by email storms that simply wasted our time. How much time do we spend each day reading emails that are irrelevant to us. It’s easy for people to add people onto an email distribution without any real thought as to whether they would be interested, and no-one would ever think of asking someone if they were interested in an email subject before sending it. Once on the list though, there’s no way off it. This doesn’t happen in the paper-mail world because sending paper-mail is difficult so you think far more carefully about who you send it to. Unless of course the paper mail is driven by technology and then it becomes junk-mail.

No respect = reduced productivity.

Another example; teleconferences. How many times have you been dragged onto an urgent teleconference only for it to go on for hours with little or no progress and definitely no focus. This is a much smaller issue with physical meetings because a physical meeting is much more expensive, requires people to travel and results in a face-to-face meeting. If you are going to meet someone face-to-face you don’t want to waste their time, it’s embarrassing.

No respect = reduced productivity.

As a collaboration tool RSS and blogs help with some of these problems but we need to be really careful here. As soon as we start to be disrespectful by including posts that are unfocused, off subject, etc. we diminish the value and impact on others productivity. That’s one of the reasons that the Top 100 list thing really bugs me.

So how do we build respect. I think the first thing that we need to do is acknowledge that it’s an issue. Once we do this we will start to invest our own time in thinking about how we interact with others and how we impact upon their productivity. This might cost us, but people will soon come to realise that we are better people to work with because we don’t waste their time. The other thing that we can do as a technology industry is to start providing some better feedback loops. I would love to be able to mark an email chain as ‘not interested’ and then to never be bothered by it ever again. Going further, I would love someone running a poorly focussed teleconference to feel the embarrassment that they would have done if we had been meeting face-to-face.

Anyway, I’m not going to be disrespectful by waste any more of your time rambling on needlessly.