Productivity – Page 12 – Graham Chastney

Concept of the Day: Cultural Plasticity

I’m not sure whether this counts as a real fully fledged concept, or just an idea, or actually even whether there is a difference.

The idea comes from Jonah Lehrer over on The Frontal Cortext blog where he reflects on the diversity of music that we enjoy (his pretext is the events at the MTV awards with Kanye West and Taylor Swift).

It got me thinking, in what other ways are we culturally plastic:

Food: The range of food available in the UK is incredible. Foods from every country in the world and even fusions of different food types. We skip between them without really thinking about it, something that my grandparents would never have done.
Video/Television/Films: I know a few people who will only go to the movies to see a certain type of film, but there aren’t many of them. And the range of film genre is increasing all of the time.
Reading: Looking at the book shelf beside me there is a huge variety of material. There’s no Mills and Boon, but apart from that there is practically every other type of writing.

So what impact does this plasticity have on the world of work?

Teams that accept diversity work better and produce stronger results. As people become more tolerant of, and learn to enjoy cultural differences hopefully this will be reflected in teams. This will be especially true for international teams which will become more prevalent as technology enables it.

I suspect, to, that people we start to choose the places where they work on the basis of the diversity of the culture. Places with a monolithic culture we be regarded as stale and dull. Skilful business managers will be able to create diverse cultures that are highly productive.

What would you like me to write about?

Some of you who read this blog know my quite well, others of you who only read about me here are starting to know me.

So I thought I’d ask the question.

What would you like me to write about?

Not sure why I’ve never though to ask before.

I’m writing this post sitting on a full train using a Blackberry while reading an article that states "within the next few years as many as 20 million people will be choosing to work one or more days a week in third-place facilities – that is, public or private spaces built specifically for the temporary or semi-temporary business purposes of companies and individuals".

And I’ve spent most of today in a meeting in a hotel lobby…it’s a changing world of work.

My New Fear of Working from Home

I have a new fear – I have become afraid of working from home. I’m not talking about a panic type fear this is more of a niggling nag that means I am more likely to choose to go into the office even when I have no need to be there. As I have done today.

As with most fear this new fear of working from home is primarily irrational.

Throughout 2008 and for much of the early part of 2009 I worked from home. This was effective, productive and in many ways less stressful. The facilities are better at home and I get to interact with the family more often. The coffee is certainly better.

So where has this fear come from? There are, as you’d expect, a number of elements.

One of my fears is a distrust of my own self-control. While the working environment at home is much better than it is in the office it is also much more distracting. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve never spent days distracted on things that aren’t work, I’m just worried that I will. Everyone who owns a home knows that there are always jobs to be done. It’s an irrational fear because there are just as many distractions in the office, they just look a bit more like work.

The self control fear also works the other way though, I worry about my ability to constrain work. I can be a bit obsessive about things and it’s easier to be sucked into work when you are working from home. It’s more difficult to shut the door and to declare it finished.

Another fear is the fear of missing out. What if I am missing out on something important or exciting? If I am at home am I always going to be second choice. At the crux it’s a lack of confidence in my own abilities and the value that I bring. If I was confident in my own ability I wouldn’t worry about being left on the sidelines. The irrationality of this fear is that the people who I interact with are rarely in the same office as me even when I am in the office myself.

Loneliness is another worry. There have certainly days when I have worked from home where I have taken a walk to the shops mainly to speak face-to-face with someone.

The last fear is a bit more of a personal one and probably the most irrational. In my mind I think that I get more headaches when I work from home, and I also think that these headaches turn into migraines more often at home than in the office. It seems like I’m stating the obvious, but I don’t like migraines and the fear of them can linger at the back of my head. Going into the office lessens that fear.

Am I the only one? Is this something that other home workers feel?

Do I need to just “get back on the bike” and push away my irrational fears?

Team Development: Forming – Storming – Norming – Performing

There are times when I discover that something I thought was widely known – isn’t. I suppose that’s one of the reasons I blog.

Over the last few weeks I’ve had three separate conversations with people about the phases of team development.

These conversations have mostly been within the context of teams that are virtual.

In one particular case the conversation was about a team that is clearly in the “storming” phase. When I said this people looked at me blank, so I went on to explain the process of team development. Once I’d done that people started to understand what needed to be done.

I work across a number of virtual team, quite often these teams get to a phase where they don’t progress, and nothing gets resolved, they get stuck in “storming”.

The main reason for this, in my opinion, is because the technology we use to support such teams is particularly poor during this phase. It’s very difficult to work through the conflicts of a storming phase on a teleconference, if not impossible. People tend to do one of two things; they are either over-aggressive, or passive, neither of which actually resolve the issues. Teams, therefore, languish in the “storming” phase and never get to “norming”.

Another reason is that people don’t understand that they need to go through these phases, because they don’t know that the phases exist. So here’s my summary:

Forming – Everyone is on their best behaviour, no-one wants to be the one to step out of line, but neither do people get anything of any real value done.
Storming – The first conflict arrives and the team members show their true colours.
Norming – Members are getting to know each other. People start to make allowances for each other and realising where everyone’s skills are.
Performing – The team runs like clock-work, the leaders don’t have much to do because everyone knows what they are doing.

I have rarely been in a team that is truly “performing”, it takes time and effort to get there.

It’s interesting to note that when I get together with the members of one of the teams that did get to “performing” we quickly move to “norming” with only the minimum of “forming” and “storming”. It’s also interesting to note that one of the teams where we got to “performing” became regarded as a threat by managers and was actively shut down. It’s not always, necessarily, in everyone’s best interest to have a high performance team.

These things are never precise, but I’ve found it a useful model for understanding situations.

Some more information:

I could spend hours doing this…

Discipline is such a key issue for productive work especially when there are so many distractions around. Let me give you my ultimate time wasting recipe:

Check your corporate email for unread items.
Read the first two emails by which time you should be bored
Wonder what is happening on Twitter.
Browse through the fresh set of updated. It is essential that you are following enough people to guarantee a fresh crop of tweets every time you look. This is easily done by following a number of news accounts.
Once bored of tweets skip over to your RSS reader to see if there are any updates. Like twitter it is vital to be following a whole stack of feeds. The syndicated and group blogs are the best for guaranteeing updates on every visit, LifeHacker and BetaNews are good examples.
Read posts until bored. The key is to never get to the end of your unread list ensuring that return visits result in further reading.
Continuing the blog theme jump over to your WordPress Dashboard. This is the first of many information sources that you are convinced give you important information each time you visit.
From your WordPress dashboard take particular interest in one or maybe two vital statistics justifying your next stop – Google Analytics.
Google Analytics will highlight some interesting searches that have reached your site – it always does. Justify to yourself a quick trip to Google Webmaster Tools for further information.
If there is any danger of you getting to the end of the statistics before you have successfully wasted enough of your valuable time you can also skip through the Bing Webmaster Tools and the Yahoo Webmaster tools. Three search tools are normally enough, but if you want to waste even more time other search engines are available.
Your next stop is your personal email – again, read a few posts but never get to the end of the unread items available.
Hopefully your personal email will highlight some justification for going to Facebook, but if it doesn’t just go there anyway. Don’t waste your time on applications or silly games – that would be a real waste of time. Spend time reading status updates and looking at photos of people you have never met.
It’s time now to graze through some of the corporate tools that you have available. Portals and dashboards provide more information than you could possible consume. This can soon be justified as work even when you are only mooching around. Justifiable time wasting is the best form.
The next activity that is vital to your time wasting credibility is your ability to browse around new sites. The BBC is particularly good for this there are endless possibilities in news and Sport.

If you are in danger of having to do some real work, by getting to the end of the list, you can, at any point, return to the top of the list.

If you have followed the guidelines correctly there should always be something to do.

Also, remember that you can carry on these same distractions when away from the office by use of a SmartPhone or other such device. Location should not be an inhibitor.

Following this recipe should ensure that you always look busy and avoid unnecessary activities that may result in something being produced. Alternatively, you could just redefine these activities as work and then you will have completed everything there is to complete.

Working through this kind of distraction reaction process is what I’m sure many people do and will do, but it isn’t good for you, or for your brain. Being able to cope with the lure of these attention giving sirens will be a defining feature of the future workforce.

Working on a day of important interruptions

Interruptions have a massive negative impact on productivity. You might think that you can easily switch from one place to another but you can’t. every time you switch you have a period of time when you are not being productive at doing what you are doing.

With this in mind there are many time management and activity management philosophies around that help you to focus on the important things and to drive out the interruptions. Most of the time I would agree, but today is one of those days that is an exception.

Today the important things are the interruptions. There are a set of people who are working away on things and they need help doing it, they don’t know when they need help so they need to be able to interrupt.

That leaves me with the challenge of staying productive between the interrupts.

I don’t want to start anything significant because I’ll just spend all day being frustrated.

I can’t sit around waiting for the interrupts because I’m likely to fall asleep and then miss the interrupts.

I don’t want to go and look for the interruptions because that would interrupt the people doing the productive work.

So what do i do?

It’s a dilemma.

I’m up-to-date on my email.

I’m up-to-date on my feeds.

I’m up-to-date on my twitter.

I almost wish that i was behind on my administration.

Writing and reading – getting down to it

Over recent years I’ve noticed a significant shift in my attention span. I’d like it to be getting longer but unfortunately it’s getting shorter.

There may be a reason for this; we recently discovered that the central heating boiler in our house had been incorrectly fitted and was doing its best to poison us all.

But I’m not sure it’s that simple.

I wonder whether it’s also a problem with the number of distractions that I now have available to me.

This week I decided to do something about the distractions.

One of the main distractions is my phone, it always seems to ring at the most inopportune times. This week I made a decision (please don’t tell anyone), I put my phone onto silent and waited to see what would happen.

I’ve written and read more in the last few days that I have for weeks.

I haven’t missed a single really important phone call – and there have been some.

Make screens a priority

How long do you think that you spend looking at some form of screen every day?

Television? Laptop? Mobile phone?

According to the New York Times it’s likely to be longer than you think:

In fact, adults are exposed to screens — TVs, cellphones, even G.P.S. devices — for about 8.5 hours on any given day, according to a study released by the Council for Research Excellence on Thursday. TV remains the dominant medium for media consumption and advertising, the study found. The data suggests that computer usage has supplanted radio as the second most common media activity.(Print ranks fourth.)

That’s right 8.5 hours a day.

Even excluding TVs that’s a lot of time, spent on screens at work. So why do we spend so little on the actual screen itself? It’s the primary tool that we use.

I’m constantly amazed when I go around offices to see the way that people are using and abusing the screen that they use all day, every day.

I’ve already written about multiple monitors. If I could communicate one thing to people that I know would radically change their productivity it would be that. But there is more to it than that.

In most organisations that I know screen purchases are tightly controlled. You have to be really special to have anything more than the standard screen. In many ways this control is completely disproportionate to the value that a good screen gives and the relative cost.

The number of people who have cracked or severely scratched mobile phone screens never ceases to amaze.

There are times when I feel like going around with a cleaning cloth and revealing to people the wonders that lurk beneath. Go on, I dare you, clean a screen today.

Lotus Notes Tabs – My Usability Problem

I have a bit of a usability problem with Lotus Notes tabs.

It’s a simple thing but it catches me out every day and has become an annoyance that I feel like I need to write about.

When I start Notes the first thing I do is to take a quick look in my inbox and then open my calendar. The two tabs that I have open look like this:

As I open items to read the tab bar starts to fill up and the size of the tabs starts to reduce.

The number of tabs that I need to open depends on the size of the screen that I am using. On my laptops it’s only four items before I get to this:

I’m now stuck, which is my calendar, which is my inbox. Opening more items just makes the situation worse. If I had a shorter name it would be less of an annoyance, but I don’t have a short name.

I’m not sure why Lotus couldn’t do something with the icons to show me which view of my mail file I am looking at, perhaps it’s configuration issue I can work my way around, or even the way that Notes has been deployed to me, but I haven’t done anything to create this situation.

Technorati Tags: lotus,notes,usability

An Approach to To-Do Lists that would even appeal to Unstructured Workers

43 Folders has this great little approach to dealing with a to-do list.

As I’ve said before, items can sometimes linger on your TODO list a lot longer than you’d like, and it can be tricky to understand exactly why that is in each case. I’m convinced cringing is often a factor.

Being that it’s Monday, and a lot of us are planning this week’s activities, why not join me in a modest exercise.

Print out your TODO list (alphabetically, if possible)
Read it over—beginning to end
Go back and circle each item that makes you cringe, or that causes you some kind of existential angst
Per cringe item, think honestly about why you’re freaked out about it. Seriously. What’s the hang-up? (Fear of failure? Dreading bad news? Angry you’re already way overdue?)
Now, again, per cringe item, add a new TODO that will a) make the loathsome task less cringe-worthy, or b) just get the damned thing done
Cross the original cringe items off your list
Work immediately on the new, cringe-busting TODO

If you could do this for just one item on your TODO list today, wouldn’t you be a little better off? Is there a quick call you could make, a draft you could edit, an email you could return, or some other piddling 2-minute task that would plane some cringe off of your hated tasks?

Imagine if you did this today for five items on your list. Now imagine you began each Monday with a Cringe Bust. Might be a handy way to pick off old items and let some unnecessary anxiety out of your working week.

(For extra credit, find the item on your list that’s been making you cringe for the longest. Anybody else turning up items that have been inducing cringes for over a month? Ouch. I suck.)

I like this approach because it appeals to the semi-structured/unstructured Graham Chastney. I’m definitely not one of these people who can look as a to-do list and prioritise it and then work through in priority order. It just doesn’t appeal and it’s in that word that the true me is revealed. There are loads of other tasks that may be more important but that just isn’t enough, they have to appeal in some way or another. And I’m OK with a philosophy that defines one of the factors as the cringe factor. Of course I also assess my to-do lists from other appeal factors.

Is this task interesting?

Does this task have value (as defined by me of course)?

Is this task for someone I like working with (because I don’t suffer fools)?

What is the reward for this task (that is rewards to me of course)?

Do I know that in completing this task that I will just get another one given to me (so actually there isn’t any point in completing this one)?

Do I think that if I don’t do this task the reason t do it will just disappear (as so many do)?

What is the pain involved in not doing this task (because life isn’t without pain anyway)?

Is this task overdue yet (because I don’t need to worry about it if it isn’t)?

Yes I know this list should be something more like:

Is this task of value to the company?

Has this task been requested by my superior?

Tough, it doesn’t. Those two narrow factors just don’t appeal. And yes I really do believe that my employee should give me tasks that appeal (if they want the best out of me).

Office Efficiency

One of my ‘other’ jobs is to help a volunteer organisation in their use of IT. This organisation is only small and consists of six members of staff. My daytime job is to help large corporate to get the most out of their IT investments.

Both of these jobs give me an interesting insight into the ways that people interact with IT. One of them is all about detail, the other is all about high level big picture. On a personal level I tend to use one as a counter-balance to the other.

Large corporation try to increase office efficiency by investing huge amounts of money in large projects. These projects tend to focus on a radical change across a whole corporate base; new email system, desktop refresh, application upgrade, new application. In most instances the training for these changes focuses on the way that the change works; this is the way that you send email in this new system; this is the way that you schedule meetings; etc.

In my work with the volunteer organisation I have realised how diverse the use of IT is in the day to day things. There are now many different routes to achieve the same thing. In Windows (for instance) think of the different ways that you could open an existing Word document; you can use the folder views via something like ‘My Documents’; you can open up Word and do a File-Open command. Previously people would try to assess the efficiency of these types of operations by looking at the number of steps that needed to be undertaken; the one with the least steps being the most efficient. While in theory this is correct, I have come to the realisation that actually the one which is the most efficient is the one which works best for the individual. The biggest efficiency problem these days is not the time it takes for the computer to undertake an operation, it’s the time it take the individual to map out in their head the operations. And the pictures and maps that people use to do this are not linear ABC type maps, they are more like mind maps.

The only truly inefficient thing is the task map that someone has in their head which takes them on a route around the task, rather than getting straight to the task. So the challenge for corporate training is to find these inefficient tasks and routes and assist people in finding a new route. This type of education and learning is radically different to the way that we educate people today. Firstly, we need to make people realise that their productivity is their responsibility and not the responsibility of IT. But that is a difficult one to sell to some people. We then, also, need ways of understanding the ways that people are using their IT. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to say “I notice from our logs of the system that you keep going to your “My Documents area by first opening My Computer” did you know that you can get there quicker by doing this.”

That type of logging is clearly not available today, all we get are ‘event logs’ which tells us about problems and issues, but tell us nothing of the way that people are working.

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