On average, employees spend 5.3 hours per day sitting, which means the chair is the foundation of a healthy office environment. Because the average office chair is 7.2 years old, the integrity of the chair’s support and functionality might be jeopardized due to its age.
Category: Productivity
What's your "productivity style"?
Carson Tate thinks that there are 4 Types of Productivity Style:
The Prioritizer – A Prioritizer is that guy or gal who will always defer to logical, analytical, fact-based, critical, and realistic thinking…
The Planner – The Planner is the team member who thrives on organized, sequential, planned, and detailed thinking…
The Arranger – An Arranger prefers supportive, expressive, and emotional thinking…
The Visualizer – A Visualizer prefers holistic, intuitive, integrating, and synthesizing thinking…
For each of these styles Tate gives a more detail explanation including a definition of their contribution to a team and set of tools that support their productivity style. A Prioritizer might like 42Goals or Wunderlist whereas a Visualizer might like Lifetick or iThoughts HD.
The main focus of Tate’s post, I think, is to highlight that different people are productive in different way, which is something I would wholly agree with. Four styles of productivity feels a bit too restrictive though. Personally, I think I can be all four of the above and sometimes all of them at the same time. I don’t think that I fit any of them as a primary style (perhaps those of you who know me a bit better can let me know which one they think I am?)
The thought that different productivity styles mean that people prefer different tools to support their style is logical, but demonstrates a problem for teams. Teams are best when they are made up of different personality (and productivity) types. Creating the appropriate tooling for a team is, therefore, a challenge. How do you coordinate when one person is using Wunderlist, another 42Goals and yet another Lifetick? I’ve seen many teams where they have tried to mandate a particular tool for collaboration, this has generally resulted in low levels of engagement with the tool. People prefer different things and if you want the best out of them then perhaps you should let them use those tools.
On a different topic, four seems to be a popular number of this kind of assessment and aligns quite closely with many of the personality type assessments. How many of you know your Myers-Briggs personality type, which is also a set of four characteristics? Do we use four because we like quadrants because that’s how we think?
Is my job going to be computerised? Another view: The 'Jobless Future' Is A Myth
I’ve written a few post now on the impact of computerisation and automation on the jobs market:
Both of these posts highlight the jobs that are likely to be replaced by computers and/or robots.
Steve Denning adds another viewpoint: The ‘Jobless Future’ Is A Myth.
This article is primarily a response to the book The Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of Mass Unemployment (May 2015) by Martin Ford.
As you may have guessed Martin Ford’s view is that the robots will take over and that Steve Denning is taking issue with this viewpoint. I’ve not read the book so can’t comment on it, but I was intrigued by Steve’s viewpoint as a counter-point to the other articles the I have read.
Denning outlines what he regards as a number of flaws in Ford’s reasoning (extracts):
One flaw is the underlying assumption that whatever is feasible will occur…
A second flaw in the reasoning is the implicit assumption that computers with miraculous performance capabilities can be developed, built, marketed, sold, operated and replicated at practically zero cost and that they will have zero secondary employment effects…
A third flaw is the failure to consider how the marketplace will react to the computer as a new market entrant…
A fourth flaw in the reasoning is to assume that when machines replace human capabilities, as they have been doing for thousands of years, nothing else changes…
As a technologist myself it’s great to hear a viewpoint from someone who isn’t. Denning’s perspective is that many of the symptoms that are being assigned to computerisation are also effects that would result from other challenges in the employment marketplace. He list seven different issues including shareholder value theory on which he has written extensively.
Denning concludes like this:
We need to stop agonizing about an apocryphal vision of a “jobless future” and to focus on the pressing real issues that we can actually fix.
There have been many technologists commenting recently:
- Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking warn of artificial intelligence dangers – Mashable
- Bill Gates is worried about artificial intelligence too – CNET
- Apple co-founder on artificial intelligence: ‘The future is scary and very bad for people’ – The Washington Post
My gut feeling is that we are going through a significant shift in employment and what it means to be in a job, but I’ve never felt comfortable with a dystopian view that the machines are going to completely take over. History and experience tells me that we humans will muddle our way through and use our incredible adaptability to find something else to do.
Standing Target: Four Hours a Day! How am I doing?
Office workers should spend a minimum of two hours on their feet at work – building up to an ideal four hours – in order to avoid the ill effects of a sedentary lifestyle, according to a study co-commissioned by Public Health England.
Office workers should be on their feet for a minimum of two hours a day during working hours, according to the first official health guidelines.
The guidance, published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, warns that UK sedentary behaviour now accounts for 60 per cent of people’s waking hours and for 70 per cent of those at high risk of a long term condition.
The British Journal of Sports Medicine:
The derived guidance is as follows: for those occupations which are predominantly desk based, workers should aim to initially progress towards accumulating 2 h/day of standing and light activity (light walking) during working hours, eventually progressing to a total accumulation of 4 h/day (prorated to part-time hours). To achieve this, seated-based work should be regularly broken up with standing-based work, the use of sit–stand desks, or the taking of short active standing breaks.
I’ve written before about sitting killing us, so was interested to hear that an official organisation like Public Health England are undertaking research into how long we should be standing to be healthy and starting to form guidelines.
The key points are that we should be starting from a base of 2 hours of standing a day, during the working day, building to 4 hours a day.
It’s worth clarifying that the studies weren’t just about standing, they were looking into “getting workers to stand and/or move more frequently”. It’s not just about going from sitting still to standing still; the point is to become more active generally.
I don’t, personally, have any great metrics on how much I stand, or sit, or move around during the working day. I can make some good approximations though.
My iPhone runs Moves which tracks my activities when I move with the phone. So I know how much time I spend walking, with my iPhone, but that’s not very accurate at work because I tend to leave my iPhone on my desk when I do all of those small movements in the day – get a drink, go to the loo, etc. Assuming that those activities account for less than 30 mins a day I’m still left with about three and a half hours of standing or movement left to do. With that in mind I went back through my activity log in Moves and realised that I have a long way to go – the amount of movement recorded during the working day is tiny. An example of a week’s movement during the working day: Monday – 11 mins; Tuesday – 12 mins; Wednesday – 39 mins (I went for a walk at lunchtime); Thursday – 4 mins; Friday – 10 mins. Oh dear.
I sometimes stand next to my desk while on a call, but it’s not three hours a day!
Most mornings I go for a 40 minute walk before going to work. I could cheat a bit and include that in my target. Then I would be down to needing an extra three hours and a few minutes of standing or moving to get to a total of four hours.
However you look at it, I have a lot of work to do to get close to the two hours, so building to four hours is going to take some effort.
Apart from getting my employer to invest in a stand-sit desk do you have any great activity ideas for me?
One thing I had thought of was taking more calls on my mobile and then walking.
"The Rise of Dynamic Teams" – Alan Lepofsky and Bryan Goode
Continuing my review of some of the sessions from Microsoft Ignite 2015 the title The Rise of Dynamic Teams caught my attention.
When I saw that the presenters were Alan Lepofsky and Bryan Goode it was definitely going to be one to watch.
This session has an overarching question raised by Alan:
Could you be more effective at work?
Well of course I can.
All I had to do is to think back to the last time I was frustrated at work and there clearly presented was an opportunity to be more effective.
Promised Productivity
Alan also highlight that we’ve been promised improved productivity for decades now, but in his opinion not really been delivered it.
My personal opinion is that we have improved our productivity, but mostly by doing the same things quicker, rather than working in different way. A good example of this is email where we send far more messages far quicker, but definitely less effectively.
Framing the problem
Many of us can recognise the issue of information overload. We use many different systems and are fed information all the time.
Alan frames a different problem which I also recognise – input overload. This is the problem we experience when we think about creating something and can’t decided what it is we are creating or where we are putting it – Which tool should I use? Where did I post it?
The point is that we now have a multitude of choices of tools so we don’t necessarily need more tools, but we do need to tools to be simpler and to collaborate together.
Best of Breed v Integrated Suites
Alan reflects on two distinct approaches to collaborative tooling – one which focusses on the best of breed capabilities and one which takes a suite of collaborative capabilities.
These are illustrated below:
The key to the suites approach is the content of the centre combined with the ability to integrate third-party capability and have data portability.
I’m not sure I would put everything in the centre that Alan does but I wholly agree with the principal. One of the significant challenges with a suite approach is that by choosing a suite you risk creating a lock-in situation. This lock-in isn’t necessarily one of data lock-in, what’s more likely is capability lock-in.
Intelligent Collaboration
Alan explains what he means by Intelligent Collaboration:
“This is poised to be the coolest shift we’ve had in collaboration tools we’ve had in 20 years”
“The ability for us to start doing really cool things based on intelligence is really going to dramatically change the way we work”
In the Microsoft approach this intelligence will initially be focussed on the individual, but will then extend to teams and organisations.
The systems that we have today have a very limited view of context and what view they do have they tend not to use with any intelligence. Take the simple example of email build-up during a holiday period. You can set up an out-of-office response, but wouldn’t it be great if something more intelligent happened.
If we take that simple example and add onto it all of the sensors that will soon be reporting on our well-being and location. You can then imagine getting a response from your bosses intelligent assistant asking you to attend a meeting on her behalf because her flight back from holiday has been placed into quarantine due to an outbreak of a virus for which she is show the initial symptoms.
Adding to the context will enable many more intelligent interaction.
Imagine a digital assistant system that made decisions based on – location, time, time-zone, emotional state, physical state and many more.
The Rise of the Dynamic Team
This is the point in the session where Bryan Goode adds the Microsoft perspective. He does this by focussing on:
Modern Collaboration
The perspective defined by Bryan is that teams will continue to utilise many different tools and will be increasingly mobile.
Microsoft are also investing heavily in meeting experiences, something that is in desperate need of improvement for all of us.
Intelligent Fabric
In order to enable modern collaboration Bryan talks through the Microsoft view of the need for an Intelligent Fabric.
Two examples of this fabric being built are Office 365 Groups and Office Graph.
Office 365 Groups provide a unified capability across the Office 365 tools for the creation of teams. A group created in one of the Office 365 tools will be visible in all of the other tools – Sites, OneDrive, Yammer, Exchange. Doing this makes a group a fabric entity rather than being locked into any particular tool.
Office Graph brings together all of the signalling information from the Office 365 tools and any other integrated tools. It’s role is to bring together the meta-data from different interactions and activities.
Personalised Insight
An Intelligent Fabric is one thing, but creating value from it is the important part.
In the presentation Bryan demonstrates Office Delve which utilises the signalling from Office Graph to create personal insights.
The personal insights currently focus on the individual, but they are being extended to provide insights for groups and organisations.
“Teamwork is becoming a first-class entity across our products”
Bryan Goode
I’m not going to explain the demonstrations other than to say that they are worth watching, as is the rest of the presentation.
Conclusions
Productivity and collaboration are going to be a defining features of future organisations as can be seen from the posts that I wrote on the Productive Workplace.
Microsoft is in a position to generate a lot of innovation and disruption by building on top of the Office 365 ecosystem. Groups, Graph and Delve are just the start of that. Having released themselves from the shackles of delivery by Enterprise IT organisation they can potential move at a pace that places them ahead of the pack.
More…
The presentation and video for this session is here.
The video is also embedded below:
"Our mission statement is to…"
I walk into a room, it’s a meeting room that anyone who has been to any corporate office anywhere on the planet would recognise. There’s a long table with chairs around it, at one end are a couple of large flat screens attached to the wall at shoulder height, the theme is wood and black leather.
There’s a business casual dress code so all the men are wearing shirts; the one lady is wearing a trouser suit.
Most of the people in the room are known to me but a couple of people are here to present who I don’t recognise. During the meeting introductions I find out that we are to receive a presentation from a vendor and they are the vendor’s technical sales representatives. At this point I’m already trying to line up a set of excuses for leaving the room, but I’m here now and an early exit would seem rude.
After the usual faffing about getting the screens to work properly one of the technical sales representatives moves to the first slide from which he reads these words:
Our mission statement is to…
Then it happens. It used to happen occasionally but recently something more permanent has happened in my brain, a connection has been broken, or perhaps a new connection has been made, I’m not sure which. On hearing the words “Our mission statement is to…” my brain experiences a complete blank out. I may as well be looking at a white screen and listening to white noise.
It doesn’t matter what the person says after these words I’m not going to hear them. If they said “Our mission statement is to undertake best-practice collaboration with polka-dot elephants enabling franchised delivery of cutting-edge chilli-marzipan rabbits to ethical nomadic muskrats in Uzbekistan” I wouldn’t know – I’ve gone to my blank place.
If I’m honest I’ve struggled to write this post because every time I write those words my brain goes off to the blank place and I have to focus quite hard to come back again.
I’d like to be able to describe the blank place to you, but I can’t, because it is just blank; there’s nothing there. I’m not sure when this behaviour started, I suspect that it’s been building up over time.
My theory about the cause is that it’s a self-preservation mechanism; even when I could hear mission statements I found them excruciating and I think my brain is trying to protect itself from any more pain. In my experience most mission statements may as well be a random selection of verbs and adjective, many of them are impossible to understand and the rest don’t say anything worth saying.
(If you want to have some fun with creating your own mission statement from random verbs and adjectives the Mission Statement Generator does precisely that.)
Why do most mission statements fail? It’s only my opinion, but I think it’s because they don’t tell a story. We are story people, we’ve collected and retold them for millennia, they engage with our minds and our emotions, they communicate a message.
I’ve been to many sessions where someone has given me their mission statement and then told me a story. I can remember many of the stories – I can’t remember any of the mission statements. Life would be so much easier if they just left the mission statement out.
Am I the only one that this happens to? Do I need to seek out some medical help?
You might also like: The parable of Ray’s Helicopter Company.
The words “Our vision statement is to…” have exactly the same effect.
Desktop Scatterer, Folder Fanatic and File Dropper
As I walked around the office this morning I was struck by a colleague’s desktop on their PC. It was absolutely full of file icons, completely covered. I’ve seen this phenomena before but never to such an extreme. I found myself recoiling at what I saw as a complete and utter mess. You may have guessed by my tone that I’m not a desktop scatterer.
My desktop has 16 icons on it; all of them from applications that have decided that I need a desktop icon. Sometimes I delete them, but many will make their way back at a later date normally after an update. All of my files are in folders in a hierarchical structure; I am a bit of a folder fanatic.
There are other people who can never find anything, they seem to have an approach of dropping files into all sorts of places in the hope that they can find them later. There are times when the disorganised side of my personality turns me into file dropper also.
I’ve never really understood the desktop scatterer, I suspect that scatterer is a bit derogatory and the desktop is highly optimised to the way that they work. I understand the file dropper a bit, sometimes you just want to get on with things without having to think about organising what you are doing. Occasionally my folder fanaticism gets out of control and I put files within folders, within folder, within folders, within folders and can’t find anything.
The joy of being a folder fanatic or a file dropper is that there are now so many places to create folders and drop files available: local disks, usb drives, network drives, DropBox, OneDrive, Google Drive, SharePoint, Wiki, email, Box, ShareFile, etc.
We all think and work differently and there are (believe it or not) advantages and disadvantages to each of these approaches.
File structures and systems are going to be around for some time because they are so flexible and enable us to optimise how we work. Perhaps it’s time, though, that we started helping each other to be as productive as possible in their use, what works for you?
Generation Z: Another Generational Caricature
One of my favourite quotes is by Soren Kierkegaard:
“Once you label me you negate me.”
I’ve previously posted about our labelling of the Millenials (Generation Y).
Shortly after I wrote that post I read an article in the New York Times about Generation Z which made me sigh – Make Way for Generation Z.
(At least we are now at the end of the alphabet and someone will have to do something a bit more interesting than just labelling the next generation as an increment from the last one. Perhaps we’ll move to special characters, how about Generation #?)
I was going to write something about why this article made me sigh, but then I came across someone who had done a better job – Generalization Z: The Times reduces generation Z to a caricature by Josh Bernoff in without bullshit:
While generalization in writing is a sin, drawing broad conclusions about a whole generation is far worse. Alexandra Levit’s piece about Generation Z in the New York Times is a great – that is, awful – example.
The sin of generalization has three basic flavors: generalizations hedged with weasel words; unsupported broad, sweeping statements; and generalization from one or two examples. They’re all lame, and you shouldn’t believe any of them.
Josh Bernoff goes on to explain in more detail where the original article fails. It’s a master lesson to all of us who write and the reconstructed article on Google Docs is great.
(If you would like to you can submit some BS to the site for analysis – now where was that email from finance?)
Millennial are just like everyone else! No surprises there then.
Millennials (also known as the Millennial Generation or Generation Y) are the demographic cohort following Generation X. There are no precise dates when the generation starts and ends. Researchers and commentators use birth years ranging from the early 1980s to the early 2000s.
Millennials are everywhere, both literally and figuratively:
- Fast food companies facing fight to win trust of millennials
- What millennials do and don’t want from their employers
- Study Shows Secret To Managing Millennials Can Be Summed Up In One Word
- How to Retain Millennial Workers
- Millennials Find YouTube Content More Entertaining, Relatable Than TV: Study
They get characterised in all sorts of ways; the Pew Research Institute allows you to take a survey to assess How Millennial Are You? This survey includes the following questions:
- Do you have a tattoo?
- Do you have a piercing in a place other than an earlobe?
(I’m not very Millennial, but that’s not surprising as I was born in the 60’s which are nowhere near the 80’s and I’m lacking any bodily adornment)
Time Magazine characterised them as the Me Me Me Generation.
Recently IBM undertook some research to see whether all of the characterisations were true. You can perhaps imagine some of the findings by the title Myths, exaggerations and uncomfortable truths – The real story behind Millenials in the workplace:
In a multigenerational, global study of employees from organizations large and small we compared the preferences and behavioral patterns of Millennials with those of Gen X and Baby Boomers. We discovered that Millennials want many of the same things their older colleagues do. While there are some distinctions among the generations, Millennials’ attitudes are not poles apart from other employees’.
Our research debunks five common myths about Millennials and exposes three “uncomfortable truths” that apply to employees of all ages. Learn how a multigenerational workforce can thrive in today’s volatile work environment.
(Emphasis mine)
What were the myths:
- Myth 1: Millennials’ career goals and expectations are different from those of older generations.
- Myth 2: Millennials want constant acclaim and think everyone on the team should get a trophy.
- Myth 3: Millennials are digital addicts who want to do – and share – everything online, without regard for personal or professional boundaries.
- Myth 4: Millennials, unlike their older colleagues, can’t make a decision without first inviting everyone to weigh in.
- Myth 5: Millennials are more likely to jump ship if a job doesn’t fulfill their passions.
Remember, they are called myths because they aren’t true. In the main the research discovered that the Millennial generation is just like the Baby Boomer and Gen X generations in all of these traits. There are some situations where it’s the other generations that are different – “Gen X employees use their personal social media accounts for work purposes more frequently that other employees” – but there are no polar differences between the generations.
So why is so much being written about the differences that the Millenials will bring, some of it is also research based, but I’m sure that there is a good deal of confirmation bias to it also (but perhaps I like the IBM research because it confirms my bias).
Microsoft – Productivity Future Vision (2015)
Over the years Microsoft have produced a number of videos to portray a vision of the future. The previous ones were in 2009, 2011 and 2013, so I suppose it makes sense that they have published one in 2015.
Below is the latest one, with a further information here. The dominant perspective seems to be screens – screens on wrists, screens in hands, screens on tables, screens as walls, flexible screens. I suppose the problem with portraying the future of data is that it doesn’t work too well on video, but there is a huge amount of data being shown on the screens.
(There’s a scene in it where someone is driving along in an open-top Jeep, when I was expecting Dinosaurs to come in from the side Jurassic Park style).
How I Process Information (Normally)
One part of my job is to stay current with the ever-changing technology and business landscapes. This means that I process hundreds (probably thousands) of items of information every day.
I don’t read all of them, but I try to process all of them on a normal day. It should be noted here that I try to have normal days as often as possible, but there are many days when that’s not possible. On those many days I do what I can to keep the framework working.
The normal way that I process information focusses on mornings. I’m mostly a morning person so that’s the best time for me to be alert because processing lots of information you should do when half asleep.
The morning is also the best time, for me, to establish and work through a routine. My morning routine works in six phases:
- Quiet Time – when I read something that is meaningful normally using an application on my iPhone. I’ll then journal about this into a moleskine notebook.
- Walk Time – I try to start each day with at least 40 minutes walking. During this time I’ll listen to a podcast on my iPhone. I find that the inbuilt podcast application is good enough for me.
- Scan Time – I will work my way through the overnight deluge of blogs via Feedly and all the interesting updates from Twitter. My focus on Twitter is a set of people I have in a list called Interesting, I am likely to scan through the first few tweets from the rest of the people who I follow but not always. In Feedly I’ll mark some items as Save for Later; in Twitter I’ll Favourite some tweets. Both the favourited tweets and the saved Feedly posts will get copied into Evernote via IFTTT.
- Email and Calendar Time – I try to limit the time I spend on work emails. The part that I do in the morning routine is to get to inbox-zero by moving items into one of two folders – Actioned or To Action. We happen to use Lotus Notes as an organisation.
- Plan Time – I have a physical folder with pre-printed Productivity Schedules in it. I’ll fill one of these out for each day. This becomes my plan for the day, it isn’t a task list it’s more than that, I’ll write about it some time.
It’s worth noting that there is only one application in these phases that is provided by my employer; the rest are either free, or I pay for them, this is my personal productivity regime.
Having written this post I realise that I’m a bit delinquent on posts for the My Tools series; time to do some catching up.
A number of colleagues have written something similar:
- Stu Downes: My Personal Knowledge Management Systems : Evernote, Instapaper and OneNote
- Max Hemingway: Personal Knowledge Management System
- Steve Richards: My Personal Work Style
Icons by Garrett Knoll, Brian Gonzalez, Andrea Verzola and Agustin Amenabar Larrin from The Noun Project used under Creative Commons – Attribution (CC BY 3.0)
Video: Three Walls by Aeon Video
A really interesting video from Aeon with the wonderful subtitle:
Is the office cubicle actually designed to crush your soul? The strange history and significance of a much-loathed space.
‘We drive to work in a box, we work in a box, we go home and watch a box and, before we know it, they bury us in a box.’
Lot of us have worked in them, but how many of us knew that they weren’t supposed to be what they have become:
I’m writing this post from my deck which is not in a full height cubicle, but is in a set of low height partitioned desks. The featured image at the top is from a weekend walk in the mountains of the Lake District.
Graham Chastney 