Category: Productivity

Focus on one thing – it's much better for you

I sit in an open plan office and look around. There are many people sat with headphones on participating in one or other of the constant stream of teleconferences. They’re all sat in front of a screen browsing around, replying to emails, participating in instant message chats. They’re all multitasking. They’re all telling themselves that the call doesn’t require their full attention so they can use some of their attention on some other worthwhile distraction. I’ve done exactly that for many years but the reality is that it’s exhausting, unproductive and ultimately destructive. The call suffers, the worthwhile distraction suffers, we suffer.

RydalI’ve talked about multi-tasking before:

Tony Schwartz recently wrote an article for the Harvard Business Review titled The Magic of Doing One Thing at a Time.

Tell the truth: Do you answer email during conference calls (and sometimes even during calls with one other person)? Do you bring your laptop to meetings and then pretend you’re taking notes while you surf the net? Do you eat lunch at your desk? Do you make calls while you’re driving, and even send the occasional text, even though you know you shouldn’t?

The biggest cost — assuming you don’t crash — is to your productivity. In part, that’s a simple consequence of splitting your attention, so that you’re partially engaged in multiple activities but rarely fully engaged in any one. In part, it’s because when you switch away from a primary task to do something else, you’re increasing the time it takes to finish that task by an average of 25 per cent.

But most insidiously, it’s because if you’re always doing something, you’re relentlessly burning down your available reservoir of energy over the course of every day, so you have less available with every passing hour.

Tony also links to this video from Stanford University which demonstrates what we do to ourselves when we do multitask:

Media Multitaskers Pay Mental Price

(A short break in writing because I was interrupted by an Instant Message from a colleague, which took me through to the start of a call into which I tried to be focussed, for once, without worthwhile distractions. It would be ironic to write a blog post on the dangers of multitasking while multitasking.)

I see myself multitasking all of the time, I’ve certainly not got this one cracked, but one thing I am certain of, I need to spend much more time on one task and far less time flitting between activities. It’s very easy to fill your life with worthless frittering, but that’s draining, unfulfilling and destructive. There are all sorts of pressures to dance from one thing to the next, but the primary challenge is with my own resolve. I suspect I’m like many people, I know that this way of working isn’t good for me, I could do something to resolve it, but choosing to leave things as they are feels like an easier route. In 12 step groups they call this denial and you have to overcome that before you can get too much further.

It’s time to move out of denial, anyone else coming with me?

Nano Workouts – Conference Call Push-ups

Following on from the thought that sitting is killing us I’ve been thinking about the different ways that I can counteract my personal inactivity.

While doing some research (sitting down) I came across a site called Nano Workout which produces regular pictures of exercise ideas for the office or home.

Today’s idea is Conference Call Push-ups:

I can’t see myself doing this in the office, at home maybe, but not in the office. The culture is such that this would be regarded as a totally mad thing to do, but perhaps that will change. Once upon a time it was regarded as acceptable to smoke in the office, now it’s illegal. I regularly walk around while on a conference call, so perhaps push-ups aren’t too mad an idea.

Sorting out sitting – before it kills me

There have been a number of articles in recent days about the dangers of sitting for long periods of the day, dangers that are serious and include a higher risk of death.

Global RainbowI, like many workers, spend much of my time sitting. If I’m working at home – I’m sitting at a desk. If I’m in the office – I’m sitting at a desk. If I’m in a meeting – I’m sitting at a table. Sitting, sitting, sitting. I’ve written before about my experiences with tension headaches which are primarily caused by issues of posture – posture while sitting. While these headaches are mostly under control, I’ve not yet managed to change my lifestyle sufficiently for me to remove all medicinal support, so sitting is still a problem.

Tom Ferris has a great post summarising the emerging evidence that inactivity, and sitting specifically, is a problem, but also what one organisation did to combat the problem.

Recent research suggests that those who sit from 9-5 (more than 6 hours daily) and exercise regularly are more likely to have heart disease than those who sit less than 3 hours per day and don’t “exercise” at all.

It’s a great shopping list of ideas including:

  • Standing desks
  • Exercise balls
  • Balance cushions
  • Monitors stands
  • Ergonomic keyboard
  • Ergonomic mice
  • Hand grippers
  • Wobble boards
  • Pedometers
  • Shoe options
  • Conference room and meeting configurations
  • Office layout
  • Food and snacks

The important point for me is that good office configurations have a direct payback in terms of productivity. We’ve known this for a long time, and yet many organisations continue to build facilities that have barely changed since the advent of the Personal Computer.

A small number of offices across the country have slowly begun to endorse the idea of exercising during work (e.g. walking on a treadmill while doing your job at Mutual of Omaha). Besides the obvious fitness benefits, exercise also increases productivity (according to research done by the Vermont Board of Education — PDF download).

Most surprising of all, remaking the workplace into a healthy, exercise-supportive environment has a cost benefit. Many of the design changes we have implemented cost little or nothing.

But it’s not just about gadgets, it’s also about culture. There are limits to what I can personally influence, especially in the office, but even then I don’t do what I know is good for me. It’s a change I am having to learn to make though. Which reminds me, I haven’t done my stretches yet today and perhaps it’s time to order an exercise ball.

We haven't quite figured out filtering yet

The other day I wrote about information filtering – "There’s no such thing as information overload only failure to filter”. This post was linked to by The Social Organisation who makes some really interesting points about filtering and the hoarding instinct:

FormbyA few years ago I wrote a post about scarcity and abundance and I still think this is the fundamental issue at play with information. Humans are driven to hoard because our impulses were built for an environment of scarcity. We are worried that if we don’t read everything – particularly if passed on through trusted social connections – we might miss something important and that makes us anxious. We mistake the available and accessible for the valuable.

I’ve never been much of a hoarder but I only have to look out across my back garden to see a house where someone clearly has huge issues with hoarding, and you don’t have to walk around many offices to realise that lots of people have similar issues when it comes to folders of paper. That’s all before we deluge people with electronic information.

While I was writing the post I was reminded of a cartoon which I couldn’t find at the time, but came across it again today:

From Bonkers World

"There's no such thing as information overload only failure to filter"

In a recent article John Gaudiin from Cisco recounts how, at a conference one of the attendees half jokingly said:

"There’s no such thing as information overload only failure to filter."

LindisfarneI’ve heard this view before, and probably used it in a few situations myself. I am an avid filterer myself. Of the hundreds of emails I receive every day the number that make it to my inbox is quite small, but I also think that it’s an overly simplistic view.

One of the problems I have is that this statement places all of the responsibility on the person receiving the information and the systems transporting it. It places no responsibility with the person or system sending the information.

I can filter all sorts of things if people or groups of people behave consistently, and the technology can do the same. The problem comes because people are not consistent, and groups of people are even less consistent.

Taking email as an example, it can be categorised in all sorts of ways, but the category is set by the person sending the information and their view of the category is probably different to mine. Just because an email is marked as urgent doesn’t mean that it becomes urgent to me, my idea of urgent and theirs are rarely the same. If I’m added as a cc: doesn’t mean I can always ignore it because sometimes I should really be at the heart of the activity. In some ways categorisation makes it worse, because people believe they are communicating something that I’m likely to ignore.

The other challenge with filtering is that it’s secret. The person who has sent me some information has now knowledge of whether I have let the information onto my field of vision or not. There is only room for a certain number of players on the pitch so a lot of people have to be happy to be a spectator, but current filtering systems don’t even tell people whether they’ve made it into the team, the reserves, a spectator or have already been ejected from the park.

The final challenge with current filtering systems is the scope of context. Current filtering systems work within their context (email, IM, etc.) they understand very little about each other’s context. They definitely don’t collect all of the context – voice is an obvious omission. The email system has no way of knowing that someone has phoned me to tell me to look out for an important or urgent email, if it did I would want it to tell me.

That leaves me in the situation where the ultimate filter has to be my eyeballs.

My approach to filtering is a version of the zero inbox approach. It’s only going to get worked on if it’s in my diary or it’s in my ‘to action’ folder. It only gets into my ‘to action’ folder if it’s not been deleted by a filter, or I’ve moved it there from one of my other filter folders like ‘newsletters’, ‘expenses system’ or ‘travel system’ which is highly unlikely, or if I’ve personally filtered it in there from what remains of what remains in my inbox. At some point in every day my inbox is empty. By using different automatic filter folders I am able to apply a different approach to reading in the different folders. In the ‘expenses system’ folder I’m only looking for one thing and that’s the ‘rejected’ word, everything else is noise. In the ‘newsletters’ folder I filter on title, if the title isn’t very interesting it gets deleted.

I don’t filter on individuals although I have seriously considered putting some people into a ‘too chatty’ filter to let me filter them separately.

While filtering items I also operate a 30 second rule, if I can respond completely in 30 seconds I will. The important thing is that I can respond completely if I’m not sure about something or I only have half the answer it goes into the ‘to action’ folder. I don’t send ‘I’ll get back to you tomorrow’ type emails, because I don’t see any value in them and they just annoy me when people send them to me.

Most of the time this works very well for me and I rarely feel completely overloaded.

My filter regime for other systems isn’t anything like as sophisticated primarily because the technology isn’t yet there.

Do you get that overloaded feeling or is your filter system working?

David Allen: "It's really cools stuff, but there's as much frustration with it now…"

In this short video from Bloomberg Dave Allen talks about technology and productivity.

Bamburgh SunsetI know a number of people who blame technology for all sorts of problems, but Dave Allen has a different take:

The medium itself is neither good nor bad – it’s neutral.

It’s a message that many of us need to hear, to a certain extent, it’s not email that’s the problem, it’s how we use it. I say ‘to a certain extent’ because my own view is that email, as an example, is only neutral in the same way that alcohol is neutral. That might sound like quite a strong comparison to make, but the parallels that I am trying to draw out are these. Alcohol might be neutral until used, but it’s effect on people, once used, differs dramatically, and people aren’t always in control of their response.  The same is true with email, and other technology media. Also, like alcohol, the effects aren’t always immediately evident and for the technology media we are a long way from understanding all of the impacts.

We need to do a much better job of helping people to understand what the impacts of their actions are when they use email, for instance, and to use it far more responsibly.

Things are changing and Dave Allen highlights this in the interview:

It’s all really cools stuff but there’s as much frustrations with it now as there is "wow this is neat".

The GTD methods that Dave Allen teaches, and other similar methodologies, are becoming very important.

The other day I read an interesting article when someone was paralleling the emerging Productivity Industry with the Diet Industry. It’s a similar parallel. (Annoyingly, for some reason, I didn’t bookmark it and now can’t find it.)

http://player.ooyala.com/player.js?height=360&embedCode=91dmJqMzoH5fkdyt241J-lK2Kn_amZaL&deepLinkEmbedCode=91dmJqMzoH5fkdyt241J-lK2Kn_amZaL&width=560

Google: Rules for a good (decision making) meeting

In a recent article that talks about how Google is seeking to regain some of it’s start-up responsiveness while still growing Kristen Gil, Google’s VP of Operation explains some of the changes that they are making. One of the changes is in the way that they do meetings. Here is what she said:

Saddleworth Moor in the SnowOne of our first observations was that many meetings weren’t working as well as they should. A well-run meeting is a great thing; it empowers people to make decisions, solve problems, and share information. But badly-run meetings are a demoralizing waste of time. We didn’t want our employees to waste either time or energy, so we gathered input and made some recommendations to help make meetings more effective.

For starters, we noted that every decision-oriented meeting should have a clear decision-maker, and if it didn’t, the meeting shouldn’t happen. Those meetings should ideally consist of no more than 10 people, and everyone who attends should provide input. If someone has no input to give, then perhaps they shouldn’t be there. That’s okay – attending meetings isn’t a badge of honor – but the people who are attending need to get there on time. Most importantly, decisions should never wait for a meeting. If it’s critical that a meeting take place before a decision is made, then that meeting needs to happen right away.

Start-up Speed

Common sense mostly, but there are many organisations where a rigorous applications of these kind of rules would make a massive difference. I certainly agree with the sentiments of good meetings being great and poor meetings being "a demoralising waste of time".

One of the ideas that is gaining traction where I work is the two pizza meeting. In other words the maximum size of a meeting is one that can be fed from by two pizzas. This is a follow on from something Jeff Bezos of Amazon instigated – the two pizza team.

Trust and Knowledge Networks

One of the things that I’m known to say is this: "The informal organisation is much stronger than the formal one".

Beverley WestwoodSometimes when I say this people nod wholeheartedly, but others look puzzled. The ones who look puzzled are normally near the bottom of the formal organisation, people further up the organisation seem to understand this implicitly. Karen Stephenson (an expert in this area) quotes a Four Star General as saying "I can lead men and women into battle but I’m a prisoner of war in my own organisation" and I think that many senior people in organisations feel the same way.

Karen codifies these informal organisation structures as knowledge networks and trust networks. She then goes on to classify the different types of network:

Six Varieties of Knowledge Networks

In any culture, says Karen Stephenson, there are at least six core layers of knowledge, each with its own informal network of people exchanging conversation. Everybody moves in all the networks, but different people play different roles in each; a hub in one may be a gatekeeper in another. The questions listed here are not the precise questions used in surveys. These vary on the basis of the needs of each workplace and other research considerations (“Don’t try this at home,” says Professor Stephenson), but they show the basic building blocks of an organization’s cultural makeup.

1. The Work Network. (With whom do you exchange information as part of your daily work routines?) The everyday contacts of routinized operations represent the habitual, mundane “resting pulse” of a culture. “The functions and dysfunctions; the favors and flaws always become evident here,” says Professor Stephenson.

2. The Social Network. (With whom do you “check in,” inside and outside the office, to find out what is going on?) This is important primarily as an indicator of the trust within a culture. Healthy organizations are those whose numbers fall within a normative range, with enough social “tensile strength” to withstand stress and uncertainty, but not so much that they are overdemanding of people’s personal time and invested social capital.

3. The Innovation Network. (With whom do you collaborate or kick around new ideas?) There is a guilelessness and childlike wonderment to conversations conducted in this network, as people talk openly about their perceptions, ideas, and experiments. For instance, “Why do we use four separate assembly lines where three would do?” Or, “Hey, let’s try it and see what happens!” Key people in this network take a dim view of tradition and may clash with the keepers of corporate lore and expertise, dismissing them as relics.

4. The Expert Knowledge Network. (To whom do you turn for expertise or advice?) Organizations have core networks whose key members hold the critical and established, yet tacit, knowledge of the enterprise. Like the Coca-Cola formula, this kind of knowledge is frequently kept secret. Key people in this network are often threatened by innovation; they’re likely to clash with innovators and think of them as “undisciplined.”

5. The Career Guidance or Strategic Network. (Whom do you go to for advice about the future?) If people tend to rely on others in the same company for mentoring and career guidance, then that in itself indicates a high level of trust. This network often directly influences corporate strategy; decisions about careers and strategic moves, after all, are both focused on the future.

6. The Learning Network. (Whom do you work with to improve existing processes or methods?) Key people in this network may end up as bridges between hubs in the expert and innovation networks, translating between the old guard and the new. Since most people are afraid of genuine change, this network tends to lie dormant until the change awakens a renewed sense of trust. “It takes a tough kind of love,” says Professor Stephenson, “to entrust people to tell you what they know about your established habits, rules, and practices.”

From Karen Stephenson’s Quantum Theory of Trust

There’s a PDF of this report available here

She also states that 80% of the knowledge in the organisation resides in these knowledge networks. That’s a powerful message for people who spend all of there time driving organisation change through the organisation hierarchy. It’s also a powerful message for those of us who live inside the networks and ignore their effect upon us and our influence over them.

If you prefer to watch there are a number of videos here.

Giving up on a goal: 1000 posts

Back in September I set out on a process of writing less to write more. It looked then like there was just a possibility that I could get the end of the year and have written 1000 posts on this blog.

Castle CragI need to set myself personal goals otherwise I get nothing done, it’s my way of focussing.

This is post number 907 and I’m clearly nowhere near the 1000 number. So I’ve decided to put the 1000 goal to one side. I’d rather focus on quality over quantity anyway, but sometimes it’s nice to have a target and quality targets are more difficult to set.

I like to reach a summit, but not at the expense of the view on the journey.

I also thought about adding up all of the other contributions that I’ve made on Twitter, Flickr, etc to come up with a view of my overall output this year. That got too scary so I decided to leave that one under the carpet.

Drifting Attention from Dilbert

I have had this happen to me so many times that I’ve almost stopped noticing it happen:

Dilbert.com

It’s a sign of our times, and not a good one.

My normal response to it happening is to sit there and wait for the person to come back to me. I feel a bit like a teacher standing waiting for a class to be quiet.

Organisation Charts

I love this cartoon from Bonkers World about different organisation structures:

I work in a large organisation that looks much more like a couple of these charts than others, and there are days when I’m not sure what it really looks like.

When people unfamiliar with the organisation ask how they get things done I regularly tell them that the informal organisation structure is much stronger than the formal one. So perhaps the diagram doesn’t matter too much anyway.

The connected world we now live in makes a whole set of new organisational shapes possible and great many of them will be successful.

At the end of the day it’s the people that matter though.

Hat tip to Seth Godin.

Telling Stories

I’ve often thought that schools should spend much more time teaching people to tell stories.

Universities should, in my opinion, have story telling as a basic requirement for all courses.

I sit in so many meetings where someone stands up and talks through a set of slides. I use the word ‘set’ to describe a random collection of information.

The slides themselves aren’t coherent, the order of slides isn’t coherent, in short there is no story.

People connect with story, stories travel and live on beyond the event itself. Tell a story and you’ll be memorable.

One of the best lecturers I ever had at university was my ‘Stress’ tutor. He regularly started lectures with a broken component. He’d then tell the story of how this component got broken. This story would always be told with glint in the eye and an air of mystery.

Our job was to solve the mystery in order to complete the story. He’d then tell us the real end of the story. I still remember one of the stories about a tow bar component that had actually led to someone’s death – that’s nearly 25 years ago.