Yesterday I met a woman who worked as the head fundraiser for a state senator. Talented, skilled, driven, and sharing a political vision with the senator, she seemed to have been in the ideal job. She quit after six months.
Conflict of ideology? Sex scandal? Financial shenanigans? Nope, nope, and nope.
Disorganization. She left because the senator's chief of staff couldn't manage the workflow in the office and organize the commitments that needed to be fulfilled. It wasn't the chief of staff's messy desk that was the problem, either. It's that the chief of staff had a nasty habit of handing off work that needed to be done by the next morning around 6pm the night before -- because she wasn't on top of her work. Faced with a non-stop series of "emergencies" that forced her to stay late at the office, the fundraiser quit. And she was followed by several more staffers over the next few months, because the environment had grown so toxic and stressful.
I've been writing a lot recently about standard work, and how it can reduce waste and improve efficiency. But knowledge workers often feel that standard work isn't applicable to their jobs, because they're so highly variable and unpredictable. This simply isn't true.
Let's take meetings (please). If your meetings are like those in most organizations, they're flaccid, bloated, puffy things have half the attendees struggling to control hypnic jerks and the other half checking their Blackberries.
Use this template to start creating standard work for meetings.
Since the 1930s, conventional managerial wisdom held that seven to 10 direct reports was optimal. However, the Wall Street Journal reports that this notion is being challenged.
Assigning more workers to each boss started catching on during the corporate restructuring pushes of the late 1980s and early 1990s, when flatter organizational models took hold. Now some consultants are urging companies to loosen their views of supervising, so organizations can run with fewer bosses. Research in Europe suggests that a manager can oversee 30 or more employees, in part by using technology to communicate and help monitor work. . . . The researchers offered several possible reasons for managers' increased span of control, the technical term for how many workers are being supervised. Improved communications techniques may "help managers leverage their knowledge, solve more problems and supervise larger teams," they wrote.
The magnetic pull to check your email every 10, or 5, or 2 minutes will kill you. Not literally, of course. As far as I know, your personal health won't suffer from peering into your inbox like a cat into a fish tank. But the relentless pull of the inbox on your attention will almost certainly prevent you from attending to what's really important to your customers and your company.
It's important to realize that processing email is a piece of work in and of itself. As Merlin Mann elegantly expressed it, processing is more than just checking, but less than responding, to every email. You have to read and assess each email, and then determine what you're going to do with it. That may mean replying, but also may mean deleting, or filing, or designating time at a later date to deal with it. "Processing" takes time.
I've just returned from the Lean Enterprise Institute's Lean Transformation Summit where I ran two workshops on applying lean ideas to the individual desktop. I've covered many of those topics in this blog before, but the discussions with the participants got me thinking: maybe my approach is wrong.
For example, I've spilled a lot of electronic ink (fortunately, electrons are cheap) telling you how to manage email. But I'm now wondering whether my advice has merely been addressing the symptoms, and not the actual problem. Which is to say, I'm giving advice on how to handle email once it's hit your inbox. But perhaps I should be focusing more on the root cause of all those emails.
If you've been reading this blog for awhile, you know that many of my ideas about efficient work come from lean manufacturing. This is the framework I use in thinking about how to reduce waste.
One of the ideals of lean manufacturing is single-piece flow: building one item at a time to precisely meet customer pull. In this scenario, there's no buildup of needless inventory, because everything is built to a specific customer's demand. (Chrysler offers a cautionary tale about the consequences of building a giant pile of unsold inventory.) This one-piece flow stands in stark contrast to "batch processing," in which orders are built up to a certain level before production starts, in order to reduce average production cost.
"We are what we repeatedly do." - Aristotle
Ben Worthen of the Biz Tech Blog in the Wall Street Journal published a clever post on an experiment to break his own email addiction. The results are both pathetic and funny, in a "isn't it funny how Milhouse always gets beaten up by Jimbo and Nelson and snubbed by Lisa" kind of way.
Worthen avoided setting heroic goals (checking emails only once a day, say), and opted for something much more modest:
We thought it would be a worthy experiential-journalism project to record how often we checked our email and to share the results with all of you. We planned to do this for a day. We called off the experiment after an hour. The reason: We’d already checked email 12 times, often for no reason at all.
Despite his uncontrollable (and unconscious) need to wallow in the inbox, Worthen retained enough journalistic objectivity to note two bad habits:
Consider the power of a magnifying glass: it concentrates the sun’s rays and enables you to generate heat and fire (and to inflict needless horror on ants, if you’re nine years old).
Now consider the prism: it refracts light and makes pretty colors.
How do you wield your time and attention at work – as a magnifying glass or as a prism? If you’re like most people, you’re probably getting pretty colors but not much heat. That is to say, you start one task and then allow yourself to be interrupted by phone calls (only some of which are really important), emails (virtually none of which are important), meetings (need I say more?), and knocks on the door. Not only do all these interruptions undermine the quality of your work, but it also takes you longer to get the job done.
Whether you subscribe to David Allen's, Julie Morgenstern's, Laura Stack's, Stephanie Winston's, et al's advice (or mine, for that matter) on productivity, there's a good chance that you don't do everything they recommend. Let's face it: it's a pain in the ass to break old habits (no matter how dysfunctional) and establish new ways of working (no matter how virtuous). If it were easy, there'd be no fat people waddling around the newest branch of Coldstone Creamery.
So if you're not able to swallow the whole productivity System of your choice and enter the promised land of an exquisitely balanced work-life, complete with a mind-like-water, email ninja-moves, and an unlimited supply of stress-free life-hacks and Google tricks -- what should you do?
I think that the weekly (or better yet, daily) review is about the best way to invest 10 minutes of your time. Lord knows, it's not a panacea for what ails you, but if you're only going to do one thing to tame the swirling chaos of your work, this might be it. Here's what to do:
Merlin Mann over at 43Folders has preached long and loud about the danger of being always available to anyone and everyone who needs or wants our help. When we don't value our limited time and attention sufficiently, we open the floodgates to infinite requests from coworkers -- to our detriment.
Don't get me wrong: helping friends or colleagues is a wonderful lubricant for social intercourse. But if the metaphorical or literal door to our offices are always open, it's alarmingly easy to get pulled away from what's really important to our jobs, and we find ourselves spending time proofreading press releases on how our company is leading the market for puppy-themed golf umbrellas.
Jim Womack, founder of the Lean Enterprise Institute and the man responsible for putting Lean on the map (at least in this country), recently wrote an article about what he calls “cadence.” This concept ties in nicely to what I preach about how to “live in your calendar” rather than your inbox, and why a to-do list just isn’t a powerful enough tool to enable you to manage your work.
Please be patient with the lengthy quote that follows. I think it’s acutely relevant in a world in which your boss or colleague often drops stuff on your desk at 4pm and expects you to finish it by 9am the next morning – even though it’s been sitting on her desk for a week and a half.
I hope that every Lean Thinker by now understands takt time. This is the available production time per day divided by the number of items the customer is demanding each day. For example, if the single-shift production process operates eight hours a day (480 minutes) and customers demand 240 widgets a day, the takt time is two minutes. . . .
You're not the only one who struggles with time management.
The Wall Street Journal's Theory & Practice column last week highlighted several executives who didn't quite live up to their resolutions to better manage time in 2007.
Mike Durney, the CFO of Dice Holdings, wanted to handle work related to the company's London office in the morning so that staff over there didn't have to work into the evenings. Unfortunately, morning meetings sometimes got in the way, forcing him to call or email London later. His new approach for 2008? Schedule his work: setting aside blocks of time for email and investor calls. He also vows to turn off his email alerts so that he doesn't get pulled into email when he's not supposed to.
Nortel Networks CEO Mike Zafirovski failed to start and finish internal meetings on time. He blames "aggressive agendas" and a relatively new management team, and wants to do better in 2008. He thinks he did better with his resolution to keep his inbox down to a maximum of 99 unanswered messages.
From Rick Tehrani, president and publisher of TMCNet, comes this gem about the productivity-enhancing potential of visual voicemail:
. . . the ability to be talking with a caller and receive voicemail messages as text while still talking is an amazing productivity booster. A busy executive can be on the phone while forwarding voicemail messages as action items via e-mail. Others in an organization can respond to these voicemails while the executive continues speaking.
Now, don't get me wrong: I think that, like many new technologies, there's a time and place for visual voicemail. Hell, if nothing else, not squandering the salad days of your life listening to the dreaded,
For more message options, press 0. To continue wasting minutes on your calling plan, press 6. To be put on hold indefinitely, press *8
is worth the price of visual voice mail alone.
Whew! Just in case you panicked at the thought of not having access to email on your upcoming five hour flight to Slippery Rock, JetBlue has come to the rescue with in-flight internet access. You'll never again have to endure three whole unconnected hours without riveting messages from the CEO informing you that his daughter's Girl Scout cookies are on sale in his office.
Tim Walker, over at the Business Insight Zone, just blogged about Will Smith and his astonishing work ethic. Tim cites a quote from Smith in a 60 Minutes interview:
“I’ve never really viewed myself as particularly talented. I’ve viewed myself as slightly above average in talent. And where I excel is ridiculous, sickening, work ethic. You know, while the other guy’s sleeping? I’m working. While the other guy’s eatin’? I’m working. While the other guy’s making love, I mean, I’m making love, too. But I’m working really hard at it,” he tells Kroft, laughing.
As far as I know, Will Smith doesn't know anything about lean. However, he clearly understands the notion of continuous improvement. Perhaps even more importantly, he demonstrates a disciplined approach towards making that improvement. Tim puts it nicely when he writes that
There's a scene in Ernest Hemingway's novel, The Sun Also Rises, in which two characters are talking in a bar. One of them describes how his business went bankrupt. He explains, "Gradually, then suddenly." This is precisely how your office went from a paragon of organization following your last cleaning binge to its current state of post-tornado trailer park.
It started gradually. You ran from the 9:00am meeting to the 10:00am conference call, while dropping your notes and a few handouts from the first meeting onto your desk. You did it again after the next one. And the next. Rinse and repeat. You told yourself that you'd get to all that stuff later. . . but, of course, you never did: when you finally got back to your office, you just shoved it to the back corner of your desk and dove into your email. And then suddenly you looked up, and you had piles of papers, post-it notes, Powerpoint decks, scribbled cocktail napkins and soy sauce packets lying everywhere. Like Hemingway said: gradually, then suddenly.
Yesterday's Wall Street Journal article, Email's Friendly Fire (available for free here), shows just how wide is the gulf between lean thinking and conventional thinking.
First, the sobering (frightening?) data: last year, the average corporate email user received 126 messages a day, a 55% increase from 2003. Translating that number into your most valuable commodity -- time -- workers are now spending 26% of their day managing email, a number expected to hit 41% by 2009. (All figures from the Radicati Group.) And while your mileage may vary, you're probably not too far off these numbers.
The problem isn't really spam, either:
This is the final part of a three-part series on the myths that underlie our thinking in the workplace and that lead to waste and inefficiency.
Myth #3: "I'm in the service business. I *have to* respond immediately."
This is probably the most powerful -- and most pernicious -- myth you labor under. It destroys efficiency, vaporizes productivity, and foments more stress and dissatisfaction than any other.
Am I being hyperbolic? Yes, most definitely. But this myth deserves it.
Clients complain all the time that they feel reactive, rather than proactive. That they're always putting out fires. That they spent 12 hours at the office and despite being too busy for lunch, that they "didn't get anything done." That they're buried in email. That they're always interrupted. And when I ask them why they didn't get to their strategic priorities, they explain patiently (as though to a child) that they're in the service business, and as a result, they have to respond immediately -- by answering the phone, sending an email, keeping their door open, etc.
