Why is business execution so hard? Why are offices littered with the dessicated carcasses of strategic plans? Why can small companies work miracles with a tiny staff, but large organizations can't even get out of their own way? I don't have all the answers to those questions. But I do have some of the questions that you should be asking to get to the bottom of this issue. I just co-authored an article at Fast Company that might help you think about the problem more clearly. Read "Are You Excited About Your Business Execution & Collaboration?" here.
No matter how unpredictable and unstructured your job is, standardized routines are necessary -- or at the very least, helpful -- for enabling your creativity to flow unfettered.
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Exhibit 1: Computer consulting firm Atos Origin announces that it’s abandoning email within three years. The CEO says that “information pollution” burdens managers with an unsustainable load of 5-20 hours of email per week (and climbing), so the company is shifting to social media in order to lighten the load. Exhibit 2: Google announces that for part of each day, new CEO Larry Page and other top executives will sit and work together in an area of the company's headquarters that's accessible to all employees. As part of the effort to recapture some of the nimbleness and entrepreneurial speed of a smaller company, he’s also encouraged employees to pitch him new product ideas in emails of 60 words or less.
I think we’re seeing a trend here. As organizations grow in size and complexity, the volume of communication (via email or meetings) explodes. But it’s becoming painfully obvious that the use of meetings and email just doesn’t scale very well. Past a certain point, the very tools that expedited communication at a smaller scale begin to throttle it. Organizations sclerose under the weight of their tools – too many emails, too many formal meetings. The attempt to communicate crowds out all other work -- even the value-creating work. Nothing gets done, and people bemoan the hulking, slow-moving battleship their company has become.
Certainly, there’s no panacea for this problem. Atos Origin has taken a technological approach, while Google has taken a physical approach. W.L. Gore has, since 1965, taken an entirely different path: no teams bigger than 200 people, so as to ensure that it will be free of stifling bureaucracy. I worked with one client that used to hold an unending string of formal (and time-consuming) status update meetings to ensure that product development teams would cross-pollinate ideas. They eventually gave up those meetings and just bought the teams pizza for lunch every other month. That worked better and eliminated the time suck of needless meetings. Other firms are adopting visual management systems—often, low-tech whiteboards or corkboards—to communicate important information quickly and efficiently. Still other organizations are now using A3s to not only aid problem solving, but also to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of communication.
If the goal of lean is to provide the greatest value at the lowest possible cost, then there’s plenty of room for improvement in our communication. But the first step is to realize that the status quo just isn't good enough, that the way we communicate is needlessly costly and inefficient. Atos Origin, Google, and Gore are taking steps to eliminate that waste. What about you?
You might want to reconsider saying yes to the latest project that your boss drops on your desk like a side of beef. Saying no might help you do a better -- or at least a faster -- job. Turns out that managing so many concurrent projects that you're the white-collar equivalent of a Chinese acrobat spinning dishes doesn't work so well.
A study of Italian judges who were randomly assigned cases and who had similar workloads found that those who worked on fewer cases at a time tended to complete more cases per quarter and took less time, on average, to complete a case. The authors concluded that
Individual speed of job completion cannot be explained only in terms of effort, ability and experience: work scheduling is a crucial “input” that cannot be omitted from the production function of individual workers.
The problem is that too much work-in-process causes a system -- whether machine or human -- to bog down. In a phrase that will likely make Jim Benson and Tonianne deMaria Barry smile (or call their lawyers), the MIT Sloan Management Review draws the analogy that
excessive multitasking may result in the workflow equivalent of a traffic jam, where projects get backed up behind other projects much the way cars get stuck in traffic when there are too many on a highway at once.
If this phrasing rings a bell, it should: here's how Jim and Tonianne made this point visually (check out slide #7):
A few weeks ago, I wrote about the need to use your calendar as a tool to assess your daily production capacity, but not with the goal of filling up every minute of each day. Overloading the system writ small -- stacking up tasks during the day like 747s over LaGuardia -- is a bad idea. But overloading the system writ large -- scheduling too many legal cases or too many projects at one time -- is also a recipe for slow turnaround, frustrated customers, sub-optimal performance, and probably premature hair loss.
Remember, you're not a circus performer. Neither your boss nor your customers "ooh" and "ahh" because you're juggling 26 projects at once. They ooh and ahh when you deliver the goods quickly and with perfect quality.
You're on line (not online) at Starbucks for your iced skinny half-caf semi-grande caramel macchiato with soy whip on top. You've got about three minutes from where you are now to picking up your drink. What do you do? Pull out your Droid and check email, of course. After all, you've got three minutes. Why waste them? That's what the mobile internet is for.
But here's a suggestion: instead of filling your brain, why don't you try emptying it?
Let's face it. In the three minutes you've got to look at your inbox, you really can't get much of anything done. Sure you can skim some of your new email, and you might even be able to answer a couple of the easy ones. ("Yes." "No." "Chicken.") But for the most part, you're pre-ordaining yourself to seeing a bunch of subject lines or messages that you can't do anything about at that moment. Not when you've got to elbow your way from the pick-up counter to the Splenda dispenser.
That's a recipe for stress. You know you have to respond to a customer or to your boss, but you don't have the time right now. It's festering in your inbox. And you know it. Enjoy the macchiato, bub.
So, a modest proposal. Next time you have three extra minutes, instead of filling up your mind with stuff you can't do anything about, why not empty it? Take a notebook and write down stray ideas that have come to you, to-dos that you've forgotten about, questions you need to ask, whatever. Use the time to empty your head of the flotsam that washes up on the shores of your consciousness so that you can actually do something about them later.
Last week I wrote about why you need slack in a system. Filling every minute with work guarantees that your throughput will decrease. My modest proposal to empty your head, rather than fill it, is, I think, a related concept. Giving yourself more work (more email busy-ness) just because you have a few minutes of unbooked time in your day is utterly counter-productive.
Yes, this means that you'll have to stop mainlining the internet for just. Three. Minutes. And you may suffer from some withdrawal symptoms. But you're likely to become more relaxed. More focused. Less frazzled.
Now, enjoy your coffee.
For a long time now, I've advocated "living in your calendar" in order to, among other reasons, understand your production capacity. Mapping out your work on a calendar helps prevent you from taking on more commitments than you have the time to handle. I was wrong. (Sort of.)
I just finished reading Jim Benson and Tonianne DeMaria's book, Personal Kanban, in which they point out that capacity is irrelevant. It's about throughput. No one -- not your boss, not your customers, not your family -- cares about how much capacity (hours) you have each day to work. They care about how quickly that work gets done, whether it's preparing next year's budget or cleaning the garage.
What's the lead time? What's the cycle time? How long do I have to wait? These are the key questions they want answered. (Well, only engineers ask the first two questions. But everyone asks the last one.) And those are the key questions you should be asking yourself. Not, "How much time do I have to work this week?", but "How can I get this work done most quickly?"
To shamelessly steal an analogy from Personal Kanban, no one cares what the capacity of a freeway is. In fact, it's completely irrelevant to you how many cars can be packed into one stretch of asphalt. What's really important is how long it takes to move down the road and whether you'll make it home in time to watch reruns of "Webster." And as any urban planner or operations manager will tell you, once your system exceeds 65-70% of maximum utilization, you're guaranteed to reduce throughput and increase cycle time.
This is why living in the calendar can be dangerous. There's a tendency to look at empty space on the calendar as something to be filled up with some ostensibly productive work. After all, if you're not filling those minutes and hours, then clearly you're either a lazy slacker or you're just terribly inefficient. With unemployment at 9%, who wants to be accused of either?
But how fast would traffic move if every square foot of the freeway was occupied by cars? How fast will your work move if every moment of your day is occupied by some pre-planned task or meeting? It wouldn't move at all. Just look at the cars around you at rush hour -- or look at the crap that's been piled up on your desk and your inbox for a few weeks. That tells you all you need to know about throughput.
So, by all means live in your calendar. Use it to assess your production capacity. But remember that 100% utilization of that capacity is ultimately self-defeating. You need slack in the system, because throughput is what counts. Not capacity.
Providing excellent service doesn't mean that you have to respond immediately. What your customers really need is predictable response, not instant response.
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Your calendar never lies. If something is a priority, then it must be reflected in your scheduled work. Period.
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Consider this: great client service does NOT require you to be always accessible, 24/7.
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Stress is your reaction to the demands of your work. It's not inherent in the work itself. Creating "standard work" to manage the repetitive and predictable tasks in your job will reduce stress.
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You schedule meetings. You schedule lunch. You schedule phone calls. Now, get used to scheduling time to think.
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Think your company's meetings suck? Well, it may be cold comfort, but you're in good company. Apparently the Bush White House's meetings stunk, too. This is an excerpt from Donald Rumsfeld's memoir -- an extended gripe session about Condeleeza Rice's NSC meetings.
I had other issues with [Condeleeza] Rice's management of the NSC process. Often meetings were not well organized. Frequent last-minute changes to the times of meetings and to the subject matter made it difficult for the participants to prepare, and even more difficult, with departments of their own to manage, to rearrange their full schedules. The NSC staff often was late in sending participants papers for meetings that set out the issues to be discussed.
At the conclusion of NSC meetings when decisions were taken, members of the NSC staff were theoretically supposed to write a summary of conclusions. When I saw them, they were often sketchy and didn't always fit with my recollections. Ever since the Iran-Contra scandal of the Reagan administration, NSC staffs have been sensitive to written notes and records that could implicate a president or his advisers. Rice and her colleagues seemed concerned about avoiding detailed records that others might exploit. This came at the expense of enabling the relevant executive agencies to know precisely what had been discussed and decided at the NSC meetings. Attendees from time to time left meetings with differing views of what was decided and what the next steps should be, which freed CIA, State, or Defense officials to go back and do what they thought best.
In one August 2002 memo to Rice, I raised this lack of resolution. "It sometimes happens that a matter mentioned at a meeting is said to have been 'decided' because it elicited no objection," I wrote. "That is not a good practice. Nothing should be deemed decided unless we expressly agree to decide it." Rice started putting a note at the bottom of draft decision memos: "If no objections are raised by a specific deadline, the memo will be considered approved by the principals." That, too, was impractical. [Secretary of State Colin] Powell and I were frequently traveling. I did not want to have others assume I agreed with something simply because I missed an arbitrary deadline.
Happy Thursday.
One of the core principles of lean is the notion of going to the gemba -- the place where the actual work is being done, so that you can see for yourself what the situation really is. This principle is particularly powerful when you're trying to solve problems. Why discuss a manufacturing failure while sitting in a conference room when you could go to the actual production line and watch the process? What's the sense in developing plans to spur sales of a new running shoe without first actually hanging out at the store and watching customers try it on? I thought about this principle when I read this article by Michael Schrage: To Improve Performance, Audit Your Employees' Emails. Schrage argues that
Because the rhythm and rhetoric of effective email exchange is a critical success factor in business performance, mismanagement of email may in fact be a symptom of other weaknesses in your organization.
Okay, okay, I know the title of the article sounds (more than) a bit Big Brother-ish. But Schrage isn't advocating that you actually monitor all the messages they read and write. That's insane. Rather, he suggests that you should make email an intrinsic part of performance reviews.
Ask people to present three sets of correspondence that demonstrate how well they've used the medium to manage successful outcomes. In other words, have them select examples illustrating their own email "best practices" for results. You, and they, will find this review and prioritization process revealing.
When you think about it, the concept actually makes sense. It's kind of like going to the "email gemba." It gives you a chance to deal with concrete communication examples, rather than vague abstractions, like, "Your direct reports say that your feedback and suggestions are confusing." Examining these self-selected emails may also reveal that the employee does a poor job of analysis, or excels at building teamwork.
To be sure, this tool is as compromised as any performance review by the delay between writing the email and the date you actually review it. But as a tool for seeing the actual work and helping to spur self-reflection and improvement, it's actually a pretty good idea.
I'm writing a book for Productivity Press about how individuals can apply lean principles to improve their personal performance and productivity. Call it a cross between Getting Things Done and lean. I'm looking for stories of people -- and you don't have to be a Sixteen Sigma Master Ultraviolet Belt -- have used lean ideas to help them eliminate waste in their work and be more efficient.
The book is focused on improvement in the workplace, so I don't need stories about how you've brought 5S to your sock drawer, and now it takes you 16 seconds less to put away your laundry. Or how you've alphabetized the spice rack in your kitchen, so you immediately know that you've run out of curry powder.
But I do want to hear how you use checklists for yourself to reduce the likelihood of errors. Or how you've created standard work for your very non-routine job. Or how you're using visual controls (like Tim McMahon and Jon Miller have done with their personal kanbans) to improve your focus on value-creating activity. Or how you've applied 5S to the information you manage (as the nurses at Virginia Mason Medical Center did to reduce and simplify the number of forms they dealt with). Or how you've applied A3 thinking and 5-Whys to solve problems.
Your stories will either be woven into the text of the book, or featured as case studies in a sidebar. If you or your company would prefer to remain anonymous, that's no problem.
My time frame fairly short: I'd like to get your feedback before March 10.
Questions? Comments? Stories? Contact me here: dan [atsign] timebackmanagement [dot] com.
Thanks!
I recently endured a turgid, three-hour meeting at a client's office. It stretched on for three hours, engorged by a seemingly endless series of PowerPoint slides, and it was all I (or anyone else) could do to hide the hypnic jerks that demonstrate, beyond a shadow of any doubt, that the meeting has gone on far too long. Marshall McLuhan's famous insight that "the medium is the message" wasn't targeted at PowerPoint presentations, but lord does it ever apply. His point was that
"we largely miss the structural changes in our affairs that are introduced subtly, or over long periods of time. Whenever we create a new innovation - be it an invention or a new idea - many of its properties are fairly obvious to us. We generally know what it will nominally do, or at least what it is intended to do, and what it might replace. We often know what its advantages and disadvantages might be. But it is also often the case that, after a long period of time and experience with the new innovation, we look backward and realize that there were some effects of which we were entirely unaware at the outset."
It's fascinating, really: when you give people a clicker and a PowerPoint deck, they stop talking to their audience and begin talking at them. Instead of communicating in a normal, information-rich manner, they begin to break their thoughts and ideas into micro-chunks that are so laborious and time-consuming to process that you might as well be dealing with a reading primer book. Except in this case, instead of getting "See Dick. See Jane. See Dick and Jane," you get something like this:
"We have a huge opportunity in front of us. But there are at least two serious competitive threats. First there is Acme Manufacturing. They have Wile E. Coyote as a well-known spokesman. He embodies determination. Second, there is Pillsbury. The doughboy has a high Q-Score. Plus, he's well-fed and has a great laugh."
Of course, there's a bullet point for each of these sentences, just in case you didn't get it -- and as a result, the meeting goes on and on and on. This meeting could easily have been cut by one-third had the presenters dispensed with the PowerPoint and instead simply talked to the audience.
Garr Reynolds writes extensively and compellingly about what he calls "naked" presentations -- presentations that are stripped of artifice, and that present ideas in a simple, powerful, and fresh manner. Naked communication is effective because the message can be communicated without the medium getting in the way. Naked communication also avoids the waste of unnecessary processing that PowerPoint almost always entails -- both in preparing the slides, and then in making the audience listen to you slowly read through them.
Do yourself a favor: make the message the message.
I recently visited a company that's almost totally consensus-driven. Virtually every decision that influences other groups or functional silos is made through consensus; no one makes decisions by fiat. This is neither good nor bad -- the world is full of successful organizations that are run autocratically. People self-select to work in that kind of environment, and they accept the benefits (speed, autonomy, a sense of progress) as well as the drawbacks. For this company, it works: it's a vital part of their culture, and while it does slow them down a bit, when they actually decide to move, everyone is on board.
But here's the thing: gaining consensus is a grueling process. Meeting after meeting after meeting, usually ending ambiguously with no clear direction and no clear action items to move forward. A nearly unending string of email conversations that are frustrating at best and confusing at worst. Two steps forward and one step back.
What this company is crying out for is a process for building consensus. In fact, let's call it by its lean name: standardized work: a clear method by which a person can build a case for the initiative, communicate it to colleagues, incorporate their feedback, gain their support, and thereby move forward. Slowly, perhaps, but consistently.
Sound familiar? Maybe a bit like an A3?
In fact, I think the A3 is a perfect structure for building consensus. It replaces difficult-to-schedule, bloated meetings with shorter 1:1 meetings between stakeholders. It eliminates turgid Powerpoint decks with a concise story told on one page. And it structures a dialog so that people don't have an opportunity (or at least, less of an opportunity) to climb up on their favorite soapbox and air their grievances about the proposed initiative. In other words, the A3 can help mitigate the downside of consensus-building.
This company -- or any consensus-driven company, for that matter -- probably won't ever be the fastest to market. But once they have a decision, they can act with overwhelming discipline and coordination. And that spells success.
Recently I've been hearing companies lament that they're no longer as nimble as they once were. Decisions require more meetings and take longer. People at all levels are frustrated because they can't implement new ideas quickly. Even the simplest issues seem to require endless rounds of discussion and debate. Eventually, the organization is either outflanked in the market, or talented people leave to find opportunities with faster-moving companies. I see at least two causes creating this problem. First, as companies get bigger and there are more zeroes attached to their budgets, the risks inherent in any decision seem to grow. It's one thing to screw up the colors on a running shoe when it only sells 8,000 pairs; it's quite another to screw it up when it accounts for 800,000 pairs. You really want to be sure that the fluorescent colors of the 80s are back before plastering them all over your new high-end shoe, and as a result, you end up consulting with sales, marketing, manufacturing, account management, IT -- pretty much anyone who has even the most tangential relationship to the product.
The fallacy here is that compared to the scale of the business, that product or initiative isn't really any more significant or risky. It's not the absolute number that's important; it's the relative number. A $5000 investment decision for a start-up is just as meaningful and fraught with danger as a $5 million decision for GE -- maybe even more so, since GE can absorb that loss without going out of business.
Second, as organizations get bigger, consensus rather than action becomes the driving force. When companies are small, everyone either sees eye-to-eye (that's why they're there, after all), or they're at least comfortable with the inevitable interpersonal conflict. But as organizations grow, employee diversity grows, and management is increasingly sensitive to the need for harmony and agreement. People may have the titular authority to make decisions, but in reality they don't: they have to gain consensus before acting. If one group doesn't agree, nothing proceeds.
The problem here is that when no one has the power to make a decision, either nothing gets done, or everything gets pushed up the the CEO for a judgment. Neither option is acceptable. Decision-making authority must reside with individuals within an organization, not be diffuse within a group.
So what is to be done? Establishing clear decision-making criteria is an important start. Set thresholds based on money, say, or risk for involving other groups. Also, allow some decisions to be made by majority, rather than consensus. Neither of these are easy changes to make, but if you don't want to become a sclerotic, lumbering dinosaur, you'll have to pursue these changes at some point.
The Daily Show's John Oliver was interviewed on KQED's Forum a few weeks ago. Along with some very clever observations, he mentioned how he loves doing stand-up comedy and tries to perform a few times per year. He also mentioned that Jon Stewart -- despite the administrative and creative burdens of producing four shows per week, to say nothing of writing a book and organizing the Rally to Restore Sanity -- also goes on the road to do stand-up. (Again with Jon Stewart? What's with me and Jon Stewart?) And that's nothing compared to Jay Leno, who still does about 150 nights of stand-up each year on the road. All three of these comedians have their roots in stand-up. Going back on stage is a way to refresh themselves, challenge themselves, develop new ideas, and perfect their art.
If you're an engineer, or a doctor, or an architect, and you've moved out of your area of specialty into "management," are you still in touch with the techniques needed in your field? Or have you lost a feel for what it takes to get the job done?
In most organizations that I've seen, many of the managers and executives no longer have a feel for how long it takes or how difficult it is to do something. As a result, strategic initiatives from management are often divorced from the reality of actually getting the task done. This leads to unrealistic timelines, missed deadlines, overburden, stress, and frustration.
Getting out of the corner office and into the gemba on a regular basis means that you see and learn what it takes to accomplish daily work. You'll know how long it takes to perform preventative maintenance on a machine, how difficult it is to update a critical spreadsheet, or how time-consuming writing a proposal can be. And that knowledge will either lead you to help figure out how to do the job more quickly and easily, or, at the very least, will give you an appreciation for how the sausage is made.
Whether you want to call it getting back to your roots or simply going to the gemba, the act of seeing (and if possible, doing some of) the work will sharpen your skills and help you to execute on your strategy more effectively.
The snow fell again in NYC this past Friday, and with it came a new spate of commentaries about how Mayor Bloomberg mishandled the big blizzard on December 26. For those who don't know the story, in the wake of a 20" snowfall, Manhattan streets were plowed quickly, but streets in the outer boroughs (Queens, Brooklyn, the Bronx, Staten Island) remained unplowed for days. The mayor apologized, promised a thorough post-mortem to understand the root causes of the poor municipal response. . . and then demoted and reassigned three people. Thee mayor's approval ratings are now at their lowest point in his administration.
In New Jersey, where up to 31" of snow fell, Governor Chris Christie is taking heat for vacationing at Disney World with his family instead of returning to the state to help with its recovery efforts. He's made matters worse by defending his decision to put his responsibility to his family first: "I wouldn't change the decision even if I could do it right now. I had a great five days with my children. I promised that." The governor's nearly bullet-proof image, constructed during a year of tough leadership and emphasis on taking responsibility, has taken a beating.
Then there's Cory Booker, the mayor of Newark, NJ. Mayor Booker was not only present during the blizzard, he personally responded to several calls for help, showing up with a shovel to help some motorists who were stuck in the snow and bringing diapers to others. The mayor kept up a constant stream of tweets so that people knew what he was doing, even asking citizens to send him tweets letting him know where help was needed. The mayor is now a hero in Newark, where he faced a difficult re-election last year.
The PR experts will undoubtedly begin talking about best practices for crisis management (if they haven't already). But from a lean leadership perspective, what strikes me is the fact that only one of these leaders went to "the gemba" -- the streets where the work was actually being done.
You could argue that a mayor has better things to do with his or her time than shovel snow (that's why we have children, after all). But I disagree. People need to see (and in the case of Mayor Booker, hear via Twitter) that their leaders are willing and able to work in the trenches.
Of course, Mayors Bloomberg and Booker, and Governor Christie have other, higher-level, leadership tasks to ensure that these service failures don't recur. But it's important for all people in the state, the city, or any organization to see that their leaders are present and doing everything they can to help ease their pain. And if the problem is something that requires specialized skills that the leader doesn't have -- shutting down a nuclear reactor, tunneling into a mine shaft, performing surgery -- then the leader should be supporting those that do have the critical skills by bringing them coffee and donuts, or cold water, or fresh bandages.
It's no coincidence that the salient memory of Rudy Giuliani is him standing atop the World Trade Center rubble, while the lasting image of George Bush during Katrina is him peering through the window of Air Force One several thousand feet above New Orleans.
No one expected Giuliani to spend all day, everyday at the World Trade Center. No one expected Mayor Booker to spend all day, everyday shoveling snow. But people do expect their leaders to at least be present where the work is being done for some amount of time.
Lean bloggers and teachers often talk about the need to get out of the corner office and the conference room and get to the gemba as part of their standard work. That need is even greater in an emergency.
One snowstorm. Three leaders. One lesson.
As a strategy, building walls is frowned upon. The Great Wall of China. Hadrian's Wall. The Maginot Line. AOL's "walled garden." Defensive moves -- all failed. But maybe in certain circumstances walls can be beneficial?
A New York Times article describes how researchers used an iPhone app to contact some 2,200 individuals and get a total of roughly 250,000 replies as to how each person was feeling and what they were doing at the time they were contacted. Forty-seven percent of them reported that their minds were wandering when contacted -- in other words, half of them were not focused on whatever it was they were doing. Most interestingly, there was no correlation between the joy of the activity and the pleasantness of their thoughts.
Whatever people were doing, whether it was having sex or reading or shopping, they tended to be happier if they focused on the activity instead of thinking about something else. In fact, whether and where their minds wandered was a better predictor of happiness than what they were doing.
This finding jibes perfectly with the focused attention inherent in Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's concept of "flow," in which a person so completely immersed in a task that feelings of time, effort, and energy disappear.
The problem today, of course, is that the state of flow is increasingly difficult to achieve. Psychologist Edward Hallowell says that
30% to 40% of people's time in the workplace is spent tending to unplanned interruptions, and then reconstituting the mental focus the interruption caused. I'm sure that was not the case 20 years ago simply because the tools of interruption were not so plentiful. And all the distraction has created blocks in thinking and feeling deeply. We're being superficialized and sound-bit.
In fact, when he asks people where they do their best thinking, the most common response is, "In the shower." Apparently, the shower is one of the last places left where we're not often interrupted.
That's where the Maginot Line comes in. While it's not possible (or advisable) to completely wall off the outside world all the time (who wants to end up like France in 1940?), it's essential to recreate some boundaries around your work time so that you can think without interruption. Close the door. Go to a conference room or a coffee shop. Spend a weekend at a meditation center. Whatever works for you. But for god's sake, put away the iPhone and turn off the internet connection.
Thinking and creating is hard work. It requires energy. Often it isn't very much fun. The prevalence and ease of distraction -- particularly electronic -- is a seriously enticing alternative to hunkering down with your thoughts and a blank piece of paper. But if you can maintain your focus on that blank piece of paper instead of mindlessly and reflexively following another distraction, you'll be much happier.
What's your Maginot Line going to be? What kind of defensive walls will you build?