KEY POINTS TO TAKE AWAY
⢠Parkinson's Law states, “Work invariably expands to fill the time available.”
⢠An updated version of Parkinson's Law could be stated as “Work expands to fill the time we
think
is available.”
⢠When people allow themselves to work beyond normal hours, more rudimentary work tends to fill the void.
⢠Dr. Temple Grandin is an autistic person and scientist who demonstrates how non-autistic people take in informationâ“like a lamp store,” she says. Everything is on, all the time, and it's all taken in.
⢠The Law of Diminishing Returns suggests there is only so much that can be done before things give way. Every light bulb eventually burns out. There comes a time when productivity peaks and then declines. You simply can't continue to add more and more and expect consistent results.
⢠What is getting lost in the electronic workplace is the notion of getting value for effort. Does an 80-hour workweek truly yield 80 hours of productive work?
⢠Email is processed differently by the brain than are other forms of messages, which leads to a false sense of priority.
⢠For the majority of people the best intellectual time of the day is between 8:30 a.m. and 10:30 a.m.
⢠“Infomania” describes a condition of overload that comes from attempting to handle too much high-speed information simultaneously. The effects are similar to marijuana intoxication.
⢠The cheetah knows that being
fast
requires being strategically
slow
.
⢠We have to learn how to slow down enough to distinguish between productive, profitable work, and other less valuable types.
⢠Thomas Freidman points out that virtually no job is safe from offshoring. Employability will be based on talents and procedures such as creativity, close attention to, and contact with clients.
⢠People who spend more and more of their time in a purely reactive mode stand to miss out unless they slow down.
⢠George Orwell's horse, Boxer, symbolizes the type of “death-in-harness” that many people are facing today.
COOL DOWN
The questions below are intended as a self-assessment. They work best if:
⢠You actually write them out, rather than just think about them.
⢠You complete them honestly.
⢠You discuss the results with your mentor.
Additional copies of the entire
How to Cool Down
collection with extra space for writing in your answers are available for download at the
Cool Down
section of my website:
www.bristall.com
. Just look for the Blue Tortoise.
⢠Add up all the hours you have truly given to work.
⢠Do you feel you often work more than the number of hours described in your job description?
⢠Do you take work home and work on it at home more than one day per week?
⢠Do you take work with you and work on it during your commute?
⢠How do you define multitasking?
⢠How productive is multitasking to you?
⢠How necessary is multitasking to your job?
⢠Do you work on the weekends more than once per month?
⢠What do you do?
⢠What does your business card describe your role as?
⢠How do these differ?
⢠How often do you review your job definition with your manager?
⢠Did you have to work right up to the deadline?
⢠How many times have you found yourself working right up to the deadline, e.g. 100 percent, 50 percent of the time?
⢠List the advantages and disadvantages that you perceive in working close to deadlines.
⢠On the whole, how does working to deadlines make you feel?
⢠What, if anything, would you like to change about this approach?
⢠How do you think you would do this?
⢠What do you think the reaction would be from managers and co-workers?
⢠What percentage of your time do you feel is taken up with satisfying the demands of the immediate?
⢠What percentage of these “immediate” tasks do you rate as being of top priority to your job?
⢠What percentage of your time do you feel is taken up with truly productive tasks?
⢠How does your general pace of work compare with others in your workplace? For instance, is it the norm for everyone to work at the same pace as you? Are you faster than most or slower?
⢠What do you do during the first hour of your morning at your workplace?
⢠Is this the best use of your time?
⢠Could you propose an alternative?
⢠Can you perceive changes happening in your own industry?
⢠Has your company or department acknowledged or reacted to changes in your industry?
⢠Perform an audit of current email practices, to assess when emails are responded to, and why they are responded to at that time.
⢠Count up the number of emails that you deal with on a typical day, including those sent, received on computer and wireless, as well as all CC copies both inbound and outbound. If you feel there is no such thing as a typical day, count up the emails that you deal with over an entire week and divide by five.
⢠From the totals above, calculate the cost if each email were to cost $5. (This $5 price tag better represents the cost of time lost, by factoring in the other tasks that could have been done.)
⢠What is your outbound voicemail policy?
⢠Do you change your voicemail greeting daily? Why, or why not?
⢠What do you think your clients feel about your current voicemail policy?
⢠Have you asked any of your clients (either internal or external) about your current voicemail policy?
⢠How do you deal with returning calls? Do you return them immediately? At set times? After work?
⢠What is your reasoning for your current call-return style?
⢠Do you own a wireless, email-accessible PDA?
⢠How often do you check it
during
business hours?
⢠How often do you check it
before
business hours?
⢠How often do you check it
after
business hours?
⢠Are you able to stand still for more than a few seconds, e.g., while in an elevator, without feeling the need to check your PDA for new messages?
⢠Do you check your email from home after hours on a weekday?
⢠When is your best time of day?
⢠When do you feel most energetic and charged up?
⢠When are you most alert?
⢠When are you least alert during the day?
⢠How many caffeinated beverages (coffee, tea, caffeinated soft drinks) do you drink in a day?
⢠How many times in the day have you felt “not in control”? What percentage of the day and week does this amount to?
⢠How could this self knowledge be applied in the scheduling of your tasks at work and at home?
Next Step: Compile this information and discuss with your mentor.
1
Grandin, Temple, PhD.,
Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior
. Harvest Books; Reprint edition (January 2, 2006).
2
Gladwell, Malcom.
Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking
. Little, Brown and Company, 2005.
6
Friedman, Thomas, L.
The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century
. Farrar Straus Giroux, Expanded and Updated edition (April 30, 2006).
Â
WE ARE CONNECTED.
BOTH WIRED AND WIRELESS WE TALK,
YET WE SAY LITTLE.
CHAPTER 2
THE SILO EFFECT
Â
In May of 2000, the then-president of Disney, Michael Eisner, spoke to the graduating class at the University of California at Berkeley to an audience that consisted of many technically oriented new graduates. In an era when the dot-com boom was still hot, he surprised many by saying some rather unflattering things about email. He viewed it as a technology that would pose a danger to the success of companies and organizations, due to the very thing that made it popularâits immediacy. Mr. Eisner said that this would lead to a flood of unscreened emotion, with messages being sent before they were ready and information being mailed to the wrong people.
⦠email is not perfect. Because it's spread so fast, it has raced ahead of our abilities to fully adapt to this new form of communication. Consider the way we learn about traditional interaction. It takes years to hone communication skills in a classroom, at a party, or when mingling in diverse company. It takes years to learn that there is a way to talk to your peers that differs from talking to your boss or your parents or your teachers or a policeman or a judge. And now here suddenly comes email ⦠and, to a frightening extent, we're unprepared.
With email, our impulse is not to file and save, but to click and send ⦠once we hit that send button, there's no going back.
1
He was right, of course, and since that speech was made, the environment in which work is done and business transacted has grown, with new tools, techniques, and relationships appearing regularly. And that's where the problem lies. It has to do with the way in which speed, combined with the act of tending to surface-level priorities, discourages innovation. It reduces our ability to find new and better ways to do things, to win customers, or to enhance productivity, simply because there is so little time for reflection, communication, and shared learning. I call this overall concept the Silo Effect, since it represents a blinding of intellectual capacity and a reduction of the potential for full productivity. In this chapter, I wish to illustrate the main components that go into building our silo, so that in later chapters we can set up some realistic plans to break the silo down and capitalize on the human and technological brilliance of our age.
INFORMATION OVERLOAD
Information overload is not a new concept. Most people are aware of it, have experienced it, and accept that it comes with the territory. It's part of work. One of the primary carriers of information overload is, of course, email. It, too, is accepted as part of work, both as a tool for getting things done and as an obstacle to that same goal. But few know how to deal with it properly, or why they should. It's just there, and we use it.
The problem lies not with the connectivity aspect, but with its speed. Email is written fast, it is sent fast, and the expectation is that we must respond to it fast. Not only do people tend to overrule the importance of their current tasks in order to respond to the demands of email, the momentum that this creates carries through to other activities until they are all processed and dealt with in a similar, hurried, surface-level fashion. Reflex and reaction start to count more than anything else.
Most people work with their email system always on, and although typical volumes of inbound messages vary from person to person, what everyone has in common is that they arrive at unpredictable times, they announce their arrival with some sort of distracting signal, and, like a tantalizing unwrapped present, they demand to be opened. Consequently, it's not a surprise that the
Infomania
study described in Chapter 1, with its headline-grabbing parallels to marijuana use, highlight a sobering fact: It's not just addiction to email that is costing us; it's the mental erosion that comes from being an information junkie that is causing the longer-term harm. People are just not able to think clearly when their brains are impaired through constant high-speed distractions.
Is email all bad? No, not at all. It's a great tool, just as a hammer is a great tool. But when it becomes a source of distraction, it descends to the same level of inefficiency as a hammer does when used by a clumsy carpenterâpainfully unproductive.
There are many people, of course, who would argue strongly that email is essential to business, and that their job depends on timely response. That may be. But then again, it might not be, entirely. When people are asked to consider the nature of their email messages and what impact they have on their day-to-day success, they are often able to place the mail into two groups, with messages that are truly urgent making up the minority, and those that are not urgent making up the majority. The real answer may have more to do with a person's sense of “customer service urgency,” or perhaps their fear of repercussions if the expectations of the sender are not met immediately. (The terms “customer,” and “client” are used in this book to define not just external members of the business community who pay for your products and/or services, but also those on the insideâpeople you report to, who report to you, or with whom you interact on a regular basis.)