Steve
Glaveski December 18, 2019
In a world of push notifications, email, instant
messaging, and shrinking office space, we’re becoming increasingly distracted
at work. The average employee is getting interrupted 50 to 60 times per day, and about 80% of these
interruptions are unimportant. As a result, people are spending little time in
what psychologists call “the flow state,” a space where people
are up to five times more productive, according to
research from McKinsey.
The constant distractions are not only leaving people
less productive, but also more stressed than ever, with a lack of control over
one’s work being cited as a major contributor to workplace stress, according to
the American Institute of Stress. So, how do we
avoid distractions in the office in order to take control of our days, do our
best work, and improve our emotional well-being?
1. Practice Asynchronous Communication
When you get an email, it’s actually OK to think: “I’ll
get to this when it suits me.”
Aside from the benefit of giving people more time for
uninterrupted focus, asynchronous communication predisposes people to better
decision-making by increasing the amount of time we have to respond to a
request. When you’re on a phone call or video chat, you’re making
real-time decisions, whereas if you’re communicating via email, you have more
time to think about your response.
In order to practice this successfully, we must do away
with the arbitrary “urgency” that still plagues workplaces the world over,
almost a century after Dwight D. Eisenhower, who, quoting Dr. J. Roscoe Miller,
president of Northwestern University, said: “I have two kinds of problems: the urgent
and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never
urgent.” This “Eisenhower Principle” is said to be how the former president
prioritized his own workload.
To optimize an asynchronous message and to avoid a lot of
follow-up emails, include the following in your initial request:
·
Sufficient details
·
Clear action item(s)
·
A due date
·
A path of recourse if the recipient is
unable to meet your requirements
2. Batch Check Everything
“Just quickly checking” anything, even for one-tenth of a
second, can add up to a 40% productivity loss over the course of
a day, and it can take us 23 minutes to get back into the zone
after task switching.
Rather than sporadically checking things throughout the
day, we should batch check email, instant messages, social media, and even text
messages, at predetermined times.
If you struggle with self-control, tools like Gmail’s
Inbox Pause plugin enable you to pause your inbox once you’ve checked it and
only unpause it when you’re ready. Blocksite and the Freedom app
also allow you to block access to specific websites and apps during specified
intervals.
3. Do Not Disturb
If you’re reading this and thinking: “But I work in an
open-plan office, and it’s impossible to avoid interruptions,” try using a
signaling mechanism to let your team know that you’re in the zone (or trying to
get there) and that they shouldn’t disturb you unless it’s legitimately urgent.
This could be as simple as a pair of headphones.
4. Avoid Calendar Tetris
In today’s workplace, it’s a widely accepted norm that
others can book time in your calendar, usually at the expense of your own
priorities.
Basecamp CEO, Jason Fried, told me on an episode of
the Future Squared podcast that at Basecamp,
you can’t book time in someone’s calendar without first getting buy-in. This
means that most meetings just don’t happen because the would-be meeting
organizer usually opts for a phone call or an instant message instead.
Alternatively, consider blocking out meeting-free zones
on your calendar, or using a meeting scheduling tool such as Calendly so
that people book meetings with you only during scheduled windows, leaving the
rest of the day free for focus, and ensuring that you avoid the email tennis
matches that scheduling meetings often degenerates into.
5. Close the Loop on Meetings
Instead of risking follow-up interruptions and a meeting
to discuss the previous meeting, ensure that you leave each meeting with
actionable next steps, clearly assigned responsibilities, and due dates.
6. Stop Using “Reply All”
Reply All, used as a mechanism to share accountability,
only adds unnecessary chatter to people’s inboxes and headspace. Take more
ownership over your decisions and only email people who need to
be informed.
7. Use Third Spaces
As Sue Shellenbarger wrote for The
Wall Street Journal, “All of this social engineering (open-plan offices)
has created endless distractions that draw employees’ eyes away from their own
screens. Visual noise, the activity or movement around the edges of an
employee’s field of vision, can erode concentration and disrupt analytical
thinking or creativity.”
If you’re struggling with open-plan offices, then try to
incorporate more third-space work into your day for critical thinking; try to
find a quiet space in the office, a serviced
office, or negotiate some time to work from home.
8. Turn off Push Notifications
The average executive receives 46 push notifications per day. To avoid our
Pavlovian impulses to respond on cue, simply turn off your push notifications. Find out
how here.
9. Use Airplane Mode
You can also use airplane mode to limit text message and
phone call interruptions during certain times of day. If the idea of doing this
gives you anxiety, you can always exempt specific numbers, such as those of
loved ones or valued and important business associates. You can set “Do Not
Disturb” mode on an iPhone to allow your designated “favorite” contacts to get
through, while silencing other calls or messages.
10. Limit Layers of Approval
While harder to implement, becoming a “minimum viable
bureaucracy” — stripping away unnecessary layers of approvals required to get
trivial and not-so-consequential things done — means that there will be less
paperwork to move around, which means fewer interruptions for people.
Awareness Is Key
Environmental changes aside, human beings evolved to
conserve energy in order to stand a shot at surviving on the savannah. As such,
we are predisposed to picking the lowest hanging fruit or doing the easiest
thing first — think checking email instead of working on that presentation.
Becoming more aware of our tendencies to pick the low hanging fruit, getting
distracted by low-value activities, is step one towards changing our behaviors.
Organizations that build a culture around minimizing
distractions will enjoy the compounding benefit of a focused workforce and will
leave their people feeling less stressed and ultimately more fulfilled.
Steve Glaveski is
CEO and co-founder of Collective Campus, a corporate innovation and
start-up accelerator based in Melbourne, Australia. He hosts the Future
Squared podcast and is the author of Employee to
Entrepreneur: How to Earn Your Freedom and Do Work That Matters.
No comments:
Post a Comment