Garr Reynolds' excellent blog, Presentation Zen, points out that the president of Toyota Motor Company is urging employees to stop using Powerpoint for the creation of documents. (By the way, if you want to learn how to make better presentations, you can't do better than to read Garr's blog and buy his book. You'll never think about Powerpoint the same way again. And your audiences will thank you for it.) Garr writes,
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TIMEBACK BLOG
Last week I wrote about the need to treat your time as a limited resource, like your salary. As with your income, you have to spend it wisely -- you don't want to squander your time playing Howard Carter on an archaeological dig for the latest version of a budget when you could be doing something important, like actually solving a customer's problem.
You can take the metaphor (about money and time, not the one about Howard Carter) one step further: just as you have to save money for unanticipated emergencies -- a root canal, a new transmission, hospitalization for your dog -- so too do you have to save time for the unanticipated crises at work. Perhaps the CEO needs a new headcount reduction plan, or the dye in your new product is bleeding, or someone finds PCB's in the caulk surrounding the windows in the public schools -- you may not know what the precise emergency is, but you can be pretty sure that you're going to lose 30-40% of each day to putting out these fires.
The NYTimes's Shifting Careers column addressed the problem of information overload last Friday. The column reminded me of a fundamental reality: that although our time is finite, the demands on our time are infinite. Whether we work 40, 50, or 100 hours per week, there's a definite limit to what we can accomplish.
Even if we were physically able to work 24 hours a day, everyday, we'd never get to the bottom of our to-do list (or our email inboxes). There will always be one more call to make, one more problem to solve, one more email to write. We have to abandon the fantasy that staying at the office later, or working weekends, is the solution to getting to the bottom of the inbox or the to-do list.
We have to treat our time like we treat our money: as a limited resource that must be budgeted. And just as we first allocate money to the most important things in life -- food & shelter -- so, too, must we allocate our time to the most important stuff in our work.
Last week I worked with a group of R&D engineers at a high-tech company. As for so many others, the blessing of email has turned into the bane of their existence. Each person gets a minimum of 200 emails per day (the vast majority of which aren't terribly important or relevant), and the burden of reading all that email keeps them from spending time on the stuff that's really important to their customers.
After I pointed out that email is nothing more than the high-tech equivalent of two dixie cups and a string -- just a way of transmitting information, but not actually one's job -- one of the engineers wondered how NASA's engineers managed to put a man on the moon without tools like email. His point, of course, was that despite the problems caused by email, in the end there's a net gain in productivity.
An article in yesterday's Wall Street Journal identified the current breed of hot business gurus. For $50,000-75,000 a speech, they'll help you and your company address the challenges of globalization, motivation, and innovation.
Harvard professor Gary Hamel is one of the gurus profiled. His latest book, The Future of Management, strives to help companies create a culture of innovation. In his words,
It seemed to me that getting large organizations to be persistently innovative was akin to getting a dog to walk on its hind legs. The moment you turned your back, it was down on all fours again.
I've been working this week with the finance department of an $18 billion company. They're creating value stream maps of their forecasting process in order to reduce the time it takes to roll up the financials from the 100 countries in which they do business. As with most companies, an internal process like this has grown without much planning, and it's now pretty damn messy. People spend days gathering data, inputting into Excel spreadsheets, then uploading to an SAP system. . . all for internal customers (the CFO, investor relations, and to some extent, the country managers) who don't really need all that data.
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.
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.