Posts Tagged ‘interruption’

Eureka! The maker vs. the manager

Friday, January 22nd, 2010

Sometimes I’ll just be sitting there minding my own business, when all of the sudden, WHAM! — something comes along that’s so obvious that it results in a “Eureka!” moment (it’s happened twice in the last couple of weeks, so expect another post just like this soon). This time the WHAM came while crawling through my RSS reader, when I found a blog post titled “Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule“.

If you’ve read very far on this site, you’ll know I despise meetings. Horribly. I view meetings as a productivity sink; there’s no way I can be more productive in a meeting, and, many times, I am completely unproductive in a meeting.  I would hear people talking about their day being fully booked — and are excited about it! I couldn’t grasp why someone would be excited about it. These same people believe there isn’t a single problem a meeting can’t solve, when, in my mind, meetings only create problems.  Why are my observations about meetings so disjointed with these other people.  Is there something wrong with me? With them?  The answer is “neither.”

The “Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule” eureka! moment made me realize that there are two distinctly different types of people when it comes to meetings.  Worse, neither side understands the other. Nor do they try.

In order for makers to help managers understand, we must communicate with them. We must let them know how a single meeting could potentially ruin an entire day. Hopefully you can find a manager that has, hopefully recently, been a maker. They will become your champion. Remind them of the joy of a meeting-less day and how much they were able to get done, and that satisfaction that provided.

You’re not going to be able to get out of all meetings, unfortunately.  There are two things that can be done to assist in your goal of unfettered making time: 1) Minimize your meetings, and 2) Coalesce your meetings.

Minimize your meetings

Minimize both the number and length of meetings. Ask if you really need to be in the meeting, and explain the benefits of what you’ll be able to accomplish if you don’t attend. Do not fall into the trap of the default hour meeting time. Challenge the meeting organizer to reduce a meeting down to 30 minutes, or to 45 if that doesn’t work. Just because your meeting software defaults to hour-long meetings doesn’t mean you have to follow their cue.

Coalesce your meetings

Think of your calendar as a hard disk defragger display. Get the meetings to all form consecutive blocks such that you don’t have an hour meeting, an hour break, and then another hour of meeting.  That hour break in the Calendar. Source: library_chic / flickrmiddle is useless because you’re not going to be able to really get up to speed before you need to start slowing down for the next meeting. Hopefully you can coalesce all your meetings together in the morning, so you’ll have a wide-open afternoon to work. (Or maybe that’s just me; I wouldn’t like my prospects for the day if I knew my entire afternoon was filled with meetings.)

Move meetings to natural boundaries, such as the hour before or after lunch. If I know there’s a meeting scheduled at 2, I’ll postpone my lunch until 1:15 or so. Don’t allow a meeting to fall right in the middle of your morning or afternoon. However, do not try to create a designated “meeting zone” during the day. Some managers will think all available time within that block of time will need to be filled with meetings. Instead, create a “do not meet” time in which meetings cannot be scheduled, allowing the makers to make and the managers to plan their next batch of  meetings.

Understanding the manager mindset

Managers usually schedule meetings to get information of one type or another. Here are a few quick ideas to provide information without having a meeting, to shorten meetings, or to get uninvited to meetings.

Suggest an alternative to a meeting. For example, if you’re asked if you’re going to be free for a meeting, respond by asking to talk about it now. Without the formality of the meeting, and the inclusion of  unnecessary people (who tend to elongate the meeting), you’ll spend less time addressing the issue.

Try a preemptive strike. If you’re scheduled for a meeting, and you see only one issue for you during the meeting (you only attend meetings with an agenda, right?), go directly to the meeting owner’s office/cube, and give them the information they need, then excuse yourself from the meeting. Follow up with an email to all the invitees.

Do not attend a meeting without an agenda. As mentioned above, you should never go to a meeting that doesn’t have a published agenda. Without it, how do you know when you’ve answered the organizer’s questions, or fulfilled their need to know? By balking at attending an agenda-less meeting, you’re actually helping the manager get in the habit of creating agendas, which will be a win for everyone.  Once you have the agenda, become an agenda hawk. If conversation goes off topic, bring attention to it and get the meeting back on course, even if it’s not your meeting.

If all else fails, become a pain in the ass. If you’re continually getting invites to unproductive meetings from a single individual, it might become necessary to go negative. Start coming up with action items for the manager, forcing them to look through the eyes of a maker for a bit. Go medieval on the meeting’s ass by being a stickler for starting and ending times, and for sticking to the agenda (see above).

Hopefully with these ideas, your meetings will become less frequent, and those you still have will be less of a waste of time.

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Posted in Productivity |

The “It’ll take just a minute” myth

Monday, September 21st, 2009

clock.jpgHave you ever been at work when somebody approaches you asking for “a minute of your time”? I’m sure we all have. The problem is that the damage done by that interruption is much more than just time consumed by the interruption.

This isn’t just about the interruption taking a minute —because rarely is that true— but it’s about the time it takes for you and your brain to recover and get back into the mindset you were in prior to the interruption. A study printed in the New York Times that used Microsoft employees as a sample set showed that it took, on average, an employee 15 minutes to recover from even the most trivial of interruptions, such as an email notification.

I have known this for quite a while from my own experience, but I believe that the estimate might be a bit on the conservative side. The reason for this is that an interruption, regardless of its length or importance, destroys your concentration. The people in this study weren’t just folks off the street, but were the well trained and intelligent folks at Microsoft, so I believe the recovery time could very well be longer for most people. Additionally, I would think that the difficultly of the work in progress has an impact upon the recovery time as well, and would not be surprised that it could take as long as 30 minutes to recover from an interruption to a difficult task.

Just for the sake of argument, let’s say the person approaching you for a minute of your time really does need only a minute, and the recovery time for an interruption is 15 minutes. The total cost of that interruption to you, in terms of productivity, would be around 16 minutes, and possibly longer depending upon the difficulty of the interrupted task.

Mark McGuiness describes the reasoning behind this as a memory retention issue. Your memory is dependent upon your mind’s state; when your focus changes, as what happens when being interrupted, your mind’s state changes, and you lose a bit of the memory of the task you were working on prior to the interruption. The example he gives is one in which we’ve all participated: being interrupted in a conversation, then, post-interruption, on person asks the other “what were we talking about?”

Now, what to do about this? Banish all interruptions? Do that, and business as we know it would collapse (yes, even more than it’s already collapsed this year). Most interruptions are necessary, and the people doing the interrupting usually aren’t doing so to break other people’s concentration. There are questions to be asked and answered, but there are some interruptions that just must be told “no.” So the answer to what to do about this is something I’ll be writing about over the next couple weeks, using three different scenarios. Next will be a topic near and dear to my heart, meetings, and in specific that most evil villain the “Status Meeting”. Following that, I’ll have entries for breaks, and how to take them, and then interruptions in general.

Photo by: TW Collins

References:

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The interruption hierarchy

Wednesday, September 16th, 2009

If you work with people, and you probably do, you can rest assured that you’ll be interrupted from time to time. Sometimes, hopefully rarely, there will be multiple interruptions at the same time. This article shows how you should prioritize those interruptions to maximize your productivity.

The order (or interruption hierarchy) in which I process interruptions goes like this:

  1. In-person visits
  2. Phone calls
  3. E-mail and Instant Messaging

In-person visits

The in-person visit, or “walk-up” is when a co-worker visits you in person. This should receive the highest priority, as someone has taken the time to actually get up from their seat, and walk over to see you. They have taken the initiative to ask a question or resolve an issue using direct communication, the most productive way to do such a thing for both parties involved.

This is the source of one of my greatest pet peeves in a retail context. There have been times when I’ve visited a store (the “bricks and mortar” type, as the e-commerce crowd calls it), and will be in the process of finalizing a sale when the clerk drops everything because the phone rings. I’ve taken the initiative to come in to the store and really buy something, with real money, but I’ve been put on hold because a perspective customer, who may or may not come into the store, is calling. Take care of the for-sures first, then move on to others.

Phone calls

There are times when a co-worker cannot stop by because they’re not physically located in the same area as you. Sometimes they may be in an adjacent building, in another city, or they may have a position that requires them to travel. For those types of people a phone call is the most productive way of fostering communication, and you should extend a high priority to them. But for others, a phone call is not as good as an in-person visit, but better than non-verbal communications.

However, if you have an in-person visit occurring when your phone rings, let the phone go, regardless of who it is. That’s what voice mail is for. Do not interrupt the tempo of your current conversation by starting another.

Email and/or Instant Messaging

Unless the sender is in a remote location, I assume any email or IM communication is low priority. For a local (i.e. in the same building) co-worker, the only time I find that email is acceptable to start a conversation is when there may be background material necessary for the conversation (Example: sending a specific error message or stack trace, then stopping by to ask about why the error is occurring). Other than that, I view email useful only for ‘follow-up’ messages, or low-priority questions that do not require an interruption, and that can be answered at the addressee’s convenience.

Do not fall into the IM trap of confusing “Instant” with “Important”. If you find yourself stopping whenever an IM window pops up, regardless of content, consider closing your IM client. Chances are that most of the IM’s you’re receiving aren’t worth the time and thought lost by looking at them.

Obviously this changes if either of the two people involved in the communication are working off-site, perhaps telecommuting. However, I’d still prefer phone (or other voice communication, such as Skype) over email and messaging.

Managing your interruptions

A friend once told me of a co-worker that has implemented office hours, much like college professors do. During those hours, the door is open, available for anyone to drop by, ask questions, general chat, etc. However, once office hours are over, the door is shut, and it’s heads-down work. If you could possibly get by with that in your workplace, I’d suggest it. It almost requires an office; I find it hard to ‘shut the door’ on my cube.

Look into creating a “Do Not Disturb” sign policy at your workplace. In order for this to work, you’re going to need buy-in from management. If you get that, and the policy is adhered to, then you can implement at type of “office hours” policy. However, the system cannot be abused; you cannot simply leave the DND sign up all day, everyday, and expect people to respect it.

If you get to a point in a in-person or phone interruption in which you’ve either resolved the issue or reached a point where a consensus cannot be reached, you’ve got to make a move to get the conversation to wind down. In the case of the resolved issue, just repeat the consensual conclusion, and thank the co-worker. If they still don’t leave, politely mention that you need to move back to the work you were doing earlier. Typically, interruptions that reach a conclusion won’t keep going endlessly; however, those interruptions when a consensus cannot be reached can be tricky to end. Tell the co-worker that you understand the issue and will need some time to think about it, then schedule a follow up meeting. Be sure to schedule this meeting immediately to assure the co-worker that they’re not just being blown off. If that doesn’t end the conversation, try the same approach as with the conclusion scenario: tell the co-worker that you’ve got to get back to your original task, and that you’ll follow up shortly.

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