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Why Work Doesn't Happen at Work

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Jason Fried’s talk at TEDx:

A key point: “People need long stretches of time to make real creative progress on an issue” (my paraphrase) and “15 minutes is enough time to have some great ideas, but not really go deep with any of them.”

It’s also interesting to see the comparison he makes between sleep and work.

The Task of Defining Your Work

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From David Allen’s latest newsletter (which you can subscribe to here), explaining why the world of work often seems so much harder now:

More and more these days I find that people in my seminars are resonating to the importance of defining our work. The challenge many of us face is to not only track, but accurately label all of our projects, and hang on to those “stakes in the ground” while the rest of the world seems to want to blow us away from them like we’re in a hurricane.

How many of you don’t have time to do your work, because you have so much work to do??!!

How many of you, in your jobs, are only doing what you were hired to do? (I never get one affirmative response in any group I query!)

I credit the late Peter Drucker for framing this issue better than anyone, from the macro perspective. He indicates that whereas fifty years ago 80% of our work force made its living by making or moving things, that number is now less than 20%. And that “knowledge work” demands a completely different paradigm of focus than we have been trained in as a professional culture.

The good news about making or moving something is that when you come to work, un-made and un-moved things make it real easy to know how to spend your day. You do not need “personal organization” other than the work that is obviously and visibly at hand. The bad news is that these days only a small percentage of us get to work and know what to do. The rest of us have to make it up. And very few (if any) of the people we interact with seem to be supporting our agenda.

So, it becomes critical for each of us to maintain a complete and accurately defined list of Projects, and to ensure that we review these at least weekly with real sincerity of focus, creating and capturing all the “oh yeah, that reminds me, I need to…” kind of next actions that need to happen to make our “work” happen.

This needs to include all the professional and personal projects about which you would like ideally for something to be happening during the course of an operational week. “R&D new camera”, “Finalize budget implementation”, “Refinance house”, “Reorganize office”, etc.

We were only trained and equipped in our culture to show up, and deal with the work at hand. We now have to train and equip ourselves, create our own targets and goal-lines, and tie safety ropes onto those outcomes to keep steady in our course against the winds of the world.

How Much Time Do You Need to Get Your Email Inbox to Zero Each Day?

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Here’s David Allen’s answer, from his latest newsletter:

Q: How much time do I need to get my email inbox to zero?

A: For people who have 50+ emails a day, I’ve noticed that it takes an average of about 30 seconds each to process (decide what it is, delete it, file it, respond to it quickly, or defer it to an “action” folder or list.) For someone with 100 emails a day (more and more common) that’s 50 minutes just to get through a day’s email load. That doesn’t count all of the other input you get as well, including phone calls, voice mails, conversations, and meetings.

A typical professional these days must factor in at least an hour a day and an additional hour at the end of the week (for a Weekly Review.) And not as “It would be nice if I could…”—but as an absolute requirement to manage their life and work with integrity.

The Way to Get More Energy is Not to Do Less

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A good point from Getting Results the Agile Way: A Personal Results System for Work and Life:

Remember it’s not doing less that makes you feel better or stronger. It’s spending more time in your strengths and following your passions, and less time doing things that make you weak. The more time you spend in your strengths, the more energy you will have. The more energy you have the more you can accomplish with less effort and less churn.

Your Brain at Work

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Here’s another book I’ve recently dipped in to: Your Brain at Work: Strategies for Overcoming Distraction, Regaining Focus, and Working Smarter All Day Long. Based on what I’ve read so far, it’s an enjoyable discussion of why your brain works the way it does in relation to various issues of productivity (for example, why you can’t multi-task).

Here’s an interesting paragraph:

While you can hold several chunks of information in mind at once, you can’t perform more than one conscious process at a time with these chunks without impacting performance. We now have three limitations: the stage takes a lot of energy to run, it can hold only a handful of actors at a time, and these actors can play only one scene at a time.

And here’s another very interesting point on the consequences of being “always on”:

“Always on” may not be the most productive way to work. One of the reasons for this will become clearer in the chapter on staying cool under pressure; however, in summary, the brain is being forced to be on “alert” far too much. This increases what is known as your allostatic load, which is a reading of stress hormones and other factors relating to a sense of threat. The wear and tear has an impact. As Stone says, “This always on, anywhere, anytime, anyplace era has created an artificial sense of constant crisis. What happens to mammals in a state of constant crisis is the adrenalized fight-or-flight mechanism kicks in. It’s great when tigers are chasing us. How many of those five hundred emails a day is a tiger?”

… [Also], the surprise result of being always on is that not only do you get a negative effect on mental performance, but it also tends to increase the total number of emails you get. People notice you respond to issues quickly, so they send you more issues to respond to.