Thank you Mimi, your
reply was most enlightening!
Every bit you have written is in fact worth reading over.
I specially like the concept of Broken In Box with or without Spam.
Regarding the triage concept I must admit that I haven´t taken the time
to read all the papers thoroughly, so as a matter of fact, I´m not in
good position to give a responsible opinion.
Regarding having a pile of "I´ll read this some day" what I can tell
you from my personal behaviour is that I have many of those piles,
which in the end I never read.
The new tactic I am taking is that I do a quick skim and scan of the
info (visual or verbal), then I either extract the info from the e mail
(even a snapshot) which I collect in folders (system) of current
projects. If I do not do even a quick skim and scan I decide that
although I might be interested in the subject, I cannot afford the time
to read everything so in the end I decide to drop from the mailing list
(if this is the case).
Having the power of Internet, comes along the good and the bad. I am
sure that I could stay almost forever reading info that is keen to me,
but I will be producing nothing in the end of the day.
Once I read that a person (can´t recall who) dropped out entirely the
bookmarks in his (or her) navigator.
He knew that having Google was all he needed to find the bits and
pieces he was looking for.
I have not dropped entirely my bookmarks, but I realize from experience
that I tend to look at them less frecuently, although I have showned
some kind of interest in first place.
I believe Chandler should be in it outmost incarnation a tool of
freedom, but not in an abstract way of thinking but in more mundane
things.
Freedom so as to have more time and manage it wisely.
Freedom so as to be quickly re-active but also pro-active.
It shouldn´t get in the way of the user (dissapear preferably)
Should be really quick in response (like for searching a phone number,
and only that!!) (see the e mail titled:Thoughts for the pillow)
Should be really quick at dissapearing (after giving me the phone
number)
Maybe it would have different skins or one for work, one for home, one
for hobby? who knows...
But it could be nice to be able to separate both home and work, even if
we work and live in the same place (a quick button perhaps, or even
something more subtle, only the text: work, home, both, so as to toggle
quickly). Maybe it could change from home to work depending on the day
and the time or even if we were in vacation, it could be a different
skin.
I am speaking of sanity, mental sanity.
Sorry for the day dreaming, maybe, (that´s my hope) this could work as
triggers to this or even better ideas.
This is the only purpose of my writting.
Thanking you all in advance,
Daniel Vareika
Mimi Yin wrote:
Thank you Daniel for posting this article. I think you've put
your finger on the need for a fundamental paradigm shift that has
taken several decades of computer use to make apparent. And this is in
many ways at the core of what we're trying to accomplish with
Chandler.
In a paper-based world where you received 1 or 2 or 3 letters a
week via Pony Express, the rate at which information arrived was so
slow that you could take the time to parse each item individually. And
the effort was usually worth it. The scarcity of communication
resources was such that people were also incredibly efficient in their
communications. If you could only send one letter a month, you made
sure it was a letter worth reading.
Today, we are clearly at the opposite extreme. Communications is
cheap, so like with most things that are cheap, we're careless with
them. SPAM is a big problem, but the lack of an incentive for people
to be efficient with their communications has a much more significant
negative impact. (It's easy to identify and delete SPAM, but how do
you deal with sloppy information that is actually relevant to you?)
People send one off emails rather than waiting to compile a list of
questions. People address emails to team lists that may have dozens of
recipients on them (I'm not talking about discussion lists like this
one ;o) rather than carefully calling out the few people that really
need to know in the To: field and maybe CC:ing the rest of the
list.
Then of course, the information overload feeds on itself. Person
A is careless is about the emails they send. Person B gets too many of
Person A's emails and can't keep up with all of them. So then Person A
has to send more duplicate emails to nag Person B. The net effect of
this multiplied over the dozens of people we deal with every day
results in a broken Inbox, with or without Spam.
Which leads us to the paradigm shift. Why are we still parsing
and processing emails one-by-one, stuck down at the runway level,
navigating our information with no perspective and no high level
understanding of what's going on?
We need to elevate ourselves a little bit and survey what we
have
at the 10 or 20,000 foot level. Deal with things with broad brush
strokes and then only drill in on the parts we've identified as
important.
In part, Chandler deals with this with our notion of Triage (as
in, don't meticulously file everything, triage most of it and then
only "organize" the important stuff).
We also have the idea of organizing your life into high-level
Spheres: Home, Work, School, Fun etc...with Areas of Responsibility or
"Projects" in each Sphere.
These are attempts to provide eagle-eye perspectives on your
data.
But ultimately, we will need to address this issue of how people
can "make high-level" sense of their data without having to
open and scan every email one at a time, and this is largely a data
visualization issue.**
Scenarios
1. Can I get a high level view of my Inbox where I can see which
emails are To: me, which emails are CC: me and which emails are to
some list I'm on?
2. Can I get a high level view of my Inbox where I can see the
information described in scenario#1 overlayed with groupings based on
WHO the email is from?
3. Can I then overlay what project the email is about?
Now, I can start to make intelligent decisions about the order
in
which I should deal with my Inbox. I'll start with the emails (To:
me)+(From:My Manager)+( About:Project due Tomorrow)
And in one fell swoop, I can automatically Archive into the
"I'll read this someday maybe" pile, all the emails that are
(To: Some list I'm on) or ( About:Office Announcements), etc...
Just as we've realized that: Now that we're not literally filing
paper into manila folders into steel file cabinets...Therefore, we
don't have to restrict items to "live" in one and only one
location...
...We also need to realize that: Now that we're not receiving 1
letter a month anymore...We can no longer afford to maintain our
incredibly expensive workflow model of parsing information one
individual item at a time.
Desperate times call for desperate measures.
:o) Mimi
**The theory being, encoding information in alpha-numeric
strings
makes it hard to grok large amounts of data without going in and
reading the text for each individual item. ie. Expressing the metadata
"Color: Blue" as a string versus colorizing the item
Blue.
At 8:51 AM -0300 9/28/05, Daniel Vareika wrote:
To
all,
I do enclose below an article not directly connected to Chandler but
to how it has changed our working habits and style.
Every day I am more convinced that we are getting more sophisticated
but day to day, our quality of living is in fact decreasing.
More if we are highly prepared.
When the Idea of Chandler arrived, I welcomed it with both arms, I
still believe chandler can make a huge difference, still, (and I am
speaking with real little knowledge), I don´t know where the limit
between a tool that gives us power and flexibility in organizing our
life, should be instead something that can help us organize more
productively (like GTD - David Allen).
Only one drop to show the ocean, the mailing lists at OSAF changed to
wikis and other forms of collaborations, as a more efficient way of
interacting.
The way I see it (and not with 20 words) Chandler should be about
freedom
Freedom of time (to do the thing one wants)
Freedom to choose (how to spend our time)
Freedom from work (and I love working)
Freedom to be with our families.
How:
By helping eliminate bottlenecks, provide us with only the necessary
and useful information (and not data), and least is best (at least in
my world).
This is how we like so much Mac OS vrs Windows or even Linux from a
user stand point of view.
We are more productive, less buttons and clutter is on our way, it is
in fact cleaner.
Have you ever thought how much time do we spend organizing and
cleaning (only or email).
I guess we all need a secretary to manage our e mail, calendar and
blog.
Sorry if this is too far fetched, but please don´t waste your time
reading me and read the article below, and read between the lines.
Yours,
Daniel Vareika
PS. Keep with the good work!!
The Real Reasons
You're Working So Hard...
By Michael Mandel,
with
Steve Hamm in New York, Carol Matlack in Paris, Christopher Farrell in
St. Paul, Minn., and Ann Therese Palmer in Chicago
BusinessWeek Online
...and what you can do about
it
Honk if this sounds like you: While
much
of America is watching Jon Stewart, Letterman, or Leno, you're
stumbling out the office door into a car-service Town Car or groping
for the clicker to the BMW in the company parking lot. Once home, you
slug down a beer or the last of a bottle of white wine on the door of
the fridge, stuff some leftovers in your mouth, and collapse into bed
beside your sleeping spouse. A half-dozen hours later, you crawl to
the shower, throw on a clean shirt, pour some coffee down your throat,
maybe drop a kid or two at school, and jump back on the frenetic work
treadmill that you can't shut off.
The good news -- if there is any,
time-challenged amigo -- is that you are not alone. More than 31% of
college-educated male workers are regularly logging 50 or more hours a
week at work, up from 22% in 1980. Forty percent of American adults
get less than seven hours of sleep on weekdays, reports the National
Sleep Foundation, up from 31% in 2001. About 60% of us are sometimes
or often rushed at mealtime, and one-third wolf down lunch at our
desks, according to a survey by the American Dietetic Assn. To avoid
wasting time, we're talking on our cell phones while rushing to work,
answering e-mails during conference calls, waking up at 4 a.m. to call
Europe, and generally multitasking our brains out.
This epidemic of long hours at the
office
-- whether physically or remotely -- defies historical precedent and
common sense. Over the past 25 years, the Information Revolution has
boosted productivity by almost 70%. So you would think that since
we're producing more in fewer hours, such gains would translate into a
decrease in the workweek -- as they have in the past. But instead of
technology being a time-saver, says Warren Bennis, a University of
Southern California professor and author of such management classics
as On Becoming a Leader, "everybody I know is working
harder and longer."
And the long-hour marathons aren't a
result of demanding corporations exploiting the powerless. Most of the
groggy-eyed are the best-educated and best-paid -- college grads whose
real wages have risen by more than 30% since the 1980s. That's a
change from 25 years ago, when it was the lowest-wage workers who were
most likely to put in 50 hours or more a week, according to new
research by Peter Kuhn of the University of California at Santa
Barbara and Fernando A. Lozano of Pomona College.
With so many managers and
professionals
stuck at work, there is a growing consensus among management gurus
that the stuck-at-work epidemic is symptomatic of a serious disorder
in the organization of corporations. The problem, in a nutshell-to-go
is this: Succeeding in today's economy requires lightning-fast
reflexes and the ability to communicate and collaborate across the
globe. Coming up with innovative ideas, products, and services means
getting people across different divisions and different companies to
work together. "More and more value is created through networks,"
says John Helferich, a top executive and former head of research and
development at Masterfoods usa, a division of Mars Inc. and the maker
of such products as M&Ms. "The guys who are good at it are
winning."
Unfortunately, the communication,
coordination, and teamwork so essential for success these days is
being superimposed on a corporate structure that has one leg still in
its gray flannel suit. Without strict gatekeepers (read secretaries),
Tom, Jane, and Harry feel free to plug themselves into your electronic
calendar. You and a colleague in another part of the company may dream
up a great idea for a new product -- but it takes months to get
approvals from your boss, his boss, and their boss. Or the corporate
bigwigs order you to join a taskforce that is supposed to promote
collaboration and innovation -- but it ends up taking a big chunk of
your time. And no matter how many layers of management were supposed
to be taken out, there always seem to be more people on the e-mail
distribution lists.
You are not imagining things. Despite
years of cutting corporate bloat, managers are a much bigger share of
the workforce than they were 15 years ago. "We've added a new set
of standards without fully dropping the old," says Thomas H.
Davenport, professor of information technology and management at
Babson College and author of the new book Thinking for a
Living.
That helps explain why time pressures
seem to be getting worse. Globalization and the Internet create great
new opportunities, but they also ratchet up the intensity of
competition and generate more work -- especially with the existing
corporate structure still hanging on tightly. "Nobody wants to
give up their territory or their control," says Shoshana Zuboff,
a former professor at Harvard Business School. Adds Lowell Bryan, a
McKinsey & Co. director: "Professionals are still being
managed as if they were in factories, in organizations designed to
keep everybody siloed. At less well-run companies, you're struck by
how frustrated people are. They work like dogs and are wasting
time."
Make that lots of time. Fully 25% of
executives at large companies say their communications -- voice mail,
e-mail, and meetings -- are nearly or completely unmanageable. That's
according to a new McKinsey survey of more than 7,800 managers around
the world. Nearly 40% spend a half to a full day per week on
communications that are not valuable. Other surveys echo similar
results. "We're making our people compete with sandbags strapped
to their legs," says Zuboff.
A Digital Spine
There is hope, however, and the promise of at least partial liberation
from the tyranny of time constraints. Why? Because the long-term
interests of individuals and smart companies are aligned. To compete,
successful corporations will have to make it easier and less
time-consuming for their employees to collaborate. They will learn how
to live with fewer time-sapping meetings and unnecessary feedback
loops -- or find themselves outrun by more nimble competitors. The
eventual result: less frustration for knowledge workers.
Moves in this direction are already
under
way as savvy companies analyze their internal social networks and
identify bottlenecks. Intel Corp., for example, sees an opportunity in
creating technology that lowers the time cost of teamwork. And others,
such as Eli Lilly & Co., are providing more corporate support for
both internal and external networks. "It's a new mental model for
how you run a company," says McKinsey's Bryan. "The winners
will be those who can handle more complexity."
At the same time we may see a rise in
new
forms of Web-based organizations where people can contribute without
having their time eaten up by existing hierarchy. Blogs, collaborative
online databases (called wikis) and open-source software development
all use the Net to handle much of the coordination among people rather
than relying on top-down command and control. Such a shift to a
digital spine could eventually lessen bureaucratic time burdens on
overworked professionals, especially those in such high-cost
industries as health care.
If history is any guide, the
stuck-at-work epidemic will turn out to be a transitional phase.
Historically, as countries and individuals get richer, they work less.
Look at the late 19th century, when the U.S. was still a relatively
poor country, with a per capita income about equal to that of China
today. Back then the typical male household head had precious little
leisure time, perhaps only about 1.8 hours a day, on average, after
subtracting time for work, chores, and meals. The average factory
worker put in about 60 hours a week, with only one day off. Indeed,
the first May Day labor demonstrations, in 1886, were driven by the
demand for an eight-hour day.
Over time, as U.S. productivity and
incomes rose, work hours dropped and leisure time increased. It was no
coincidence that the five-day work week was first introduced in 1926
by Henry Ford, a decade after he pioneered high-efficiency,
mass-production methods.
By 1970 the 40-hour workweek was the
norm. And, at least until recently, European and Asian countries have
followed the same trajectory of declining work hours. Since 1991
average annual work hours have dropped by 11% in Japan, 10% in France,
6% in Germany and Britain, and 5% in South Korea. Meanwhile, average
monthly work hours in Taiwan are down by 7% over the same stretch.
Even work hours in China, while still much higher than in the U.S.,
may be coming down. "Asians are poorer and still working like
crazy," says Alberto Alesina, a Harvard University economics
professor who has studied international work hours. "But as they
get richer, they are taking more leisure."
The one real exception to the rule
has
been the U.S. Since 1991 the U.S. has grown substantially faster than
Europe and Japan. Nevertheless, average annual work hours are down by
less than 2%, and that includes all the low-skilled workers who are in
less demand today.
Interestingly, there are signs that
global competition is forcing Europeans to start moving away from
their tradition of shorter work hours. The number of Germans working
more than 40 hours a week rose sharply last year, to 5.3 million from
4.7 million. Siemens, DaimlerChrysler, Deutsche Bahn, and many smaller
companies have been able to increase work hours without corresponding
increases in pay. French workers seem to be putting in more hours in
the past year or two as well.
European executives are sounding more
and
more like their American counterparts. "Ten years ago, if I was
on a business trip, I'd get to my hotel in the evening, and there
might be a message or two from my secretary and a couple of faxes,"
says Philippe Midy, a Paris-based executive at McDonald's Europe who
travels extensively around the Continent dealing with supply and
logistics issues. Now there's a deluge. "Sometimes I'm answering
e-mails at 2 a.m."
At least at the moment, long hours
are
part of the price to be paid for faster growth, especially if you work
for a multinational. "If you are going to be a participant in
economic activity that is part of a globalized market," says
Stephen S. Roach, chief economist for Morgan Stanley, "you need
to be prepared to stretch beyond 9 to 5."
Companies have been willing to pay
big
bucks for those longer hours. Over the past 15 to 20 years, people
working a 40-hour week received virtually no increase in real pay,
according to research by Kuhn and Lozano. Yet employees putting in a
55-hour week saw their real pay rise by 14%. The implication: The
gains of two decades of growth have mainly gone to ambitious -- or
fearful -- Americans who are working longer hours.
But even high pay can't compensate
for
unrelenting time pressure. Top managers have to realize that
encouraging networks and collaboration demands as much attention and
resources as supervising and measuring performance in traditional
ways. Most companies have built up large human-resources departments,
but few have a department of collaboration. "Most managers don't
manage social networks effectively," says Babson's Davenport.
At Intel, the drive to reduce the
time
spent sharing knowledge and collaborating is an outgrowth of efforts
to better coordinate far-flung operations that stretch from Israel to
India. One idea being pursued by Luke Koons, director for information
and knowledge management, is "dynamic profiling" --
technologies that automatically summarize areas on which a researcher
or a manager is focusing, based on the subjects of their e-mails and
Web searches. Such a regularly updated profile could make it less
time-consuming to locate potential collaborators and resources, an
especially daunting prospect in a large, innovation-minded company
such as Intel. Equally important, dynamic profiling doesn't force
individuals to spend hours manually updating their profiles as their
focus changes.
The Off Switch
There's plenty of demand for new technologies that more efficiently
foster collaboration, such as software that allows virtual meetings,
where everyone doesn't need to be present simultaneously. "Our
communication tools are woefully inadequate," says Alph Bingham,
a top executive at Eli Lilly who is vice-president of e.Lilly.
"We are still relying on sticking everyone in a room and
hammering it out. It's untenable globally."
Another time-eater: all the meetings
and
e-mails required to manage details of a collaboration or partnership.
"Organizations need to recognize that when you engage in
collaboration, there's another level of complexity," says
Bingham. Part of the solution is to hire people for a new type of
position devoted to facilitating or managing networks and
relationships. Lilly, for example, created a new internal group --
almost like ombudsmen -- to manage communications among Lilly
scientists and myriad outside partners. "This allows the
scientists to dedicate less of their time to the collaboration,"
says Bingham.
Adding new software and more people
to
reduce the cost of collaboration is great -- as long as it doesn't
create even more work. To really ease the work overload -- and, not
coincidentally, make corporations more nimble -- it's also essential
to identify and eliminate unnecessary interactions. "Sometimes
people need to remind themselves that there is an off switch -- and
use it," says Paul Saffo, a director at the Institute for the
Future, a think tank based in Palo Alto, Calif. "Solitude is the
scarce resource in business lives -- having that time when you are
disconnected and realizing that everything will go along fine without
you."
To reduce time pressures -- and hike
productivity -- the number of low-value interactions must be cut.
"The usual assumption is that more collaboration is better,"
says Rob Cross, an assistant professor at the University of Virginia's
McIntire School of Commerce who also runs Network Roundtable, a
research group whose members include Schlumberger, Microsoft, Intel,
Merc, and BP. "But it's important to ask not just where we need
to build and connect but where do we need to let go?"
By having workers fill out a 15- to
20-minute online survey, Cross can chart who people communicate with,
how much time is spent preparing for which meetings, and where the
bottlenecks are. "Then I ask executives: 'What decisions are you
making that others can make?"' says Cross. "Are there
aspects of your role that you could let go of?"
Masterfoods used this methodology to
map
out how its product development, packaging, and process-development
staff spent their time. The results were surprising. "When we
looked at the data, it turned out that it was too hard to do business
internally," says Helferich, then head of Masterfoods' R&D.
People had to talk to 30 or 40 other people just to get their jobs
done, which took away from their time to work on new ideas. Notes
Helferich: "We were high-density on task and low-density on
innovation." Now Masterfoods is in the process of redesigning the
workflow of the packaging group to eliminate a lot of the extraneous
steps that took up time.
If you are high enough in your
organization, you can simply choose when to make yourself unavailable.
Bryan, one of McKinsey's top consultants, says he has given up cell
phones and computers, letting others handle his communications.
"I never had time to think," says Bryan. "It's amazing
how much you can get done if you don't spend all your time
interacting."
Many of the most overloaded managers
are
not yet at a level where they have the luxury of controlling their
schedules or dispensing with unproductive e-mails, pesky voice mails,
and interminable meetings. But in terms of reducing work overload,
perhaps the biggest and most difficult step will be for corporations
to give their knowledge workers more freedom over their own time.
"The Industrial Age approach to management dies a pretty tough
death," says Babson's Davenport. "Even today people end up
being evaluated not only on how much they produce but also on how many
hours they are in the office."
Of course, there's one shiny new
example
of where output matters more than process: the Web. Nobody cares how
long it took or what time of night it was when someone wrote a blog
entry -- all that's seen is the final result. Similarly, the success
of open-source development projects such as Linux and Apache, the most
popular Web server software, rests on the competence of the
programmers involved, not on how many hours they log.
Reclaiming Your Life
The web model may give a glimpse of a less overloaded way of life that
lets people take charge of their time while still making a decent
living and a real contribution to society. Take Ted Husted, a
46-year-old freelance software consultant who lives in a Rochester
(N.Y.) suburb. These days he consults 32 hours a week, remotely, for
the Oklahoma Environmental Quality Dept., down from 40 as recently as
this summer. But he also spends 10 to 15 hours a week as a major
contributor to the Apache open-source software project.
Now he has time on weekends to watch
his
kids play sports. He goes out to lunch with his wife, Barb, every
Monday. And he even has time left over to contain the fast-growing
maple trees on his corner lot. Meanwhile, his work on the open-source
project garners him visibility and respect among his peers. "I
think I can keep this pace up indefinitely," says Husted.
"But I have to have discipline about it. Now I make sure there's
at least one day when I don't even touch a keyboard."
Few people will ever make a living as
a
blogger or a contributor to an open-source software project. But there
is pressure to find new ways of organizing work, from both
corporations and overworked individuals. "In terms of hours, I
keep thinking we're on the verge of a backlash," says Babson's
Davenport.
Try telling that to Ken Middleton,
director of convention sales for Houston's Convention & Visitors
Bureau. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, he has been putting in
grueling 70-hour weeks hustling to find space for meetings that had
been scheduled for New Orleans. Even in normal times, though, he works
55 hours a week, including four to six hours on weekends. Does he feel
overworked? "Absolutely -- but doesn't everyone? My wife says I
need to get a hobby and stick to it. There isn't time for that right
now." Who has even a moment for a backlash?
...and what you can do about
it
Honk if this sounds like you: While
much
of America is watching Jon Stewart, Letterman, or Leno, you're
stumbling out the office door into a car-service Town Car or groping
for the clicker to the BMW in the company parking lot. Once home, you
slug down a beer or the last of a bottle of white wine on the door of
the fridge, stuff some leftovers in your mouth, and collapse into bed
beside your sleeping spouse. A half-dozen hours later, you crawl to
the shower, throw on a clean shirt, pour some coffee down your throat,
maybe drop a kid or two at school, and jump back on the frenetic work
treadmill that you can't shut off.
The good news -- if there is any,
time-challenged amigo -- is that you are not alone. More than 31% of
college-educated male workers are regularly logging 50 or more hours a
week at work, up from 22% in 1980. Forty percent of American adults
get less than seven hours of sleep on weekdays, reports the National
Sleep Foundation, up from 31% in 2001. About 60% of us are sometimes
or often rushed at mealtime, and one-third wolf down lunch at our
desks, according to a survey by the American Dietetic Assn. To avoid
wasting time, we're talking on our cell phones while rushing to work,
answering e-mails during conference calls, waking up at 4 a.m. to call
Europe, and generally multitasking our brains out.
This epidemic of long hours at the
office
-- whether physically or remotely -- defies historical precedent and
common sense. Over the past 25 years, the Information Revolution has
boosted productivity by almost 70%. So you would think that since
we're producing more in fewer hours, such gains would translate into a
decrease in the workweek -- as they have in the past. But instead of
technology being a time-saver, says Warren Bennis, a University of
Southern California professor and author of such management classics
as On Becoming a Leader, "everybody I know is working
harder and longer."
And the long-hour marathons aren't a
result of demanding corporations exploiting the powerless. Most of the
groggy-eyed are the best-educated and best-paid -- college grads whose
real wages have risen by more than 30% since the 1980s. That's a
change from 25 years ago, when it was the lowest-wage workers who were
most likely to put in 50 hours or more a week, according to new
research by Peter Kuhn of the University of California at Santa
Barbara and Fernando A. Lozano of Pomona College.
With so many managers and
professionals
stuck at work, there is a growing consensus among management gurus
that the stuck-at-work epidemic is symptomatic of a serious disorder
in the organization of corporations. The problem, in a nutshell-to-go
is this: Succeeding in today's economy requires lightning-fast
reflexes and the ability to communicate and collaborate across the
globe. Coming up with innovative ideas, products, and services means
getting people across different divisions and different companies to
work together. "More and more value is created through networks,"
says John Helferich, a top executive and former head of research and
development at Masterfoods usa, a division of Mars Inc. and the maker
of such products as M&Ms. "The guys who are good at it are
winning."
Unfortunately, the communication,
coordination, and teamwork so essential for success these days is
being superimposed on a corporate structure that has one leg still in
its gray flannel suit. Without strict gatekeepers (read secretaries),
Tom, Jane, and Harry feel free to plug themselves into your electronic
calendar. You and a colleague in another part of the company may dream
up a great idea for a new product -- but it takes months to get
approvals from your boss, his boss, and their boss. Or the corporate
bigwigs order you to join a taskforce that is supposed to promote
collaboration and innovation -- but it ends up taking a big chunk of
your time. And no matter how many layers of management were supposed
to be taken out, there always seem to be more people on the e-mail
distribution lists.
You are not imagining things. Despite
years of cutting corporate bloat, managers are a much bigger share of
the workforce than they were 15 years ago. "We've added a new set
of standards without fully dropping the old," says Thomas H.
Davenport, professor of information technology and management at
Babson College and author of the new book Thinking for a
Living.
That helps explain why time pressures
seem to be getting worse. Globalization and the Internet create great
new opportunities, but they also ratchet up the intensity of
competition and generate more work -- especially with the existing
corporate structure still hanging on tightly. "Nobody wants to
give up their territory or their control," says Shoshana Zuboff,
a former professor at Harvard Business School. Adds Lowell Bryan, a
McKinsey & Co. director: "Professionals are still being
managed as if they were in factories, in organizations designed to
keep everybody siloed. At less well-run companies, you're struck by
how frustrated people are. They work like dogs and are wasting
time."
Make that lots of time. Fully 25% of
executives at large companies say their communications -- voice mail,
e-mail, and meetings -- are nearly or completely unmanageable. That's
according to a new McKinsey survey of more than 7,800 managers around
the world. Nearly 40% spend a half to a full day per week on
communications that are not valuable. Other surveys echo similar
results. "We're making our people compete with sandbags strapped
to their legs," says Zuboff.
A Digital Spine
There is hope, however, and the promise of at least partial liberation
from the tyranny of time constraints. Why? Because the long-term
interests of individuals and smart companies are aligned. To compete,
successful corporations will have to make it easier and less
time-consuming for their employees to collaborate. They will learn how
to live with fewer time-sapping meetings and unnecessary feedback
loops -- or find themselves outrun by more nimble competitors. The
eventual result: less frustration for knowledge workers.
Moves in this direction are already
under
way as savvy companies analyze their internal social networks and
identify bottlenecks. Intel Corp., for example, sees an opportunity in
creating technology that lowers the time cost of teamwork. And others,
such as Eli Lilly & Co., are providing more corporate support for
both internal and external networks. "It's a new mental model for
how you run a company," says McKinsey's Bryan. "The winners
will be those who can handle more complexity."
At the same time we may see a rise in
new
forms of Web-based organizations where people can contribute without
having their time eaten up by existing hierarchy. Blogs, collaborative
online databases (called wikis) and open-source software development
all use the Net to handle much of the coordination among people rather
than relying on top-down command and control. Such a shift to a
digital spine could eventually lessen bureaucratic time burdens on
overworked professionals, especially those in such high-cost
industries as health care.
If history is any guide, the
stuck-at-work epidemic will turn out to be a transitional phase.
Historically, as countries and individuals get richer, they work less.
Look at the late 19th century, when the U.S. was still a relatively
poor country, with a per capita income about equal to that of China
today. Back then the typical male household head had precious little
leisure time, perhaps only about 1.8 hours a day, on average, after
subtracting time for work, chores, and meals. The average factory
worker put in about 60 hours a week, with only one day off. Indeed,
the first May Day labor demonstrations, in 1886, were driven by the
demand for an eight-hour day.
Over time, as U.S. productivity and
incomes rose, work hours dropped and leisure time increased. It was no
coincidence that the five-day work week was first introduced in 1926
by Henry Ford, a decade after he pioneered high-efficiency,
mass-production methods.
By 1970 the 40-hour workweek was the
norm. And, at least until recently, European and Asian countries have
followed the same trajectory of declining work hours. Since 1991
average annual work hours have dropped by 11% in Japan, 10% in France,
6% in Germany and Britain, and 5% in South Korea. Meanwhile, average
monthly work hours in Taiwan are down by 7% over the same stretch.
Even work hours in China, while still much higher than in the U.S.,
may be coming down. "Asians are poorer and still working like
crazy," says Alberto Alesina, a Harvard University economics
professor who has studied international work hours. "But as they
get richer, they are taking more leisure."
The one real exception to the rule
has
been the U.S. Since 1991 the U.S. has grown substantially faster than
Europe and Japan. Nevertheless, average annual work hours are down by
less than 2%, and that includes all the low-skilled workers who are in
less demand today.
Interestingly, there are signs that
global competition is forcing Europeans to start moving away from
their tradition of shorter work hours. The number of Germans working
more than 40 hours a week rose sharply last year, to 5.3 million from
4.7 million. Siemens, DaimlerChrysler, Deutsche Bahn, and many smaller
companies have been able to increase work hours without corresponding
increases in pay. French workers seem to be putting in more hours in
the past year or two as well.
European executives are sounding more
and
more like their American counterparts. "Ten years ago, if I was
on a business trip, I'd get to my hotel in the evening, and there
might be a message or two from my secretary and a couple of faxes,"
says Philippe Midy, a Paris-based executive at McDonald's Europe who
travels extensively around the Continent dealing with supply and
logistics issues. Now there's a deluge. "Sometimes I'm answering
e-mails at 2 a.m."
At least at the moment, long hours
are
part of the price to be paid for faster growth, especially if you work
for a multinational. "If you are going to be a participant in
economic activity that is part of a globalized market," says
Stephen S. Roach, chief economist for Morgan Stanley, "you need
to be prepared to stretch beyond 9 to 5."
Companies have been willing to pay
big
bucks for those longer hours. Over the past 15 to 20 years, people
working a 40-hour week received virtually no increase in real pay,
according to research by Kuhn and Lozano. Yet employees putting in a
55-hour week saw their real pay rise by 14%. The implication: The
gains of two decades of growth have mainly gone to ambitious -- or
fearful -- Americans who are working longer hours.
But even high pay can't compensate
for
unrelenting time pressure. Top managers have to realize that
encouraging networks and collaboration demands as much attention and
resources as supervising and measuring performance in traditional
ways. Most companies have built up large human-resources departments,
but few have a department of collaboration. "Most managers don't
manage social networks effectively," says Babson's Davenport.
At Intel, the drive to reduce the
time
spent sharing knowledge and collaborating is an outgrowth of efforts
to better coordinate far-flung operations that stretch from Israel to
India. One idea being pursued by Luke Koons, director for information
and knowledge management, is "dynamic profiling" --
technologies that automatically summarize areas on which a researcher
or a manager is focusing, based on the subjects of their e-mails and
Web searches. Such a regularly updated profile could make it less
time-consuming to locate potential collaborators and resources, an
especially daunting prospect in a large, innovation-minded company
such as Intel. Equally important, dynamic profiling doesn't force
individuals to spend hours manually updating their profiles as their
focus changes.
The Off Switch
There's plenty of demand for new technologies that more efficiently
foster collaboration, such as software that allows virtual meetings,
where everyone doesn't need to be present simultaneously. "Our
communication tools are woefully inadequate," says Alph Bingham,
a top executive at Eli Lilly who is vice-president of e.Lilly.
"We are still relying on sticking everyone in a room and
hammering it out. It's untenable globally."
Another time-eater: all the meetings
and
e-mails required to manage details of a collaboration or partnership.
"Organizations need to recognize that when you engage in
collaboration, there's another level of complexity," says
Bingham. Part of the solution is to hire people for a new type of
position devoted to facilitating or managing networks and
relationships. Lilly, for example, created a new internal group --
almost like ombudsmen -- to manage communications among Lilly
scientists and myriad outside partners. "This allows the
scientists to dedicate less of their time to the collaboration,"
says Bingham.
Adding new software and more people
to
reduce the cost of collaboration is great -- as long as it doesn't
create even more work. To really ease the work overload -- and, not
coincidentally, make corporations more nimble -- it's also essential
to identify and eliminate unnecessary interactions. "Sometimes
people need to remind themselves that there is an off switch -- and
use it," says Paul Saffo, a director at the Institute for the
Future, a think tank based in Palo Alto, Calif. "Solitude is the
scarce resource in business lives -- having that time when you are
disconnected and realizing that everything will go along fine without
you."
To reduce time pressures -- and hike
productivity -- the number of low-value interactions must be cut.
"The usual assumption is that more collaboration is better,"
says Rob Cross, an assistant professor at the University of Virginia's
McIntire School of Commerce who also runs Network Roundtable, a
research group whose members include Schlumberger, Microsoft, Intel,
Merc, and BP. "But it's important to ask not just where we need
to build and connect but where do we need to let go?"
By having workers fill out a 15- to
20-minute online survey, Cross can chart who people communicate with,
how much time is spent preparing for which meetings, and where the
bottlenecks are. "Then I ask executives: 'What decisions are you
making that others can make?"' says Cross. "Are there
aspects of your role that you could let go of?"
Masterfoods used this methodology to
map
out how its product development, packaging, and process-development
staff spent their time. The results were surprising. "When we
looked at the data, it turned out that it was too hard to do business
internally," says Helferich, then head of Masterfoods' R&D.
People had to talk to 30 or 40 other people just to get their jobs
done, which took away from their time to work on new ideas. Notes
Helferich: "We were high-density on task and low-density on
innovation." Now Masterfoods is in the process of redesigning the
workflow of the packaging group to eliminate a lot of the extraneous
steps that took up time.
If you are high enough in your
organization, you can simply choose when to make yourself unavailable.
Bryan, one of McKinsey's top consultants, says he has given up cell
phones and computers, letting others handle his communications.
"I never had time to think," says Bryan. "It's amazing
how much you can get done if you don't spend all your time
interacting."
Many of the most overloaded managers
are
not yet at a level where they have the luxury of controlling their
schedules or dispensing with unproductive e-mails, pesky voice mails,
and interminable meetings. But in terms of reducing work overload,
perhaps the biggest and most difficult step will be for corporations
to give their knowledge workers more freedom over their own time.
"The Industrial Age approach to management dies a pretty tough
death," says Babson's Davenport. "Even today people end up
being evaluated not only on how much they produce but also on how many
hours they are in the office."
Of course, there's one shiny new
example
of where output matters more than process: the Web. Nobody cares how
long it took or what time of night it was when someone wrote a blog
entry -- all that's seen is the final result. Similarly, the success
of open-source development projects such as Linux and Apache, the most
popular Web server software, rests on the competence of the
programmers involved, not on how many hours they log.
Reclaiming Your Life
The web model may give a glimpse of a less overloaded way of life that
lets people take charge of their time while still making a decent
living and a real contribution to society. Take Ted Husted, a
46-year-old freelance software consultant who lives in a Rochester
(N.Y.) suburb. These days he consults 32 hours a week, remotely, for
the Oklahoma Environmental Quality Dept., down from 40 as recently as
this summer. But he also spends 10 to 15 hours a week as a major
contributor to the Apache open-source software project.
Now he has time on weekends to watch
his
kids play sports. He goes out to lunch with his wife, Barb, every
Monday. And he even has time left over to contain the fast-growing
maple trees on his corner lot. Meanwhile, his work on the open-source
project garners him visibility and respect among his peers. "I
think I can keep this pace up indefinitely," says Husted.
"But I have to have discipline about it. Now I make sure there's
at least one day when I don't even touch a keyboard."
Few people will ever make a living as
a
blogger or a contributor to an open-source software project. But there
is pressure to find new ways of organizing work, from both
corporations and overworked individuals. "In terms of hours, I
keep thinking we're on the verge of a backlash," says Babson's
Davenport.
Try telling that to Ken Middleton,
director of convention sales for Houston's Convention & Visitors
Bureau. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, he has been putting in
grueling 70-hour weeks hustling to find space for meetings that had
been scheduled for New Orleans. Even in normal times, though, he works
55 hours a week, including four to six hours on weekends. Does he feel
overworked? "Absolutely -- but doesn't everyone? My wife says I
need to get a hobby and stick to it. There isn't time for that right
now." Who has even a moment for a backlash?
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