I have a confession. Last year I wrote about dealing with workplace interruptions, it’s consistently been one of the most popular posts . You can read it here.  But yesterday I didn’t follow my own advice. I was three-quarters of the way through a task, (upgrading WordPress for this blog)  when I allowed myself to be interrupted. I was carrying out a complicated, manual process, that I’d never done before. I was following written step by step instructions, but lost my train of thought. When I got back to the task, I forgot that there was still one step to do. When I tried to fire up the site again, it didn’t work. Two hours later, with the help of Mohit Gupta, who’s an unbelievably helpful member of a fantastic WordPress Facebook group, I discovered what I’d done – or hadn’t done. God, I felt stupid.

“Bigger chunks of work have natural break points”

What have I learnt? That bigger chunks of work have natural break points, and where I left off wasn’t one of them. So if you can’t find a good place to pause, push through to the end of the task (I couldn’t because I already had brain-fry), or else leave yourself a great big marker where you left off. If I’d done that last one I would have known there was still one step left to do. When I used to draft contracts, that’s exactly what I did when faced with an interruption or distraction.

I also learnt to ask for help earlier rather than later. When you work on your own, it’s easy to become very self-reliant and imagine that it’s better to solve all of the problems you encounter on your own. But there are people in your virtual team who are happy to help.

I won’t make that particular mistake again, but I’ll probably be making others, it’s the best way to learn!

It’s a New Year. Time for a change. A new job. How can you use psychology to give yourself an edge?

“The VIA survey will give you brilliant material for an interview. You’ll have a scientifically validated list of the qualities that make you unique.”

A really good place to start is the VIA survey of character strengths – It’s free, you just have to register to use it. I like it because it makes you think about who you are, not what you do. You’ll get a list of your signature strengths, like Love of Learning; Fairness, Equity and Justice; or Judgement, Critical Thinking and Open-Mindedness. You can read more about it in the Martin Seligman book “Authentic Happiness”. Seligman was the founding light of Positive Psychology, which shifted the focus from a “What’s Broken?” model to “What’s Great” frame. That’s an excellent jumping off point when looking for a new job, you can play to your strengths. Otherwise it’s easy to waste a lot of time rectifying or concealing your “weaknesses”. The VIA survey will give you brilliant material for an interview. You’ll have a scientifically validated list of the qualities that make you unique.

It’s also good to find out what your motivations are for leaving your current job (assuming you have one). I love Daniel Pink’s book ” Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us” . I love it because research shows that what we think motivates us (money, shiny things, big houses) isn’t what motivates us. What we really seek is Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose. Very different to the carrots and sticks usually on offer in the workplace. You might want to buy your old boss a copy as well. Did you know that having a bad boss is the most common reason for wanting to get a new job?

I’d also modestly suggest getting a Time Intelligence Report for yourself. It will tell you how you score on Motivation, Planning, Execution and Reflection, as well as the all important Time Perspective. Why do you need to know these things? Well, if you’re looking for a new job, you need to change from your current negative state of disillusionment with the past (old job) to a more optimistic, future-orientated state of optimism. The Time Intelligence Report will get you there, with a personal diagnosis and list of positive actions to take.

The Time Intelligence Report is only £1 until the end of January.

You can get it here

Burnout

Are you worried about burnout? If not for yourself, perhaps for your colleagues. There aren’t enough hours in the day to do all of the work. Staff cuts and lack of job security mean that everyone has more to do, with fewer resources in the same amount of time.

Deadlines have to be met and we all need to deliver, otherwise, we’re toast. That’s definitely how it feels for many people today. So we end up working late, at weekends. at home, and it’s still not enough. There’s still more to do, everything’s urgent, piling up and threatening to over load your system.

“There’s no one to delegate to any more”

People get sent on Time Management courses to fix the problem, but the new normal at work isn’t about prioritising. It’s not about being better organised, or being able to delegate there’s no one to delegate to any more. It’s probably not about In-box Zero, either.

It seems like all we can do is, like a galley-slave, row faster and keep up with the drum beat.

This is where I’m supposed to tell you about our new, improved, turbo-formula Time Intelligence, with added Psychology. A magic way to get more done in less time.

Not going to do that this week. I just want to ask you………..

If this is the new normal, and most of us are heading for burnout…..

What can you do about it, for yourself and members of your team?

• Say “No” more often?
• Renegotiate time scales and deadlines?
• Review your objectives, and your team’s?
• Be ruthless in identifying waste work, especially when it’s being allocated?

And what can a company do to adjust to the new normal?

• Update objectives?
• Focus on a maximum of 5 strategic priorities and execute them?
• Be ruthless in saying “No”?
• Identify waste work, and stop doing it?
• Make it safe for people to identify their own waste work?

One thing’s for sure. Work can’t go on like this can it?

Please leave a comment below. What’s the new normal like where you work?

We humans are really bad at forecasts.

“Hofstadter’s Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law” 

Daniel Kahneman literally wrote the book about the Planning Fallacy. He won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 2002, even though he’s a psychologist. He’s as smart as you can get. But he still fell into the very trap he himself identified.

“But we did not acknowledge what we knew. The new forecast still seemed unreal, because we could not imagine how it could take so long to finish a project that looked so manageable.” Daniel Kahneman. Thinking, Fast and Slow

The problem is, thinking about the Future is hard. It’s a long way away for most of us, particularly Present Hedonists. It’s so far away, we have to construct it by airlifting the present and plonking it down in the general area. Maybe we’ll embellish it a little, but it looks a lot like today.

However, the Future is not more of the Present. It’s not today delayed by 12 months. When you finally arrive in the Future, it’s definitely not like it used to be. You find that your forecast failed to factor in an economic downturn; a change in management; contractual disputes; specification changes; mission creep; illness; holidays; bad weather. Plus it was just plain over-optimistic, because you needed a good business case to get your project authorised.

 So what can you do?

Tip #1. Phone a Friend. Once you have your forecast. Double it. Double it again. Then throw away your forecast and ask an experienced colleague who’s not connected to your project. Before you ask them, get them to bring to mind similar projects they have done in the past. That way they draw on real-life, rather than joining you in your over optimistic fantasy world.

Tip#2. Do a Pre-Mortem. I’ve written about pre-mortems before, here. They’re brilliant for eliminating group-think and the euphoria that pervades the early planning stages of any project. They force you to live in a dystopian future and explain how you got there. You wouldn’t want to live there, but it’s nice to visit, once in a while.

Have fun, and please let us know how you get on with your forecasting, in the Future.

We’re not in Kansas any more…

Read A Geography of Time, by Robert Levine. It’s a really witty, well-written book about time culture – how different cultures behave with time, based on his personal experiences and his own and his students’ experiments. We all do time differently. In Brazil, arriving at 4pm for a 1pm appointment is not necessarily being late.  Hopi North American Indians have no verb tenses for Past, Present and Future. The Spanish use one word for “expect”, “hope” and “wait” – esperar.

Levine has a unique way of measuring the pace of life, and he’s measured it in 31 different countries.

• Walking speed in downtown areas (time to cover 60ft)
• Waiting time in the post office to buy a stamp
• Accuracy of public clocks

He adds these proxies together, to rank countries by pace of life. The 1,2,3 is Switzerland, Ireland and Germany. Mexico brings up the rear in 31st place. There are all kinds of surprises in there – I’ve spent a lot of time in Ireland and would describe my experience overall as relaxed, rather than fast paced. The USA is only in 16th place, when it feels like they should be higher (yes, they walk fast, but have massively long waits in the post office, and the clocks are way out of time).

So all countries have a time culture. And within countries, all regions and individual cities have different time cultures. In the US, Boston is the fastest pace of life, Los Angeles is the most laid back. In general, the North-East industrial area occupies the top slots, and California takes four of the six bottom places (together with Shreveport, Louisiana, and Memphis Tennessee).

“CFOs tend to look rearwards, at last month, or last quarter. “

What does this mean for you at work? Well, if you work for an international, or multi-national, there will be many sub-cultures, where time works differently. You’re regarded as an alien if you fail to see this, and conform to those (often hidden) cultural norms. Even within departments, it only takes a moment to imagine how differently they perceive time:

• Finance – essentially looking in the past. Last month, last quarter.
• Sales – In the present, but slightly future focussed on the next quarter
• Legal – trained to look at the past to assess risk in an imagined future
• R&D – looking way into the future
• Operations – existing in a continuous present. The past is rewritten.
• Maintenance – issues occur in the present. But they plan for the future
• CEO – Strategically working to a 3 year plan

Now imagine you’re a CFO, whose looking for their next move to CEO. This article Forward Looking CFO (pdf) by the Wharton Business School describes how CFOs find it so hard to make the transition from a rearward looking discipline to a forward-looking CEO.

Have you experienced a culture clash like this? We’d love to hear about your experiences. Leave a comment below. And read the book, it will get you thinking.

What’s productivity in a knowledge economy?

Here’s how we really measure productivity today, in a knowledge economy:

• Number of emails received/sent/commented
• Response time to emails
• Number of meetings
• Hours present in the office

This is the stuff we’re concerned about – on the scale of how busy we are. We measure them because they’re quantifiable. It’s what we boast and complain about. If that’s how we keep score, it’s no wonder that busyness is the main business of business.

In manual jobs, Time Spent ÷ Good Widgets produced ≡ Productivity.

What really adds value in a company where information is the main commodity? Here are some suggestions:

• Innovation
• Speed to execute
• Ability to adjust rapidly
• Problem-solving
• Team Working
• Learning

These are the things that companies often say they care about – the behaviours they encourage. But it’s not what we talk about among ourselves.

What gets attention at your place of work? How should we be keeping score of the things that count?

Believing is Seeing

I gave a presentation titled “4 tools to smash time management” to a local Enterprise group this week. The main take away was “We live in a visual world. Use visual tools”. I borrowed the idea from Kanban, where you use a board to track the Backlog/Doing/Done phases of your tasks or projects. It’s an upgraded To-Do list, because you get a sense of movement as a task moves through the three phases, and accomplishment when it’s in the Done column. With a To-Do list, it’s either To-Do, or crossed off/not on the list. Kanban is also a great way to share information quickly within teams. You don’t have to go searching for files in cabinets, or files on a system. It’s there, for everyone to see.

The other examples I used were a Yearly Wall Planner, an egg timer and our Time Intelligence Report (TIR). Year planners work really well for people who can’t see further ahead than the next couple of days. The whole year is laid out in front of them as a picture. The egg timer was for the 45 minute sprints I talked about here. Again, you can see how much time has elapsed, and how much is still to go.

My business partner, Alan, used to be a graphic designer, and he’s done a great job with the TIR. The scoring information is all visual, and we use this spider diagram to show scoring on your Time Perspective 

Past, Present, Future

It’s a lot more digestible than the raw data, which is just columns of numbers. I’m proud of how the TIR looks, and the great job it does in making complex information easy to understand, just by looking. A picture is worth a thousand words, and a million digits.

Simplify your time management by using visual cues for yourself, and to communicate within your team. It will save you time!

I have a feeling, not backed up by any science at all, that knowledge workers get stressed about workload because they can’t see it, it looms over them as a weight and a presence, but has no physical form or appearance.

What do you think?

When you’re time poor, it’s easy to think that you’re being more efficient if you pack as much as possible into those 1440 minutes in a day. Working at 100% capacity has to be efficient, right?

Here’s how stressed people with no time try to make more:

Speeding Up

• Speak faster. Miss things out.
• Skip lessons learned briefings
• Cancel “soft” meetings like 1:1s and reviews

Replacing a long-duration activity with a short one

• Email instead of phoning or meeting face to face
• Skimp on background information

Multitasking

• Emailing during meetings
• Not finishing one task before starting another
• Driving and texting or phoning

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fs4lO2IceFk

• Walking and texting https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNyTqIsrk0w

Wall to wall scheduling

• Leaving no gaps between activities
• Not leaving enough time for any one  activity
• Scheduling “free time” 
• Racing from one thing to another

Time and Space are inseparable concepts, ask any physicist. So are No Time and No Space.

Oh, and there’s a fifth one. Looking for quick-fix tips, tricks and apps about time management, hoping they will make you time rich. They’re the Ponzi schemes of the time management industry. You’ll spend your time trying them out, but waste most of it, because only a few will ever work for you.

Do you recognise these behaviours in yourself or members of your team?

A way to prioritise, if you have time

How do you prioritise when everything seems to fall into the Urgent or Important quadrants of Stephen R Covey’s  model?

I always assume that people have seen this model before, and know how it works. I guess you can think of it as a sorting-hat for tasks. If the tasks are in the top two quadrants, they’re important, and that’s where you should spend most of your time. The bottom two quadrants are for tasks that are not important, but it’s very easy to spend a lot of time there.

This is Whack-a-Mole prioritising

If you’ve ever spent your day being busy, but not feeling like you’ve made any progress on your goals, you’ve been hanging out in the Urgent zone. You’ve been working to meet deadlines and reacting to the thing in front of you – the Boss, a phone call, an email – stuff that didn’t even make it onto your To-Do List for today. This is Whack-a-Mole prioritising.

The truth is, not everything is Urgent, we just don’t get time to stop and think “which box does this really fit in?” – all the moles have to be whacked urgently. No one stops to find out where they’re coming from in the first place. No one stops to think whether we’re in the business of whacking moles either.

Much as I like Covey’s model, in my opinion it doesn’t deal with the systemic problems that teams face – of managers saying stuff in the top right quadrant is strategically important, but their behaviour doesn’t back it up. People thinking that they need to reply to an email in a nanosecond, otherwise they’re not on the ball. Colleagues making demands and causing interruptions that cascade into a wasted day.

So how do you prioritise, when everything seems urgent?

Work Life Balance

I’ve always had a problem with the concept or work life balance. It’s a logical contradiction, because Life is a class which has the sub-categories of work, rest and play and all the other things that fit into a life. Yep, people call me a pedant sometimes.

Nevertheless it’s a hot topic, and has been ever since we started making the distinction between work and life. Interestingly, this seems to have started in the ’70s when the number of women in the workplace was increasing rapidly. Apparently, before that, men didn’t notice there was a distinction, or care if there was one!

There are still many people today (men and women), who aren’t bothered by that distinction. And if it doesn’t bother you, I guess your work-life balance is …err… balanced. As long as your friends and family accept that as well.

Uh huh, just let me finish this important email

So that leaves the rest of us, who feel a conflict, some of the time. I experience it as tug-of-war for my attention, and it happens in real-time, as a choice. My epiphany came 13 years ago, when I realised that my two kids, who were 5 and 7, only needed one thing from me. My attention – now. Not the “uh huh, just let me finish this important email” kind of attention, but a fully present human being, during the time I was with them. For my part, I realised that time was not unlimited, was irretrievable, and that days quickly turn into years. Now they’re 17 and 19 and we’ve had some really, really  good times together. I have to admit that, now, I’m on the receiving end of “uh huh, let me just finish this really important Facebook status update/Twitter “, but I don’t need their attention, so that’s OK with me. I guess.

Eventually, if you add the slices together, you’ve got yourself a life

The other time demands that hit us in work and in life are a series of micro-decisions and choices about what we’re going put our attention, for that particular slice of time. Eventually, if you add the slices together, you’ve got yourself a life. which you either live consciously, by actually making a decision, and asking “is this the best use of my time?”. Or not.

Otherwise you’re just passing the time.