QuietSpacing

I am continually amazed by the fascination with Gen Y. Having just downloaded the 60-page OXGENZ report entitled Generation Y and the Workplace – 2010, I believe it’s mostly Boomers who are fascinated. (Note, I’m a Boomer.) My take is that this pre-occupation is our continuing desire to be integrally involved in the lives of our children. Nothing wrong with that. In fact, it might work out well for the Gen Y folks in general.

What’s In a Generation Anyway?

Having said that, my personal opinion is that the Gen Ys value what most of us value: Family, Good Working and Living Environments, Flexibility (though probably more than we did), Recognition (maybe too much given their relative accomplishment as yet?), Security, and Comfort. All worthy, but certainly not earth shatteringly different.

What’s really changed is the measure of those values. The best example I have is the desire to work remotely. This was simply not possible 30 years ago when I entered the work force. E-mail and the Internet existed, but only in the scientific world. Our bread was buttered with phone calls, meetings, faxes and large word-processing systems. Working remotely only worked for individual contributors (artists, athletes, authors, etc., to cover the “a”s).

Conversely, I work from two different homes today. I run two entirely separate businesses, one of which is completely virtual. All this is because of technological advance, not generational change. I’m still a Boomer, but I’m leveraging what’s available to me.

Getting Down to Brass Tacks

Maybe the real issue isn’t that the Gen Ys want something different than the older generations. Maybe it’s that the older generations need to shed the “I did it that way, so they should too.” attitude? Or maybe we should just let our children live their own lives and work it out for themselves?

Enough of my running on at the keyboard…

Tweet This Post

Whenever I speak to audiences about productivity, be it during a training seminar or a keynote presentation, I always, always, always recommend that they face away from passing traffic.  The urge to look up is so strong and whenever we fall prey to that urge, we lose our focus.

The natural tendency to look up whenever someone passes by is instinctive.  It’s probably a survival mechanism long-instilled in our psyche to observe the “threat” before it consumes us.  Instead of trying to change our genetic conditioning, let’s see what other options we have.

Position A – Command Central

Most work spaces are configured such that people can see who enters them.  Whether you’re in an office or a cubicle, you usually face those who approach you.  I fashion this Command Central – you command your space by knowing all who enter. 

Innocuous as that seems, the problem is that the human eye has a vision arc of approximately 120 degrees (see Vision Span at Wikipedia).  Thus, when you’ve got your head down focusing on the work at hand, you can see quite a ways “up” in front of you.  That’s why you tend to look up whenever someone passes by your work area.

Each of those slight interruptions add up over the day.  Assume it’s only a two-second interruption and that it only happens 30 times per day.  That’s one minute each day of “lost” time.  Over the course of the average work year – about 220 days – you’ve lost four hours of productivity.  That’s 1/2 of a day in head nods!

Of course, the bigger problem lies in what can happen when you look up.  What’s that, you ask?  That the person passing by makes eye contact, comes into your work area, sits down and starts talking to you!  Now, don’t get me wrong.  I’m a huge fan of strong working relationships with co-workers and colleagues.  But impromptu team building is not the way to accomplish that goal.

The oft-quoted figure on the time it takes to regain focus once interrupted is 20 minutes.  Assuming this drop-in interruption only happens once a week, you’re still losing about 17 hours of productivity each year just trying to get back on task after that impromptu conversation!  Do you really want to spend two extra days each year getting your work done all in the name of unintended team building?

Position B – The Non-Feng-Shui QuietSpacing® Workspace Positioning Recommendation

The solution is to position yourself such that you face away from passing traffic.  If you have an office, position your desk against the wall furthest from the door.  That way people are passing by off your left shoulder.  In addition to eliminating the twitch response to look up on your part, those passing by can see you are working and are more likely leave you alone!  This arrangement also opens up your workspace, giving you a number of furniture arrangement options - like placing a small round table between you and the door so people have a place to come and work with you right in the office.

If you don’t have an office, you can still position yourself to face completely away from passing traffic or mostly away from passing traffic.  Any reduction in the chance you’ll look up pays dividends in terms of increasing your focus and your productivity.

Less Twitching is Always Good

When you position your work space away from passing traffic, you reduce the number of instances that your attention is diverted from the task at hand.  The result is increased productivity and more time on your hands to do other things – like head down to the water cooler to catch up on the latest!

Tweet This Post

Our 24×7 world has a rash … a rash of ASAP. It’s highly contagious and seems to strike from the top of the organizational chart and move down. Everyone has been afflicted by this rash and most have inflicted it on others.

By Any Other Name

Identifying the ASAP rash is not hard. Here is a list of symptoms:

• It almost always originates in the workplace. However, it has made inroads into some unfortunate home environments as well.
• The problem often appears in its native form – ASAP – but be on the lookout for its other forms, such as Now or Immediately. Other variations include Urgent and Top/Highest Priority.
• No definable time of day seems to be more or less susceptible to an outbreak, resulting in a higher level of anticipatory anxiety throughout the day among all workers.
• People suffering from this rash appear anxious and pinched. Their rate of speech tends to accelerate and many times they wave files or papers about when moving through the office trolling for available help.
• Subject lines are littered with this rash when it strikes in electronic form.
• Though episodic in nature, once afflicted, suffers tend to relapse quickly and for longer periods of time.

What’s All the Fuss About?

If the H1N1 virus was a pandemic, I don’t think a word has been coined yet to describe the depth, breadth, and severity of this rash. Imagine if everyone starts telling everyone else that everything is due ASAP.  Counter-productively, the workplace would grind to a halt!

For anyone working for anyone else, which basically means … well, everyone, this is not an inconsequential problem. So innocent on its face, when multiplied by the innumerable number of delegations that occur each day, it is easy to see how a frantic, dysfunctional, and unhealthy working environment can quickly develop. All from an innocuous little self-inflicted rash.

Questions We’d Like to Ask

Whenever these edicts issue forth from those handing out assignments, here’s a list of questions I can only hope we’re courageous enough to ask:

• Righty-O, just let me look at my calendar. Hmmm, when exactly is ASAP as I’m not seeing it here?
• ASAP, you said – as soon as possible? Terrific. I’m leaving on my long-overdue two-week vacation in an hour, so I’ll get that back to you in about 15 days. That’s as soon as possible in my world right now.  How’s that work for ya?
• Really? ASAP? If this that important, why is it just now being brought to my attention?  (Oh, silly me, the customer/client/boss just handed it to you too. Did you have the courage to ask them that question?)
• Fabulous! I love having lots to do – job security, you know. Now, since everything you’ve given me is ASAP, which one should I do first?

Take Back the Day

There is no known cure for this malady. However, there are several things you can do both as a work giver and as a work receiver to minimize outbreaks and reduce the impact when the rash flares up. Precautions include:

• Develop an early warning system by regularly surveying the work you have and the work you are expecting to receive. Prioritize each item and spread the priorities out as realistically as possible. Keep in mind that you only get so many hours each day to actually produce work. In this way, work that is susceptible to the ASAP rash can be identified early and steps can be taken to avoid or, at least, reduce the severity of the outbreak.
• Communicate often with co-workers, as the rash tends to be fierce when visibility between co-workers is low, allowing the infection to spread to low priority items left to fester too long.
• As a work giver, think in terms of clearly defined time lines – like a specific date or day of the week. Specific times help also. Converting an ASAP into a Wednesday by 2:00 pm results in complete avoidance of the problem.
• As a work receiver, diplomatically seek this information if it’s not forthcoming from the work giver. Press for specificity and enlist the other person’s help in prioritizing any other work that is equally unclear.

Long-Term Prognosis

Workplaces that have suffered outbreaks of the ASAP rash, in all its forms, have reported significant improvement in quality of work product and worker morale when the simple steps above were followed. Creating an effective working environment that is efficient and highly responsive is a very favorable prognosis given the wide-spread problem identified and addressed here.

To your health!

Tweet This Post

While talking with a client last week, it occurred to me that the accounting concepts of LIFO and FIFO are a perfect way to distinguish between the way we historically processed our stuff and the way we currently process our stuff. (“Stuff” includes all the inputs that stream into our lives throughout the day.) My observation is that the rapid development and adoption of technology have fundamentally shifted the way we manage all the information we need to process … for the worse.

Quick Definitions

Before explaining my position, let me first define LIFO and FIFO. They are terms (ancronyms actually) used to financially account for inventory as it enters and leaves a business. LIFO stands for Last In First Out; the notion being that the cost of  last item put on the shelf (the newest) is used when determining inventory value.  In contrast, FIFO stands for First In First Out and dictates that the cost of the item first put on the shelf (the oldest) be used.

There are a number of reasons for these distinctions which go beyond the point of this article, as well as my limited understanding of advanced accounting principles.  My use of these concepts here is focused more on when a particular item is addressed – is the oldest or newest of higher importance?  It seems to me that we’ve moved from the old-school behavior of managing our stuff in a FIFO manner to a LIFO manner. That is, for the most part, we used to take that which was oldest on our to-do list and get it done before moving “up” the list to things that were newer. Consequently, things never got too dusty on the to-do shelf and we stayed reasonably current with our workload and deadlines.

However, as the inputs started to come at us faster and faster because of technologies like laptops and the Internet, we began to shift to LIFO behaviors – addressing things as they pounded us on the fly, leaving those that were older to rot a little longer on the to-do shelf. That behavior became firmly entrenched when smartphones started delivering the tsunami of inputs to us wherever we went.

It’s gotten so bad that people routinely send a second email or text a few minutes after the first one if they haven’t received a response yet! Huh? What about focusing on the to-dos that were already on my plate? What about client/customer service? How is that advanced when I’m yanked from input to input never having time to actually think about the right solution? Think about it for a minute. Great service and performance comes from concerted, focused effort, not lightspeed reactions and herky jerky efforts. (Note, I just deleted an entire diatribe about “ASAP,” “Urgent,” and “Top Priority.” Consider yourself on notice that they may appear in a later post.)

Relearning the Lost Art of Taking Stock

So what’s the solution? How do we regain some semblance of control and sanity in a world where inputs continually stream at us 24×7? My answer, as you’ve already guessed, is to return to a FIFO model of managing your workload. Simply put – conduct regular surveys of what’s on our plate. At least three times each day – morning, noon and night preferably – stop and look at what you’ve accomplished, what you’ve got to do and when you think you’ll get to each item. With your stock taken, adjust any deadlines that were or have become unrealistic and communicate those changes to others.

Taking stock in this way will give you a much better understanding of the existing commitments on your time. This will, in turn, allow you to better estimate when things currently on the list will get done and when those that will soon be there will get done. As you regain control and command of what’s “in inventory” and what’s coming into inventory, your sense of accomplishment and success will also rise.

Small Changes Make Big Differences

Returning to the historical way of managing your to-do list is not reverting to old, outdated habits. It’s channeling the new data inputs into a proven process for maximizing your productivity. When you’re racing against things moving at nearly the speed of light you will lose every time. If you force the inputs to slow down to human speeds, you stand a chance of managing them more effectively. Adopting the LIFO model of to-do list management will help you make that transition.

Tweet This Post