QuietSpacing

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!

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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.

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Leave Time Between Appointments

Imagine a wake of papers drifting to the floor behind you as you charge off to your next appointment (physical meeting, video conference, phone call, etc.). That’s what’s happening to all the thoughts and ideas you had in the apppointment you just left as you race to the next one.  They’re drifting into oblivion as you try to gain purchase on the upcoming subject matter. Worse, yet, you’re still thinking about those items as you enter the next meeting, resulting in loss of attention to the topic at hand. Two birds killed with one stone – with negative results.

Try inserting just a snippet of time between appointments – five to fifteen minutes. This will allow you to capture all those trailing thoughts into a  physical or electronic form, give you an opportunity to catch up on other projects in the works, and provide space for you to take a deep breath before moving forward. The net result is lowered stress, increased productivity, and a greater sense of command over your day.

Reduce Appointment Lengths By 25%

Work fills the time allotted. Not truism is more accurate in the business day. Meetings, conference calls, videocasts and the like can seem endless, sucking down valuable time that is better spent getting things done.

Try reducing meeting lengths by 25% and see what happens.  Reduce a 60-minute appointment to 45 minutes or take a 30-minute meeting down to 25. (Okay, that last is not exactly 25%, but you get the idea). You’ll find that people tend to focus more specifically on the topic de jure and cut through the side trips. If you don’t get everything done, just schedule another, shortened meeting!  The worse case scenario is that you run a few minutes long, but, thanks to the first suggestion above, you’ve got some leeway there.

Manufacturing Time Is Easy!

The two suggestions above are quite simple to implement. Other people may need some time to adjust to the new formats – shortened meeting lengths and spaces between appointments – but you can see that they go hand-in-hand. The net result of doing both is that you’ve actually used the same amount of time more effectively and efficiently. Consequently, you’re more productive, in greater command of your day, and feel less stress.

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Email has reduced us to the level of salivating dogs.  Whether we are in the office, at home, or in the line at the grocery store, we are obsessed with checking our e-mail.  Ask yourself, when was the last time you went 20 minutes without checking your e-mail or without thinking about checking your e-mail during a workday?  My guess is that you can’t recall.  I know I can’t.

I’m confident that the e-mail pioneers never in their wildest dreams thought we’d one day have state and federal legislation that prevented us from checking our e-mail (among other things) while driving!  Do we need to be told that taking our eyes of the road while hurling two tons of metal down the road at 65 miles an hour is dangerous?  Really?

Be an E-mail Support Group of One

But enough of that diatribe.  Let’s turn back to some ideas on how we can each save our self from the strangle hold this new-age form of communication has on us.  In my work with clients, we often linger on this love-hate relationship with e-mail.  On the one hand, it’s a vital, and often effective, form of communication.  On the other hand, it has created an expectation that people are always available and always responsive, a mindset that is nonsensical on its face. Yet, it persists.

So how to manage the duality that e-mail has created?  My baseline response is that we need to release ourselves from its bondage and regain command of the tool.  That’s a decision every user must make.  Once made, slight changes in the way we manage e-mail are relatively easy to implement:

• Settle on the Calendar or Tasks View.  Most productivity suites, such as Outlook, Lotus Notes, and Google Apps, provide a group of interrelated tools with e-mail being one of them.  There is usually also a Calendar and Tasks function in the suite, each with a separate screen or view.  Because e-mail is a form of communication, I recommend that it be treated as such.  Since very few people wait by the mailbox all day for letters and such to arrive, I believe that clicking to the Calendar or Tasks view of your productivity suite is a far better place to spend your time – looking at your appointments or to-dos.  Surely, you must check your e-mail regularly – maybe even three or four times an hour – but there’s no reason to hang out in that screen waiting with baited breath for the next one to arrive!
• Minimize The Screen.  Like settling on a different view, you can also minimize the screen altogether.  This is no different than closing your office door when meeting with someone.  The message is not to interrupt you right now because you’re working on X.  Again, you can check your e-mail as often as necessary, but you don’t have to open each and every one the minute it arrives.
• Turn Away From Your Screen.  Positioning your computer screen such that you can turn away from it when you are working on other things – like paperwork – is a terrific way to reduce the distraction caused by new e-mails dropping into your Inbox.  Of course, I don’t need to tell you about turning off the new e-mail alert, right?  But, then again, we did need that legislation…
• Turn Off Your Monitor.  If all else fails, take matters literally into your own hands and turn the monitor off!  Besides, this is the greenest suggestion of the bunch as it uses less electricity.

Take Charge of Your E-mail; Set Yourself Free

When you decide that you control your e-mail instead of being controlled by it, you free yourself of its grip on your psyche.  After you’ve taken that first step, you can implement any of the suggestions above to realize an immediate benefit from your choice.

Think I’ll go check my e-mail …

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Several years ago, I was having lunch with a new client – the managing partner of a law firm – and we were talking about the struggle to just stay caught up with all the stuff coming at us each day.  As the conversation continued, he mentioned to me that one of the little tips he’d developed was something called the One More Thing Rule.

Specifically, at the end of each day, right before shutting everything down and walking out of the office, he’d do one more little thing – return a quick call, send one last e-mail, etc.  These little things literally took a minute or two, but in doing this one little thing, he was able get over 200 more things done each year.  Yes, 200!

The Upside

I’ve incorporated this rule into my own workday and regularly recommend it to others.  There are several direct benefits to this rule:

• You get the aforementioned 200 extra things done.
• You appear, and are, more responsive and effective.
• You have a definitive way to determine when the end of the day has arrived.
• You have one less niggly thing on your plate the next day.

The Downside

There are two risks inherent in adopting this rule:

• You pick something that takes more than a minute or two and end up at the office much longer than expected.
• You like the rule so much you fail to stop at just one.

The true purposes of the One More Thing Rule are to get you just a little more productive and to give you an identifiable point at which to end your day.  If you start diving into larger efforts or do numerous things, you’re defeating both the spirit and benefit of the rule. So, take care when applying this principle and you will reap the benefit of increased productivity and the reward of getting home to your family earlier accompanied by a sense of greater accomplishment.

Time for me to go home!

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