May 2010
Friends,
My growing business has been directed so far at
sizable organizations; not surprising, since that’s where I spent my entire first career. Lately,
however, I’m looking at the issues of Computing Productivity in the exact opposite sector: Small
Businesses. Typically comprising a motivated founder working alone or with a couple of helpers,
these businesses combine the opportunity (and risk) of freelance work with large doses of
innovation and energy. They also suffer from effectiveness challenges like the largest corporation,
and are victims of my favorite baddie, Info Overload, though in slightly different ways.
The
reason I’m paying attention (on top of being a small business myself, of course) is that I was
invited by my friend, the accomplished business coach Amir Hardoof, to speak this week at Seminar 2010, a conference for small businesses, and provide advice on handling the
information flood in this kind of business. And as I adapt the lessons of my 16 years fighting IO to
this new audience segment, I find it interesting indeed – expect to see it as a theme in a coming
newsletter!
Cheers,
This issue’s theme: Securing Time to
Think!
Information Overload has multiple impact areas (described in this paper), and the one I consider the most disturbing is also the least recognized
by managers and people in general. This is the impact on our thinking ability: paradoxically, the
current abundance of information has taken away our Time to Think.
Of course, most of
us don’t have the time to even realize the critical need for such thinking time. So consider Isaac
Newton, sitting under his apple tree. What, I ask, was he doing under a tree during work hours? He
was thinking, that’s what; he was contemplating the universe and the problems he had to solve.
That’s what you did if you were a scientist, before the arrival of computers. And if you were lucky,
an apple fell and your mind was so calm and efficient that it made the innovative leap. Had Newton
lived today, he’d have a BlackBerry beeping every five minutes, and we’d still be waiting to
understand why apples and meteors fall down.
Fact is, our brains need long periods of
uninterrupted thought to invent, create, solve problems, write computer code... and today’s hectic,
24x7 work ethic has completely demolished this mode. Few people worry about it, but they certainly
should; we all pay a heavy price in terms of stress, but businesses and research organizations lose
fortunes as their people work at reduced thinking capacity. A few academics study this phenomenon; I
hope they will provide the proof points needed to draw the attention of the rest of the world.
What YOU can do about it
Actionable Tip
If you work in a company, you should definitely consider running a
pilot of a proactive methodology that provides quiet thinking time. I ran one at Intel – we gave engineers one interrupt-free morning each week, with gratifying results. See
the book listed below to learn how it’s done.
As an individual, you can secure Quiet Time for
yourself by allocating “Focus Blocks”, when you concentrate on learning or creating without
interruptions. This may take some planning, since the rest of the world will conspire to interrupt
you nonetheless; you may need to communicate your method to your coworkers, or use a time when you
work from home and can turn off your communications equipment to go offline for a few hours at a
stretch...
Food for Thought
What one needs to realize is the huge potential benefits of
restoring Time to Think in a business. The classic experiment was run by Prof. Leslie Perlow of
Harvard at a hi-tech corporation; she gave engineers three Quiet mornings a week. This led directly
to their finishing their design project (of a new printer) ahead of the expected schedule; which
translates directly to Time-to-Money for the company. Allowing your knowledge workers quiet periods
for introspection and focused problem solving can also lead to more innovation, which is priceless.
Furthermore, you don’t need to invest any money in such a change – all you need is a change in the
current company culture, so that people are allowed and empowered to turn off incoming channels a
few times a week. Like any cultural change it isn’t easy, but the ROI is clear. Go for it!
Analysis and Opinion
This “Time to Think” story is closely related to the Push vs. Pull dilemma. The expectation of 24x7
interruptibility derives from an implicit assumption that knowledge workers are at their best when
stuff is pushed at them, whether it’s knowledge – from papers someone thinks you should read to the
compact tidbits of Facebook and Twitter – or communication, as in email and telephony. Yet I
strongly suspect that we are much more valuable when we create, rather than absorb the creations of
others. The creative, self-driven process seems more promising than the reactive mode of having
information thrown at us in the hope that something useful will come out of this.
Of course
we need both modes; one can’t be creative in total isolation. But we should assign at least part of
the week for thinking and reflection; and the interaction with the ocean of information out there
should rely mostly on Pull mode, as when we use RSS feeds to consume what we want – when we have the
time.
Try to find a moment to think about it!
Solutions and Resources
Here is a video of Prof. David Levy of U Washington lecturing on “No time to think”.
There are a few software tools out there that allow you to set aside “Quiet Time”: they can defer
incoming message delivery, or at least the alerts that indicate new arrivals in the Inbox; or they
block distracting web sites for the duration. Two products that incorporate such a “Do Not Disturb”
feature are
ClearContext and RescueTime – take a look.
The aforementioned “Quiet Time” experiment from
Prof. Perlow is described in her book Finding Time (Amazon).
And of course, you can use the Off button on your BlackBerry...
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