Of course, many people are throwing the only weapon they feel they have available at the problem – more time. We are working longer hours to cope with the increased workload. Many senior managers I work with are in meetings between 9 am and 5 pm, then catch up on emails and other tasks between 5 pm and 9 pm. We know that this is not the solution!
As the volume of information we receive each day continues to grow, the pressure is becoming overwhelming. It is not unusual for me to work with managers who receive 300-plus emails per day. This is crazy! We do not need 300, or even 100 emails a day to do our jobs effectively. I would argue that these emails are actually stopping us from doing our jobs effectively. But that sense of overwhelm is definitely being felt at all levels in organisations. We need a solution, fast.
We are not leveraging the technology at our fingertips enough – tools like Microsoft Outlook, Lotus Notes®, Google Calendar™ and smartphones. We use them every day, but in my experience most of us are not really harnessing their power. In fact, I would suggest that the average worker probably uses about 20 per cent of the functionality of a tool like Outlook. And yet this is the first thing they turn on every day to check their email. We learn the basics – how to send an email, how to schedule a meeting. But few of us go on to utilise these powerful tools in a holistic way to organise our time, priorities and information.
Instead, we are grappling with modern productivity issues using old-fashioned tools and strategies. Paper lists, sticky notes and piles of paper – none of these answer the challenges of managing our work in the modern workplace. We need to get smart about leveraging our technology.
There is no doubt that these three issues are having a major impact on our effectiveness and motivation. But I believe there is a fourth issue that has an even greater negative influence.
When is everything needed? Now! ASAP! Yesterday! Five minutes ago! We are under great pressure to deliver everything instantly, and this constant urgency is affecting the quality of our work. It is causing reactivity in the workplace that is increasing stress levels, increasing working hours, and decreasing the quality of our thinking and outputs.
This reactivity has come to be accepted as the norm in many organisations. ‘But that's just the way it is around here’, they say. It's just how it is in global finance, the legal sector, the insurance industry, even in the consulting industry. Well, I don't agree. I do not accept that it has to be that way. I believe that to a large degree this urgency has been driven by the ‘instant’ nature of electronic communication. Certainly we need to ensure that we all work together with a sense of urgency to get things done. But have we gone too far with this, creating instead senseless urgency?
Sometimes I imagine myself as a superhero, flying in to save the day in my clients' offices. If I was, I would have to have a nemesis, an arch-enemy. The enemy I have sworn to banish from as many organisations as I can get to is unnecessary urgency.
I see workers battle with urgency every day. And they are losing. They are becoming resigned to the fact that this is ‘just the way it is around here’. The battle is complicated by the fact that there are different types of urgency at play. There is the real urgency, the things that crop up which need our immediate attention, no question. But often masquerading as real urgency is false urgency. These are the things that are not really urgent, but other people have worked out that if they shout loud enough they will get cut-through in a hectic workplace. And sometimes we make things seem urgent when they are not. Do you react instantly to email alerts and allow yourself to become distracted from other, more important work?
Urgency can also be reasonable or unreasonable. Reasonable urgency applies to time-sensitive work that needs our urgent attention and could not have been planned for. Something has happened, and it needs our prompt response. Unreasonable urgency is work that has become urgent either because someone else has not done the work in a timely way or, worse, because we ourselves have not done the work in a timely way. This needless crisis now risks throwing your day (or someone else's) into chaos.
This last scenario is avoidable, and much of this book is aimed at reducing this unacceptable and unnecessary frenzy of activity. We need to get back to completing tasks in a timely way, to working proactively most of the time, and reacting only to the real and reasonable urgency that should arise infrequently. If we dial down the urgency just a couple of notches, our work lives will become less stressful, more enjoyable and, ultimately, more productive.
So how do we change this dynamic that is so entrenched in the modern workplace? Can we control urgency? I believe we can. It requires a mind-shift and a certain amount of discipline, but I do believe we can move to a more proactive work style.
In my observation, the most productive (and inspiring) people are proactive. This means they are driving the next steps and are in full control of their work and priorities.
We can drive productivity at the individual level, at the team level or at the organisational level. But it always starts with the individual – how we behave, what we choose to focus on, what we allow to drive our day.
This book is designed to help you dial down the urgency and work more proactively using an integrated productivity system (illustrated in figure B, overleaf) that I have developed over the past 13 years while working with corporate clients. It sets out the steps and strategies to help you take control of how you organise and keep track of your incoming work (inputs), what you spend your time on each working day (actions) and what you achieve (outcomes).
Figure B: integrated productivity system
The integrated productivity system at a glance
Increasing your productivity is not just a case of implementing a few tips and tricks, and it's not solely about email management or how you organise your priorities. True productivity in the 21st century workplace requires a more sophisticated approach. That does not mean it has to be complex, though. All of the productivity strategies in Smart Work can be implemented to increase your productivity in a simple and practical way.
As our work becomes more complex, we need a system to manage what we need to do and when we need to do it. Centralisation is the key. To manage our actions, commitments and priorities effectively, we need to have everything centralised in one organising tool.
Having everything in one place gives you focus, clarity and a better ability to prioritise. The electronic calendar has become the default tool for managing meetings and appointments, and has been embraced widely in the corporate workplace. The calendar centralises all of your meetings in one place, and it works pretty well most of the time. But you also have many, many tasks and priorities to juggle outside of meetings. This is where systems become decentralised, with work buried in separate ‘piles’. This is neither efficient nor effective.
The case for using electronic calendars as your main meeting scheduling tool is obvious to most. Meetings happen in collaboration with others. Our schedules are complex, and using a system that allows us to clearly check everyone's availability and lock in mutually convenient meeting times seems only logical.
The case for using an electronic task list is not so clear to many, so fewer have made the leap to ditch their paper lists in favour of digital tools. For me, it all boils down to one simple but compelling function. With the click of a button emails can be converted into tasks and scheduled as prioritised actions in tools like Outlook! Just as you benefit from the efficiency of meeting invitations that are scheduled at the agreed time once accepted, your productivity will be increased once you begin to schedule emails as tasks to be prioritised and completed at the appropriate time.
So you need one tool to manage your meetings and one tool to