Author: Francis Wade

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Is HR Doing Enough to Protect Worker Productivity?

istock_000000217921small.jpgStart with managerial anxiety.  Add in some new technology in the form of smartphones.  Toss in some employees that don’t know how to say no.

Watch as bad habits develop around email, text messages, voice calls and IM’s.

Or… perhaps… do something about it , as I suggest in this article targeted at Human Resource professionals.

Here is the link to my article:  “Is HR Standing By While Corporate Culture Changes?”

It describes a new challenge for human resource departments, who have never quite been held accountable for worker productivity.  Now, the time is right to speak up against the bad habits that are helping to create corporate cultures of un-productivity.

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Why I Love Time Management

Now and then I ask myself “Why?”

Why do I have this blog devoted to time management and productivity?  Why do I spend time coming up with new  ideas every now and then, so that I can share them and hopefully turn them into ideas that make it into a class, a webinar or my consulting work?

I struggle a bit with the explanation, partly out of a fear of sounding too Pollyana-ish.  If I could put together a trite explanation… that’s it all about becoming dirty, filthy rich…. if I could leave it at that, I suppose many would nod and understand.  But then, I’d look foolish for giving away most of what I do for free.

I took a couple of MBA classes while I was at Cornell, and this just isn’t a great strategy, according to that kind of thinkingh.  I have been giving away almost everything for free, long before the book “Free” came about, and while the book helped me feel like I wasn’t alone, or crazy, it’s only added some capitalist logic to the fun I was already having tinkering with time management concepts.

At the moment, for example, I have nothing for sale on my website at all, and in 2010 I have only had a single product for sale for about 2 weeks (MyTimeDesign2.0.Professional.)

Not that that troubles me.

While I sometimes wish that I could make a living from this peculiar pursuit, it’s not what gets me up in the morning.

Instead, I think I like three things about what I do here on the 2Time blog, in the NewHabits-NewGoals programs and in MyTimeDesign.

The Challenge

I don’t know exactly why, but I am convinced that millions of working people around the world are trying to be more productive than they already are, not because the boss demands it necessarily, but because their aspirations require it.  For example, many people are trying to lost weight, start their own small business, get more education or spend more quality time with their families and they know that a simple improvement in how they manage their time will give them “more.”

They also know that time is one of those commodities that cannot be reclaimed, and that the older they get, the more this rings true in their experience.

As far as I can tell, these concerns transcend nationality, race, gender or any of the categories that we use to distinguish human beings from each other.  The idea that  I could solve it for so many people thrills me each and every day — after all, I am working to solve a problem that my colleagues here in Kingston, Jamaica, and my fellow human beings in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, are all struggling with.

What’s at stake is nothing more than our quality of life.

What pisses me off is that all the books/websites I have read on the topic don’t deal with some basic truths:

  • we all have (and need) unique approaches to managing our time
  • we each have something that is working for us right now (to some degree)
  • time management is all about habits, and it’s hard for humans to change habits
  • to expect someone to toss out their current habits and adopt a bunch of new ones -in an instant – is unrealistic
  • the vast majority fail to implement new systems even when they try very, very hard
  • no-one knows how to measure the quality of an individual’s time management system

These truths might be called the “hidden secrets” of the time management industry, and they must be the starting point of everyone who is serious about helping people to become more productive.  To my mind, they are inescapable.

To add fuel to the fire, time management as an academic topic doesn’t have a proper home, and has, tragically, fallen through the cracks.  It’s a severely under-researched topic, and while it impacts every single working person on the planet in a profound way, there isn’t a single conference, journal or academic department in a major university that focuses on it (that I am aware of.)

Four years ago when I went looking to upgrade my own productivity system, I was appalled to find such a lack of depth in such a critical topic that impacts so many people.  As far as I can tell, little has changed since then.

Tinkering

As an 18 year old looking for a field of study, I was attracted to Industrial Engineering/Operations Research because of its dual emphasis on people and logical, fact based thinking.  Today, I love to tinker with technology, but not at the “lines of code” and “circuit board layout” levels.  Instead, I like to solve human problems with good technology.

This might be the reason why I have been so focused lately on the ways in which smart-phones have actually been destroying productivity.

But I should be more rigorous… smart-phones are great, but there is something weird (and un-hygienic) about the fact that some 50% of Americans have no problem using their smart-phones in the bathroom.

It’s a case of technology actually enabling us to hurt ourselves, via the bad habits that we adopt.

Today I spent some time tinkering with Microsoft Outlook, the most popular program of its kind by far.  Back in the 1990’s, it was born as an email program, and it’s evolved over the years  into an almost-ubiquitous productivity program.

This doesn’t seem to have happened by design, but instead, by accident.  Outlook is being used for a purpose that far exceeds its original design and over the years, little has changed.

Tinkering with Outlook’s is something that I would simply LOVE to do!

Now I know that that is not everyone’s cup of tea, but I have dreamed of reshaping Outlook’s design so that users see it as a productivity center that pulls them into a powerful day each day, rather than “a place to check their email.”  (Gmail, Yahoo and AOL Mail are also good candidates for complete re-design.)

I fully expect that in the future someone will bring some high quality, Apple-like design to this particular problem — I’d enjoy being a part of an effort like that.  (Unfortunately, so far I can’t find anyone interested in solving this particular problem.)

The Result

At the end of the day, however, I like to see results, even if someone else produces them, or gets the credit.  The kind of results I have in mind are a world in which:

  • each person has their own way of managing their time
  • their time management approach works for them, and they know how to fix it or upgrade it when it stops working
  • technology tools are useful, and new technologies are built around users’ needs, and are adapted by users with good insight on how to use it to enhance their time management systems
  • there is an easy way to measure the progress of each person’s productivity
  • time management is a body of knowledge that is taught to 10 year old’s

Like most people, I want to know that what I’m working on makes a solid contribution, and I truly believe that most of the things I focus on in the 2Time blog are unavoidable.  For example, there must come a time when we realize en masse that it’s crazy to expect that people will teach themselves the fundamentals of time management.  It’s just as crazy to think that there is one perfect system for everyone, now and for all the years to come.  It’s also crazy to think that people can change a number of ingrained habits in an instant, when all the research tells us otherwise.

I think that people will come to understand these truths for themselves, and start to pass them on to younger generations, so that they can benefit earlier in their careers.

I guess I’m hoping that I’ll be able to help to make that day come just a little bit quicker.

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The Productive Moron

I just published a provocative article over at the Stepcase Lifehack blog entitled “Are You Becoming a Productive Moron?”

In the article I make a tongue-in-cheek prediction based on some of the behaviors I see today… the most simple-minded employees will come to be seen as the most productive, simply because they reply to their email quicker than anyone else.

It’s a bit of fun, with a serious side.

You can see the article here: A You Becoming a Productive Moron?

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Escaping Your Unproductive Boss’ Bad Habits

istock_000000796578xsmall.jpgWhen I joined the corporate world back in 1988, there seemed to be only a few managers that were crazy-making.

Nowadays, their numbers seem to have increased, aided with new technology that helps them get their way in the short term, while ruining the  productivity of their companies.

These bad bosses isn’t necessarily malicious.  In fact, they are quite  well-intentioned, but they are unable to see the impact of their  actions on a large scale.  Unfortunately for them, technology has  served as a tremendous amplifier of unproductive habits, turning  bad individual habits into organization-wide headaches.

For example, the boss who got into a letter writing feud with another manager and started off a volley of paper letters in the 1980’s created little damage.  Letters, after all, took a long time to write and disseminate, and copies only found their way to their recipients slowly.

With the advent of email, however, a similar feud in the 1990’s could easily escalate into a public war of messages involving every single member of staff, who could watch from the ringside as  several messages were sent within the hour, tying up thousands of  dollars of valuable employee time.

It was one of the early examples of a way in which a boss’ bad habits could become everyone’s nightmare, and time-waster.

Fast-forward to 2010, and the games continue, with a twist.

Now, managers give employees the gift of Blackberrys with the full knowledge that they are gaining something powerful — 24/7 access the employee’s time (or something quite close to it.)

Smartphones give users access to a phone, email, instant  messaging and voice mail.  Managers quickly learn that there is  a difference between those employees who are equipped, versus those  who are not.

More specifically, those with smartphones are far more likely to: – respond to urgent 4:00am emails – reply to a text message while driving on I95 – interrupt their vacation to edit that pesky client document – join a conference call on Sunday morning – answer instant messages in the middle of meetings

Any boss, good or bad, would rush to give the gift of a Blackberry or iPhone  to most employees, given the obvious benefits listed above.

However, the increasing number of employees who are in the know understand that the above list of “beneficial behaviors” are a  recipe for corporate disaster.

When all managers develop the smartphone driven practice of  interrupting their employees at will, it guarantees that very few will get any work done.  I remember in the early 1990’s, when  my colleagues and I would stay home, come in early, leave late or  visit the office on weekends in order to “get some work done.”

In other words, we did our real work outside work hours, because the work day was so filled with unplanned and unproductive interruptions.

Now, with the advent of smartphones, there is no escape.  None of  these strategies work — the only reprieve from the smartphone  leash occurs when one is either swimming or bathing… for now.

What are employees to do?

I doubt that much can change by griping — instead, someone must  take a stand.  These corporate habits are quite difficult to  break because they are unconsciously practiced by those who are  the most powerful in the company.  In most companies, there are no policies governing their use (with the recent exception of  driving restrictions.)

An employee who takes a stand can do so for practical reasons,  vs. moral reasons.  They can look for hard evidence that a company that has its employees chained to email is driving itself into an  unproductive state (unless they are some kind of customer care  unit whose job it is to email.)

They can start to check email only at certain hours, and let those around them know that they are un-tethering themselves from the 24/7 electronic leash.  At the same time, they must play the tricky game of convincing executives and line managers that the change in tactics  will annoy some of them in the short term, but ultimately benefit  everyone in the long term.

After all, who wants a company filed with employees who are  enjoy their chains jerked from one moment to the next, as they get pulled from one crisis to another?  I have seen highly-paid  executives who operate like this, and the truth is that they hate it.

Some burn out and leave.  Other knuckle under and become the worst perpetrators, with their own employees becoming the fresh victims.

As I mentioned before, what makes this problem a tough one to solve is the fact that the habits are unconscious, and widespread among  those who are the most powerful in most companies.  Turning the ship around is ultimately a group activity, but it must start  with at east one person who is willing to convince others that  the change is a necessary one to make.

Whistle-blower laws have worked well to empower employees who are  committed to end criminal wrongdoing.  For many, it’s a matter of  professional ethics and standards.

The boss’ bad habits may not be crimes, but they do have a negative effect. It’s the rare employees who are willing to adhere to a  higher personal standard of productivity that companies will come to rely on to lead them out of the “monkey on a leash”  behavior that we are now calling “productivity.”
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The UnProductive Time Games that Employees Play

istock_000011427285xsmall.jpgIt happens in every company.  Within a few months, the top notch  recruit from one of the best schools joins in the time management games that their colleagues have been practicing for years, and  before long they are operating at a mediocre level of productivity, and sometimes they are even rewarded for it.

What’s remarkable is that these games are invisible to all but  the most astute observers, and even fewer are willing to “unplug themselves” from the Matrix-like state they find themselves in.

Here are some of the unproductive games that employees quickly find  themselves sucked into that undermine corporate productivity.  I  am using the definition of a game used by Amy Jo Kim at  ShuffleBrain.com — a system in which players engage in an artificial conflict, defined by rules, that results in a quantifiable outcome.

The Main Game: Do what you can to stay out of trouble.

While this game is one that we learned from our earliest days in school, it is one that operates  powerfully in most companies and influences every single person.

The fact that there is a competition of sorts between employees means that most are competing by trying to stay out of trouble,  which is exactly the behavior that executives and managers say they don’t want.

Yet, few companies are able to create an environment that enables employees to overcome the habit of “keeping your head down.”

When it comes to time management, it’s easy to see that there  are certain games that are important to play and win in order to move ahead.  Here are the ones I have seen.

The Ping-Pong Email Game

One of the popular games played is what I call ping-pong email. The goal is simple – make sure that you have the quickest email response time in the company.  After all, how can one do better than to make sure than people get a response in  minutes?

There are some who firmly believe that the employee who responds to email quickly is one who is sensitive to colleague’s needs, a  good team player and demonstrates excellent time management skills.

I predict that one of the tools that’s coming soon is some kind of method to quantify email responsiveness. Luckily, it  appears that no such tool exists at the moment, but I am sure that some geek somewhere is crafting the required code.

Of course, the person who wins this particular contest is also  likely to be contender for the “Most Email” title.

Some companies will take note of your prowess at these games by making note of it in your performance appraisal, and salary increase.  Heck, you can even get more money from being good at the game of Email Ping-Ping!

The C.Y.A. Email Game

This is an older game in which employees cover their ass by  “capturing” conversations in email.  Instead of walking over to have a conversation or using a phone, they use email.  If they are caught unawares and someone has a conversation by the water cooler, they simply send an email when they return to  their desks that says… “as we discussed, you are not going to do your part on the ABC project.”

The game is easier to play when everyone has a Blackberry, of course. The goal is to establish a trail of emails that establishes your  clear innocence when the s**t hits the fan.  It matters not that email takes longer to write, process and read, and that issues are  harder to resolve via email.

Email that is used to convey strong emotions inevitably creates more  problems as mismatches occur between sender and receiver.  This  produces further emails in order to resolve the new issues that the new email created.

This game reaches its crest when an issue does get raised in an  emotional way, and you are able to pull up the email trail that clearly  shows that you are not at fault.

The Head-Fake Email Game

This game is played by those who are checking email on their smartphones.  The objective is to check for email, read and  respond so quietly that no-one else notices – even if you are talking with them one-on-one.  This is a fun game  to play on dates, in weddings and in meetings.  Earning a  comment of disapproval means instant disqualification.

An important skill to learn in this game is how to nod one’s head to give the listener the appearance that they are being heard. This head-fake will work with some, but not all — only the most skilled will get away with it every time.

Ardent players of “Ping-Pong Email” eventually migrate to the “Head-Fake” Game.

The true thrill of this game is playing it successfully with  executives at higher levels of the company.

The Hide Behind Email Game

You have to conduct a difficult conversation with a prickly  colleague.  More than anything else, you want to stay out of  trouble, with him or anyone else in the company.

Rather than talk to him directly, you simply send him email. The best times are after 4pm, so that he can’t find you in  person — you have already left the office.  Hopefully, he takes the night to think about things, and any desire to do you bodily harm  has dissipated by morning.

Success is marked by getting a weak response or no response at  all.  Whether or not anything actually changes is beside the point, because you have the email to prove that you made an attempt but “he’s just so difficult to work with — not a good team player.”

You win this game when you can add this item to your performance review in the form of a kudo — e.g. “coached subordinate  successfully.”

You lose points if he pins you down in the hallway and actually succeeds in having a live conversation!

The CC: Email Game

This game has lost favor in recent years, due to its over-popularity.

It’s a simple one — conduct an email argument with someone, and  intimidate them by CC’ing additional people with each reply.

The game has been spoiled by overuse by those who add others  either too early in the conflict, or in numbers that result in lots of important people being pissed off.  Some have been known to include entire companies in their exchanges, grinding actual  work to a halt as everyone pauses to watch a public battle that  is more compelling than any game ever played on World of Warcraft.

The fun in this game comes when someone higher up in the food-chain jumps in the fray and publicly smacks down your adversary, even mildly.  (You can tell this happens when the emails stop.)

You lose major points if someone smacks you down, and minor ones if someone complains about the conversation itself.

It’s a high-stakes game that has become harder to win in recent times, so smart employees carefully use their BCC: button to achieve the same effect.

Bottom Line:  Many of these games have innocent origins by employees that are trying their best to do a good job, but have gotten lost in companies that end up with lo productivity because no-one has intervened as these  games have spiraled out of control.

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Coaching Using the 2Time Principles

istock_000001500277xsmall.jpgIt recently struck me that someone who coaches for a living should be able to use the 2Time thinking to become a better coach in time management.

The principles of good coaching are simple, as I learned them from Thomas Leonard, founder of CoachU:

  • set believable high-level targets with the client
  • gain an understanding of the current state
  • set detailed goals and refine targets
  • implement actions
  • measure the impact
  • refine and repeat until the goal is accomplished

Unwittingly, I used this same structure in setting up 2Time which makes it quite different from the other approaches that exist.

I haven’t found another approach to time management that starts with an individual’s current habit patterns, acknowledges that some of it is indeed working, and helps them to focus on the parts that need improvement.

For a coach that wants to help a client, this makes things a LOT easier, as the other approaches that I have discovered only try to  get individuals to implement a canned set of new habits.  They are on their own in figuring out exactly how to make the transition.

A coach who uses the 2Time/MyTimeDesign templates is a better diagnostician,  and can help their clients to save time and energy as they work on becoming more productive.

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The Coming Productivity Crisis

istock_000000182302small.jpgIf you listen carefully to the latest economic news, and to business owners around the world, you can see it coming.

The US is pulling out of the “Great Recession” in fits and starts, slowly pulling the rest of the world back into the black where we all share a greater sense of optimism for the future.

At the same time, job growth has been sluggish, or non-existent, as companies demonstrate a surprising reluctance to hire employees to fill the gap in production that is bound to increase once solid and steady economic growth returns.

I know I’m not alone in looking for ways to handle the hoped-for-increase in business without increasing overheads.  I am loathe to hire more people to work for me, and unlikely to hire full-time employees for a long, long time.

Instead, companies of all sizes are simply going to turn to employees who complain about having too much to do, and demand that they find a way to get more done.

A handful will do better, and actually give their employees ways to improve their personal productivity.  Instead of investing in new human resources, they’ll look to expand the capacity of their current employees.

Will this work?

I know that it’s possible… I have worked in companies in which the productivity is so obviously low that it’s not too hard to imagine the difference that better employees would make.

I have also worked in other companies in which employees never, ever catch up with email.  Their Inboxes are overflowing with messages begging for overdue action – a sure sign that time is not being managed well.

But you tell me… is there a widespread crisis on the horizon as expectations outstrip hiring?

Have you seen any signs of this?
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The Taxonomy of Teaching Kids

I just read a fascinating article from the New York Times entitled Building a Better Teacher.

It’s a long article, but what got my attention was the fact that it’s built on a search for the fundamentals of teaching.

It turns out that teacher quality is the single most important variable in the ability of students to learn in a classroom setting.  The article describes the years of research that’s been done to identify the practices that good teachers use to produce results.  They selected the teachers to study that are able  to produce results in some of the poorest schools in the US, where resources and family support is below average.

The researchers have isolated these practices in a way that that has put them into words, and has helped teachers to begin to set up sessions to master individual skills in coaching sessions with other teachers.

It turns out that a lot of things that schools and teachers do to impact their effectiveness don’t really matter, and a few things do that are not that hard to learn with enough dedicated practice time.

In other words, it’s a bit like the world of time management.

The journalist who wrote the article reported that many teachers and well-meaning experts are looking for improvement in the wrong places.

I believe the same is true in the case of time management.  Some of the approaches that have a minimal effect include:

– trying to follow someone else’ system of habits without regard for one’s current habits

– improving by ignoring habits and instead focusing on things like “energy,” “attitude” and “motivation”

-over-simplifying the challenge that we all have of changing ingrained habits quickly, whether it involves learning or un-learning habits

It struck me that it took a long time to develop this taxonomy, and that it’s all based on empirical research that’s been captured on film.

I started to wonder… how long will it take to popularize the concept of Time Management 2.0? After all, like the teaching researchers, I am actually (and mostly) putting some names to things which people have done for many years.

I am also daunted by the fact that years and years of work has been put into the taxonomy of teaching, and that I have spent only 4 years on this effort, but I haven’t started any kind of empirical research.

Hmmm….

Here is the link once again to “Building a Better Teacher.”
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Explaining MyTimeDesign by Video

I was recently interviewed by Peter Gales of MoreVidaReviews by video.

Here are links to the three videos on YouTube in which I answered some questions about MyTimeDesign.