Applied Research in a World of Increasing Time Demands
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Corporations making large-scale technology changes have learned over the years that it’s a big mistake to go out and buy the biggest, newest flashiest product available on the market without first doing a thorough study of the company’s needs.
In fact, there are procurement guidelines set up for precisely that purpose and best practices that govern the process so that all the right factors are appropriately weighed before a decision is made. Some professionals make a career in this area, and have developed skills that are highly prized due to the critical nature of certain technology choices, and the high costs involved.
However, up until now, academics and corporate executives have focused on the purchase of single large, complex systems. My research isn’t complete in this area, but I can’t find any critical thinking to help executives make another kind of technology decision that corporations make — the decision to equip their employees with individual, portable technologies like smartphones.
What are the differences between these kinds of decisions?
Purchasing a Single Large System
– the price per unit is high
– a failure is highly visible
– the processes and requirements are usually well defined before vendors are sought
– implementation, training and maintenance are seen as important elements of the process
– total-cost-of-ownership methods are used
– there is clear accountability for, and measurement of the business impact
Purchasing Smartphones
– the price per unit is low
– failures are almost invisible (such as a near-accident brought on by texting while driving)
– the processes that people use are not defined before vendors are sought
– no training is offered
– the cost of owning the gadget is seen as the price
– there is no-one accountable for the business impact, or any measurement
Here is an imagined “worst case process” that takes place when a company decides to make a smartphone purchase:
1. The CEO or other executives fall in love with their new smartphones, as it enables them to communicate with each other outside hours, during vacations, weekends, sick days, holidays and from any point in the world
2. They decide to make the units mandatory for all employees
3. They offer no training, and no new company policies are crafted
4. Anecdotal evidence floats up to the executive suite that the devices are being abused, and the CEO takes them seriously when he notices that his meetings at all levels are taking longer because at any moment, half the attendees are someplace in cyberspace via their smartphones. Among his executives he seems unable to conduct a half hour conversation without someone stopping to answer a call, check email or send a text. He learns that some companies are banning smartphones from meetings altogether, citing addictive behavior driving up the time spent in meetings
5. He commissions a study which shows that among his employees, smartphones are being used in the following way:
– 85% are texting while driving
– 72% use their smartphones in the bathroom
– game playing and social networking are the most popular everyday use
– 80% use their device in meetings
– 28% are afraid that they’ll lose their jobs if they are not available on weekends
– 35% answer messages on sick days
– 45% check messages between 12am and 6am
– 70% believe that some overall productivity has been lost, even as 80% “enjoy” their device
6. He decide to come down hard, and bans non-business apps from being used, blocks social networking and gaming websites and purchases a new technology to block internet access from smartphones within company vehicles, and meeting rooms
7. The annual company survey reveals a new complaint — work-life balance is suffering as employees complain about being “always on” and required to be available to be at work even when they are trying to get away from work. A quick check with IT reveals that the volume of email has exploded, driven by new messaging on weekends and holidays. Also, they report that employees are taking inordinately long periods of time in picking up their gadgets for the first time, or retrieving them from the repair shop.
8. The CEO establishes a joint team between IT/HR and Operations to look at the issue
9. A followup study shows that 88% believe that overall productivity has fallen, and a mere 33% are “enjoying” their device
10. The joint team recommends training for each employee, plus a raft of new policies about the company’s expectations of employees when they are not at work
If you can imagine this sequence of events, you can probably see that the initial error was to skip the customary needs analysis study that is required of large-system purchasing decisions. The executive team, like many managers, made several assumptions about their employees’ behaviors and needs. What’s remarkable is that in this case, everyone is trying their best to save time and boost productivity, even as obvious mistakes are being made.
In most companies, however, a decision to provide employees with “time-saving technology” is made without a good understanding of the complexity of individual behavior in the area of time management. They don’t take into account the fact that each employee has a unique, home-made productivity system that they put together for themselves as young adults or teenagers.
Employees lack the skill needed to evaluate their time management systems, in order to decide how best to affect an improvement. That’s why so many unproductive, and unexpected habits cropped up in the “worst-case” described above. The time-saving technology ended up affecting employee safety, productivity, etiquette and hygiene in negative ways.
Fortunately, there is a great deal that can be learned from the methods used to purchase large systems:
Lesson 1 — understand the current system to be improved. In this case it means, bring every employee to the point where they understand their current time management system
Lesson 2 — help employees determine the gaps in their current systems, by giving them access to best practices
Lesson 3 — look for process changes that need to be made. In the case of individuals, this translates into new habits, practices and rituals of time management
Lesson 4 — source new technology
Lesson 5 — train employees to use the new technology within company guidelines and policies
Lesson 6 — monitor the implementation and adjust as necessary
The case described above is not an example of one large mistake, but instead it involves a small mistake repeated many times. The end-results are no different, but the lack of accountability for and measurement of individual productivity in most companies allows the problem to gain the momentum that it shouldn’t.
If there’s a place to start at a high level it might be to clearly assign responsibility for individual employee productivity to one executive, and give them the authority to decide on how best to use technology to make improvements.
P.S. This is a new area of research for me, so I’d appreciate any related sources of information that you might know of.
As I mentioned in my prior post: “The Pedagogy of Time Management,” there is a need for anyone who wants to improve their skills in this field to craft specific opportunities for structured practice.
Mark Needham’s summary of Talent is Overrated describes three kinds of practice from the book:
With regards to improving skills, three models are suggested for non-work related practice:
- Music Model – Break down activity into smaller pieces; analyse each for ares of improvement; repeatedly practice each area. This is a useful approach for practicing presentations and speeches where we know beforehand what we want to do.
- Chess Model – Study real games; practice the situations from the games; compare what you did vs what happened in the real game. This approach has been applied in business for many years, disguised as the case method.
- Sports Model – re-learn the basics of the field; simulate situations that may come up in real life.
He goes on to apply these models to the improvement of software development skills in an interesting way:
I think some parts of each of these models can be applied to software development. From the sports model we can take the idea of re-learning the underlying principles of computer science and how our code is actually working behind the abstractions languages create for us; from the chess model we can take the idea of considering different options when we have a choice to allow us to select the one which will best solve our problem; and from the music model we can take the idea of identifying specific areas of improvement in our work and relentlessly working on these.
That’s cool thinking… and it makes me wonder how I can do the same with time management skills.
Ever since I created the NewHabits training programs I have wanted to include practice sessions – the equivalent of hitting shots from the driving range – but I have been unable to think of a realistic way to do this.
I’d love some help on this. Is there a way to practice the 7 fundamentals – (Capturing, Emptying, Tossing, Acting Now, Storing, Scheduling and Listing) in a classroom environment?
Also, is there a surefire way for someone who wants to improve their skill in a particular area to focus on practicing that skill in keeping with the guidelines for deliberate practice from Talent is Overrated?:
I don’t think I’m the only one with this challenge, and from prior posts you might find that I have been struggling with this question for a while, and that progress has been slow. Why?
Let’s look at some of the critical skills in Capturing:
– carrying something to capture with at all times
– capturing manually, instead of using memory
– maintaining a backup strategy
At one point, I have imagined an elaborate real-life case study in the middle of my live programs, in which a manufactured crisis results in participants having to use these three skills. One fantasy involved a fake fire-alarm, mysterious phone calls involving elaborate instructions and a rapid response requiring information that had to be successfully captured in order to be used.
What I was thinking…???
I also am not a great believer in “analogy” learning exercises… for example, showing the importance of Capturing by going out to a ropes and logs course to do physical activities that teach similar lessons. There is a certain physical motion required to Capture, and it’s this action that must be practiced… (Michael Jordan didn’t practice passing a basketball by playing soccer.)
The difficulty seems to be that it’s devilishly hard to re-create the original events that trigger manual capturing in the average day. (This is distinct from automatic capturing, which happens when someone sends you an email, for example. It requires no action on our part.)
What are these triggering events? Here are a few “cases:”
Each of these events naturally leads to the use of one of the critical skills in Capturing. Something must happen at that critical moment for the user to realize that this is an opportunity to practice a new time management skill.
As an aside — let me explain how that works in my training. Each person evaluates their current Capturing abilities using a scale ranging from White to Green Belt skills. Some decide to make an upgrade, and pick up new habits. In other words, they decide to engage in a brand new practice in response to the usual events they face each day. (Take my online Capturing Quiz to see what I mean.)
The question is, how do they know (in the heat of the moment) that this is an opportunity to Capture using a new habit (by writing down the new time demand on a pad of paper) rather than using their old habit of, for example, committing it to memory?
And, how do they remember to practice that new skill until it becomes a new habit?
At this time, all I can think of is that they can engage in a form of visualization, in which they picture the event happening and their new, preferred response. It might require a short definition such as “when I commit to a time demand in a meeting I immediately write it in my paper pad.”
Also, they could get a colleague or their boss to help them recognize and point out those moments when they say things like:
These might be indicators that an error in Capturing took place.
They could also look for themselves to see the times when they don’t capture well, and time demands fell through the cracks. I imagine something like a Crack Score to be kept by an individual who tracks the number of time demands that fall through the cracks each day, and some record of the source of the error. In some cases, it might be traced back to a fault in Capturing.
While you may read this and think to yourself, “I would never bother with all that!” you may want to take note of the message of Talent is Overrated as related by the Fundamental Soccer blog:
2) Deliberate practice can be repeated a lot. High repetition is the most important difference between deliberate practice of a task and performing the task for real, when it counts. Tiger Woods may face that buried lie in the sand only two or three times in a season, and if those were his only opportunities to work on that shot, he’d blow it just as you and I do.
Repeating a specific activity over and over is what people usually mean by practice, yet it isn’t especially effective. Two points distinguish deliberate practice from what most of us actually do. One is the choice of a properly demanding activity just beyond our current abilities. The other is the amount of repetition.
Top performers repeat their practice activities to stultifying extent. Ted Williams, baseball’s greatest hitter, would practice hitting until his hands bled. Pete Maravich, whose college basketball records still stand after more than 30 years, would go to the gym when it opened in the morning and shoot baskets until it closed at night.
Talent is Overrated is unambiguous on the point — if you want to get better, then deliberate practice is THE “secret sauce” that high achievers have been applying behind the scenes in order to accomplish the amazing goals that we so admire in ALL fields.
Time Management is no exception, and the widespread mediocrity that passes for acceptable performance around the globe, in virtually every workplace, will only be reversed with a commitment to deliberate practice.
I have just been accepted to speak at the Institute of Industrial Engineers Conference in Reno, Nevada. I’ll be presenting on May 25th.
The topic will be related to time management 2.0, of course and I’ll be echoing many of the themes that can be found on this website.
I’m excited to be able to share my ideas with others in the field, and am hoping that I can help to carve out time management as an important topic for learning and teaching.
Hopefully one or two blog subscribers can make it to the speech?
How many time demands are created in a day?
This critical piece of information is one that remains a mystery, it seems, and there hasn’t been any research that I can find to answer the the question.
(For a definition of the term “time demand” see this post located on the 2Time website. The rest of this article relies on your understanding the definition. Also, I’ll write this post as if time demands can be found outside the mind. The truth is more subtle than that… time demands are created by individual minds in response to some outside stimulus, but I’ll write this article as if they can be found in the stimuli themselves, so I’ll say things like “a piece of email has no new time demands” when what I really mean is “a piece of email has no stimulus for any new time demands.” I have taken the liberty to speak imprecisely in order to enable the larger point to be understood.)
The only research that I have found is simplistic – it measures the number of emails that come in each day. This is an almost useless estimate, as any given email might have absolutely no time demands whatsoever. Email spam, or one that closes out a discussion e.g. “Thanks” are both examples of email that do not include time demands. The message is read and then immediately tossed, or thrown away.
Another piece of email might include multiple time demands in just a few sentences. For example, a one-line email (e.g. “O.K.”) might affirm a prior request to receive the authorization necessary to execute a huge project involving thousands of people and millions of person-hours. Therefore, just counting the amount of email that one receives means little or nothing.
At the same time, email arriving in one’s inbox is only on source of new demands. Here are some others that fall neatly into different categories, depending on the circumstance:
– in a meeting, during a shower or while driving, you have a brainstorm and decide to take a complex series of actions. You capture these new time demands on a paper pad
– while watching television, you decide to take advantage of a weekend sale, and you make a mental note to stop by the store on Saturday morning with some cash in hand
– when you check your voice-mail, you receive a request for someone to send you additional information on a product your company is selling. You leave the message, promising yourself to come back later
– you wake up in the morning with a mysterious back-pain. You call the doctor’s office to make an appointment later that day
– you chat with your sister, a real estate agent, and decide to buy your first house
All these time demands are created in the moment the decision is made, but there doesn’t exist any easy way to measure their total number. Furthermore, all time demands are not created equally as they vary in length, and presumably have their own start and end times. Some may be complex, and are actually made up of many smaller time demands that can be scheduled into a calendar.
In the mind of the creator, the consequences of failing to complete one time demand are very different from another. This gives rise to a feeling that they might have very different priorities.
The fact that there is little research, however, doesn’t stop employees from making assumptions each day about how volumes of time demands vary in volume. Some may seem to be commonsensical, but I believe that we can make tremendous daily mistakes, based on incorrect conclusions. Consider the following hypotheses:
– managers receive more time demands each day than their subordinates, and taken together, they require more total time to complete
– employees create fewer time demands on weekends than on weekdays
– the more time demands are created in memory, the greater one’s stress level
– the amount of email in one’s Inbox is correlated with ones’ stress level
– the number of time demands that we enter our lives each day has been rising steadily
– retirees have fewer time demands than active employees
– meeting quality is correlated with the number of time demands that are created
– new channels of communication (such as BBM) generate new time demands
– Facebook generates new time demands, in keeping with the number of one’s friends
– the number of time demands that slip through the cracks and are lost or forgotten is an indicator of time management skill
– it is impossible to complete all time demands successfully
– as the number of time demands in one’s life escalates, new techniques are needed to cope
– smartphones enable the creation of an increased number of time demands
We probably each have our individual opinions on these items, and the quality of our lives is probably dependent on the way we each answer them. The fact that we don’t have solid answers reveads a gaping hole in time management research, and I’m not optimistic that it will be filled anytime soon.
One positive note is that skillful managers who don’t use memory (i.e. Green Belts in the 2Time terminology) do track each of the major time demands that enter their system faithfully, and could be studied to answer some of the questions above. Unfortunately, the tools to capture this information doesn’t exist today, but I believe it’s only a matter of time before they are invented… perhaps in our lifetime!
I had a recent conversation online with a few young professionals who complained that they need to check their smartphones in meetings because they are simply too boring.
While there’s an immediate problem of their lack of responsibility, it points to a fact of life for Gen Y and Millenial employees. They were raised on video games, remote controls and high-speed internet access, and they have been led by doting parents to believe that they have a right to switch to something more captivating whenever they want.
Not that they are the only culprits.
Employees of all ages are using their smartphones to look for, and find, better stuff in the middle of meetings, conversations and conference calls. Their eyes glaze over, and as they succumb to the “Blackberry Itch,” their mind starts to conjure up wonderful messages, websites and instant messages that will be instantly theirs in a matter of seconds… in the time it takes to grab their smartphone and fire it up. For some, this need to find instant distractions has become an addiction, as their mind convinces them that it needs additional stimulation whenever there’s a momentary lull.
It’s no insult to the other people in the conversation, meeting or call. It’s not meant to be rude or disrespectful. In fact, it’s not meant to be any more significant than changing the channel on a TV or clicking on a link to a website.
Unfortunately, it IS unproductive, and while some may think that it’s simple multi-tasking, a meeting in which half the attendees are lost on their smartphones is a meeting that will take longer than it should, wasting time and costing thousands of dollars. The cost far outweighs the potential benefit.
In passing, I read about some research that’s just beginning to explore the widening problem of reduced attention spans in the workplace, but in the meantime younger employees would do well to realize that their careers are being endangered by everyday habits.
For the first time in a long time, I put my pen to paper to update the “manifesto” of ideas here on the 2Time website.
In writing the special report, 8 Edgy Ideas From Time Management 2.0, I tried to pull together the best ideas I could find from the posts I have written over the past 4 years. I also recorded an audio version and a short video introduction that you can view below.
To download the report, simply click on the icon or click here. I’d love to hear your thoughts on it over at the page I created for comments.
(To answer the 9 question survey click here.)
It’s dawning on me after some reflection that I am developing a real yen for not just time management, but how it is practiced in workplaces around the world.
I remember sitting in meetings in Caracas, Venezuela, back in 1999 and being amazed that a ringing cell-phone would stop a meeting in its tracks, even if the owner happened to be presenting. As a result, meetings took longer than they should resulting in a profound feeling of frustration on all sides. The old habit of answering the phone whenever it rang obviously wasn’t working in 1999, let alone 2010.
But no-one ever said anything, or did anything about the problem.
It was a good experience for me, because the very high cellphone penetration found in Caracas was a useful predictor of behavior that would become commonplace in companies in every country around the world.
As you can see from my recent posts, I have been digging up all the research I can find on the topic, and now I’m doing some research of my own to fill in some of the gaps I have discovered.
My smartphone survey runs until the 28th, and it consists of 9 questions. You don’t need to be a smartphone user to answer the questions — in fact, I’m collecting some data on the opinions of those who don’t have smartphones, and those who plan to get one (I am in the latter category.)
P.S. I’ll be unveiling the results of the survey during my free Smartphone webinar on July 28th at 8pm. Click the icon at right to be placed on the early notification list or click here.
I do believe that I have referenced this important study that was published in April 2010 in a few of my posts, but I have had a few questions, so here is the source document that I, and others, have been referencing. The study was published by Intercall and it’s entitled: “Technology in the Workplace – April 2010.” It includes data gathered from interviews of some 2500 respondents.
Here is one of the findings:
American workers are feeling the anxieties associated with a lack of job security:
A full quarter of respondents report feeling that their job security is partially dependent on their supervisor seeing them connected to work even after hours.
While this doesn’t say that supervisors are necessarily asking for this kind of availability, it implies that the conditions are being created for the requirement to be clearly conveyed. I imagine that that number is only increasing. But that could just be me!
Also,
Two in five American workers report that they are doing the job of two people because of the impact of the economic recession on their company (39%).
No comment needed there.
Finally,
My morale / job satisfaction improves when my employer provides the technology tools and services that help me to do my job better and faster.
It’s a great study, and it reflects that change in the workplace that I hope to reflect in some new training modules I am putting together around the topic of smartphone habits. These modules will be included in MyTimeDesign 1.0.Free, which will soon be released, and I’ll be coaching those who do MyTimeDesign 2.0.Professional on how they can improve their performance in this area.
P.S. I know I’ve been throwing a lot of research at you recently, but the times they-are-a-changing, and I want to keep putting the facts in front of my readers, so that they can make informed choices.
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This must be the week for research and reflection, because I am once again writing about a piece of research that I have found that has some interesting findings.
This article is entitled “Supporting Email Flow“and it’s authored by Gina Danielle Venolia, Laura Dabbish, JJ Cadiz and Anoop Gupta.
It’s a little dated, as it was published back in 2001 by Microsoft Research, but it has some interesting findings that I believe are echoed by what I see today in the actions of professionals everywhere. The majority of the questions in the study were answered using a 5-point Likert scale where 1 = “strongly disagree” and 5 = strongly agree.”
Finding #1: The median response to the statement, “When I’m at my computer and a message arrives, I immediately look at it” was 4 or “agree” (avg=3.7, sd=0.9).
Not too surprising, but I wonder if this number has changed because of the number of email messages that we receive each day in 2010. I believe that that the underlying habit has not changed, but it’s success as a tactic for handling email has been undermined.
Finding #2: “When I get to work in the morning, the first thing I do is check my inbox” was 5 or “strongly agree” (avg=4.8, sd=0.4). The median response to “When I get back from a meeting, the first thing I do is check my inbox” was also 5 (avg=4.7, sd=0.6).
Finding #3: 6 of 10 interview participants used email messages as their to-do lists, and on the survey, the median response to “I keep messages as reminders for later action when I owe a response” was 4 or “agree” (avg=4.3, sd=0.7). People also kept messages that they needed read later (median=4, avg=4.1, sd=0.8) and messages for which they were expecting a response from someone else (median=4, avg=3.9,
sd=1.0).
Finding #4: “If a message needs action but I can’t do it right away, I move it to the Outlook Task list”. The median response was 2 or “disagree” (avg=2.4, sd=1.3). When users were asked, “I can easily tell which messages I have kept as reminders,” the median response was 3 or “neutral” (avg=3.2, sd=1.3).
The fact that this was and is happening was not addressed by the researchers. I was surprised at this, because it highlights the fact that Outlook was not being used as designed. In other words, I surmise that the intended flow of activity in Outlook was that a user would convert an email into a Task, and add it to a list. Obviously, this was not happening.
Some may argue that I go too far in supposing that the designers of Outlook’s User Interface (UI) had any use-process in mind, and that it’s up to the user to employ the tool in a way that makes sense for them.
I’m no expert in UI, but I do know nonsense when I hear it.
It’s no accident that the majority of users gravitate towards Outlook’s Inbox in order to read their email first. The program was designed as an email management tool, first and foremost, and its design encourages users to “do email” first.
The results show that this is exactly what happens in reality. Those who know better, and instead spend time planning and scheduling their day before downloading email must create a novel habit for themselves that runs counter to Outlook’s design.
Given the fact that this research was undertaken and the results were made known to the public as far back as 2000, I have to ask… why, 10 years later, has nothing changed in the way that Outlook is designed? Improved techniques for email processing such as the Zero Inbox as widely seen an antidotes to email overload, but Outlook’s design has done nothing to help, even when the data shows that a group of researchers in the bowels of Microsoft knew that the program’s design was failing in a critical, core function.
There are some other interesting findings that would interest the historians of email, but I was intrigued by the following result which was included as a bit of a side-note.
This graph shows what happens once a user receives an email, in order of preference for each activity. The most popular activity was “Leave in Inbox.”
What’s remarkable is that the article never once predicts what might happen in 2010 or 2020 when the volume of email messages increases, and the most popular strategy, leaving email in an Inbox, turns out to be detrimental. There are users who have tens of thousands of email messages in their Inbox, simply because they adopted a technique in 2000 that turned into a burden in 2010.
What an avoidable tragedy.
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