Tag Archives: Time management

August 2, 2016 · 11:23 am

When Is “After Hours”?

I’m going to sound a lot like the cranky old guy I am today. This fit of pique has been brought on by a new study called “Exhausted But Unable to Disconnect”. It was authored by Liuba Belkin of Lehigh University, William Becker of Virginia Tech and Samantha A. Conroy of Colorado State University, and it shows it’s not just the amount of time spent on work emails, but the anticipatory stress and expectation of answering after-hours emails that are draining employees. 

When I got into the business world, neither email nor cell phones existed. When you walked out the door to go home, you really did leave the office behind unless you chose to take some work home with you. There was little fear that the boss would summon you to do something since to get you the message to do so would involve either a telephone call to your home landline or sending a search party to find you. If you were out you were pretty much unreachable. Disruptions to your downtime were rare.

Obviously, that’s not the case today. I’m sure you’ve had the experience of not responding to an email and receiving a phone call from someone not very long after the mail was received. It’s bad enough when that’s a client or vendor or friend. When it’s a boss, it’s worse since there’s very little ability to ignore it for a bit. This study bears that out:

The study is not the first research to find after-hours emails hazardous to workers. It breaks new ground in focusing not primarily on mail volume and the extra time it adds to the workday but on a little-explored aspect of the problem: the mere expectation that workers will respond to email in their off hours. Such a job norm, the professors write, “creates anticipatory stress” and “influences employee’s ability to detach from work regardless of the time required for email.”

All of us need time to recharge. The study shows that just the expectation that a nastygram from the boss could be coming is just as bad as the actual demands. As managers, we need to make it clear that disrupting our team’s downtime is not going to be the norm. Our organizational cultures need to demonstrate respect for the need to disengage. There needs to be time that truly is “after hours” or the odds are that there will be a breakdown of some sort during business hours. None of us want that, do we?

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August 14, 2012 · 8:43 am

Do Less, Be More Productive

Every manager I know – heck, every business I know – is having to do more with less.

English: Productivity comparison for the membe...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Fewer resources.  Fewer people.  Hopefully not fewer consultants!  That means that every person on staff needs to be more productive.  Productivity is one of those tricky numbers – it’s a ratio of output to input – that seems more attuned to an industrial age than to a time when the world is moving to an information-based economy.  Still, one thing I speak with clients about all the time are results – key performance indicators, things we can measure to gauge our progress.  Sometimes I even get paid based on those productivity measures so I’m very focused on improving them.

One thing I’ve found is that we sometimes confuse putting out more with making more value.  I think many of the technological innovations which we enjoy these days were originally designed to help improve our ability to be productive.  In fact in many ways I think they had the opposite effect.  We’ve become tools of our tools.  For example many years ago when I began in business I was very careful about how I wrote each and every document because someone would have to type that document and if we needed to make changes we had to retype the entire thing.  Once word processing became the norm it was very easy to make revisions. In theory we could put out the document more rapidly since changing a word didn’t mean retyping everything.  The reality is that we spent a lot more time focusing on formatting – how the document appeared – and making little changes – a word here and there – because we could.  We didn’t think through what we were saying before we started to write.  I’m not sure we became all that more productive.

Email is another tool that should make us productive but has the opposite effect in many cases.  It’s easy to add recipients to a chain and everyone seems to want to weigh in.  What could be a 5 minute hallway conversation turns into an 8 hour chain of notes.  We’re less productive.

I advocate doing less to be more productive.  Send less email (but have more face to face conversations).  Don’t respond to every note unless it’s directed to you.  Don’t multitask – finish one thing before starting another.  Trust your staff and delegate.  Spend more time on the 20% that produces real value and less time on the other 80%. Maybe even pretend that a lot of the “productivity tools” don’t exist. What are your productivity secrets?

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