Why Johnny Can’t Work

Can you quickly name 6 ways to increase productivity (your own, or your employees’)? Try these.

1. Help everyone learn to use email more efficiently and effectively.
2. Learn how to eliminate meetings when possible, and make the meetings you do have more effective.
3. Create “do not disturb” times where phone calls and drop in visitors are off-limits.
4. Manage performance to minimize mistakes that require time-intensive fixes.
5. Develop healthy and productive social media use practices.
6. Mix breaks with intensive work periods to encourage the best performance.

How much of the average work day is spent on activities – both work related and incidental – that really don’t have much of an impact on what we are there to do (i.e. work)?  If you listen to some experts, the answer is “a lot”!

Just listen to these arguments

The average person spends 28% of their workday deleting, sorting and replying to email (ok the replying part might help workflow, but think of the time that would be saved if everyone adopted best email practices)

Meetings are routinely pegged as being the biggest category of work time wasters. (We’ve written about that here before). There are so many ways to eliminate waste in meetings, it’s amazing this issue stays at the top of the list.

Attention-switching from task-to-task is a big time waster, as it takes anywhere from 5 to 23 minutes to get refocused. Co-workers stopping by, phone calls that you just “have to answer” and ad-hoc meetings (the meeting after the meeting?) are often the culprits here.

Over one-third of people recently surveyed stated that one of the biggest time wasters for them was having to fix other people’s mistakes. Where do all these mistakes come from? Maybe rushing to meet deadlines because your email, and meetings, and phone calls have you constantly behind schedule?

For all of the value that social media can bring to business, a lot of delay, distraction and time wasting comes from having your social media feeds in front of you all of the time. Companies realize that it is nearly impossible to keep people from reading their Facebook pages or looking at their Twitter feeds, but new approaches , emphasizing compartmentalizing your social interactions into brief time blocks once every hour or two show promise for mitigating this problem.

Allowing people to take brief breaks regularly during the day keeps them alert, awake and focused. If you have a desk job, it is vital to your overall health to stand up once in a while and take a brief walk (just don’t go to the next cubicle and interrupt your busy co-worker). The Pomodoro Technique for example, recommends 25 minutes of intense work, followed by a five minute break. Other recent reports suggest that working hard for 52 minutes and then taking a 17 minute break could be optimal (how’s that for specificity?).

Other time wasters, like trying to find in-house information or track down a co-worker whose help you need, can be lessened by creating effective company intranets or Enterprise Social Networks.  These tools will help you search for what or who you need, and leave requests to people to get back to you so that you can move on to the next task.

It may be difficult to accurately predict how much of a productivity boost you will see from adopting the practices described here, but it would be even harder to argue that there isn’t a lot to gain from making the effort!