The Biggest Problem at Your Office? Maybe It’s You

According to author and entrepreneur Jason Fried, work is a terrible place to get work done. One of the biggest problems? Managers.

During a recent talk at the TEDxMidwest conference, Fried said that whenever you ask someone where they go when they really need to get something done, their response is rarely “the office.”
Instead, Fried says, people tend to respond in one of three ways:

1. A physical place: The porch, the coffee shop, the library, etc.
2. A mode of transport: The train, a plane, a car (the commute, in other words, says Fried)
3. A time of day: “Well, it doesn’t really matter where I am, as long as it’s really early in the morning or really late at night or on the weekends.”

But the office, Fried points out — the very place that companies have spent so much time and money to make functional and appealing — rarely makes the list. Why is that?

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The Office as Cuisinart

Fried notes that “the front door of the office is like a Cuisinart…you walk in and your day is shredded to bits.” Your time, he says, is so chopped up by interruptions and meetings that you just can’t get anything done.

Especially for creative people, Fried says — designers, programmers, writers, engineers, thinkers — it’s crucial to have long stretches of uninterrupted time to get something done. “You cannot ask somebody to be creative in 15 minutes and really think about a problem,” Fried says. “And even though the work day is typically eight hours, how many people here have ever had eight hours to themselves at the office? How about seven hours? Six? Five? Four? When’s the last time you had three hours to yourself at the office?”

Managers: Designated Interrupters

Managers are a huge part of the problem, he notes, as it’s their “job to interrupt people…. They don’t really do the work, so they have to make sure everyone else is doing the work, which is an interruption.”

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They also tend to pop by at the worst possible times — “while you’re actually trying to do something they’re paying you to do,” Fried notes.

But that’s not the worst thing managers do. We’ll look at that cardinal sin tomorrow. We’ll also tell you about an upcoming webinar that can help you reform even your most interruption-prone managers.

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