By Stephen D. Bruce, PHR
Editor, HR Daily Advisor
Just My E-pinion
Where do you go when you really need to get something done? Probably not the office, says entrepreneur Jason Fried. There are just too many distractions.
Fried is the co-author, with David Heinemeier Hansson, of the book Rework, about new ways to conceptualize working and creating. Fried is the co-founder and president of 37 signals , a Chicago-based company that builds web-based productivity tools like Basecamp, Campfire, and Writeboard.
We expect our people to do good or great work, Fried says, and we assume that they need to come together to do the work, so we get an office and fill it with stuff, and expect our employees to come to that place every day to do work. But is it really the place to get things done? Fried asks.
Ask people where they go to get work done and they mention either a place, or a moving object, or a time. The answers Fried hears most often are:
- Porch
- Deck
- Kitchen
- Basement
- Coffee shop
- Library
- Train
- Plane
- Car
- Commute
- Early or late
- Weekend
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I almost never hear someone say “the office,” says Fried.
Working at the office is like being in a Cuisinart, he says. You get 20 minutes and then it goes on and you get pulled aside, then 14 minutes more. At the end of the day you look back a day and realize that you got nothing done.
You were at work, sat at desk, went to meetings, did calls, but didn’t actually do any meaningful work, he says.
All people, and especially creative people, need long stretches of uninterrupted time to be really creative and consider a problem carefully.
Why do people choose to work at home, or go in early, or work on weekends? Because there are no distractions, Fried says.
It’s like sleep, says Fried. Sleep has stages, and when you get awakened, you have to go back and start again with the earlier stages. Work is like that. So why do we expect people to work well when they are interrupted all day long?
Ironically, many employers don’t want employees to work at home because there are too many distractions, but home distractions are voluntary, says Fried, and at the office, they’re involuntary:
Managers try to blame Facebook and Twitter, Fried says, and some employers actually ban these things. But that’s a decoy. These are just modern-day smoking breaks.
Real Problems are M&Ms
The real culprits, says Fried, are the M & Ms—managers and meetings. A manager’s job is to interrupt people. Managers have to make sure that people are doing work. So they interrupt.
And meetings are worse—just toxic terrible things, Fried says. Managers call meeting and it’s an incredibly disruptive thing. You’re saying, “Stop what you’re doing” to 10 people, and what are the chances that all 10 people are ready to stop work at that moment?
So people go to the meeting—they’re not working—and they talk about things they are going to do later. Remember, says Fried, that a 1-hour meeting with 10 people is really a 10 hour meeting.
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Suggestions to Remedy the Situation
Fried has three suggestions for making the office the place for productive work:
1. You’ve got casual Friday, how about “no talk Thursdays.” Start with one afternoon a month, Fried says. You’ll see that a tremendous amount of work gets done.
2. Start switching from active collaboration to more passive models—e-mail, instant messaging, and various collaboration products. Some say e-mail is distracting, but it’s at the time of your choosing. Yes, you’re going to be interrupted, but you can be interrupted when it’s convenient.
The important concept underlying this suggestion is that very few things need immediate answers, Fried says.
3. If you have a meeting coming up, just cancel it, Fried says. Everything will be just fine.
Are You Losing Time to M & Ms?
What do you think? Are M & Ms robbing you of productive time? What do you do to keep M & Ms at bay? Let me know at sbruce@blr.com or leave a comment below.
I think it’s important for employees to speak up (respectfully) when a meeting is either entirely superfluous, or occurring more frequently than needed. Some managers feel more “manager-y” when they get the whole team together on a regular basis, but oftentimes it’s not necessary – or, as Fried argues, actively harmful to productivity.
Active collaboration is a Catch 22; it’s one of the problems people have with totally online degrees. Sure, we can communicate via email and collaborative products in less time and with less distraction, but there is something dynamic about real-time meetings, especially for brainstorming or problem-solving.
One solution similar to his suggestion of ‘no talk Thursdays’ might be for companies to designate certain days of the week as “meeting free” days and (as a general rule) forbid them on specific days of the week. How nice would it be if you knew that you could guarantee you had no meetings every Tuesday and Thursday, for example? Imagine the peace the peace of mind that you could count on having 1 or 2 days per week that can’t get filled with meetings, so you could focus on getting things accomplished (other inevitable and occasional interruptions aside)!
Meetings are sometimes necessary. And they don’t need to be just a necessary evil. The problem is choosing the appropriate method for communication/problem solving at any given time. Is a meeting really necessary when a simple phone call would work? Would one meeting with all the players avoid an endless chain of emails? Then of course, any meeting requires good facilitation – a skill many people lack.