Was There Life Before 7/24 Connectivity?

Today's New York Times has an interesting essay by Ben Stein entitle, Connected, But Hermetically Sealed. It is nice commentary about how we use technology to seal ourselves off from the real world.

Mobile phones, PDA's Ipod's, all great technologies that contribute to the quality of our lives also serve to diminish the quality of our lives by isolating us.

Imagine, sitting with a group of people, none talking to each other, but all engaged in text messaging as vigorously as possible.

Yesterday, on a bike ride, I passed someone saying "Hello" as I passed. They didn't hear me or respond, because they were listening to their Ipod.

All of us are guilty, I find myself hiding behind my (de)vices. After all, it's so much easier to bury yourself in email, messaging, playing a game, or listening to music than to be engaged. Rather than observing what's going on around us, rather than talking to friends, colleagues, and, god forbid, strangers, we can hide behind the technology. Without these (de)vices, I have to actually pay attention to something or someone else. I have to listen, I have to hear a different point of view, I have to learn.

It strikes me a ironic, these devices intended to enhance communications instead isolate us. We deal with only the familiar and turn a blind eye to the new.

These devices, which can improve our productivity, are actually diminishing the quality of our experience. Instant accessibility supposedly helps us be more reachable for urgent things, enable us to respond faster. When I reflect on the emails, text messages, and phone calls to my mobile, as far back as I can recall, there was nothing that couldn't wait a few hours. In fact there are many things that would have been better off by waiting a few hours.

I have often thought back to pre-historic times---when we didn't have mobile phones, PDA's etc. How did we deal with "urgency?" I have been engaged with top executives in major businesses worldwide. As I reflect back, business and the quality of decisions these executives made did not seem to suffer from delays of a few hours. In some ways, one might argue that many issues which are urgent at one moment, are no longer important 30 minutes later. The built in buffer of waiting a few hours to get back, actually made numerous issues become non issues and disappear.

Many organizations are recognizing these issues. they set limits on sending and receiving emails. They limit use of Blackberry, phones and other (de)vices. We don't need an organization to help us with that, each of us can take action.

1. Set your own time limits to email.
2. Let calls to your mobile phone roll into voicemail---don't interrupt what you are doing to answer it.
3. Let text messages queue up, look at them periodically, but not instantaneously.
4. Take some joy in looking around, watching what is going on around you, engage in the real world.

Distracted: The Erosion of Attention And The Coming Dark Age

As a person who constantly rails against the levels of multitasking most of us have fallen victim to, I was intrigued by a new book: Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age by Maggie Jackson.

I have just had the opportunity to quickly skim it, and think it is an important book to read. It seems well researched, presenting data on the impact of multitasking and our inability to focus. It projects a dire future---I'm not sure I quite buy into that---but will re-read.

Technology has provided us wonderful means of staying in touch. It provides us access to oceans of information. We all have wonderful tools.

However, in leveraging these tools, it seems we may have lost sight of what they are supposed to help us do. They should help us get more done----yet because of our inability to focus, our willingness to succumb constantly to interruptions, we seem to get less done. They are to help us make better decisions, yet it seems that we have less wisdom or knowledge.

In our fast moving, bullet point focused worlds, it will be hard to sit down and read this book, but it is worth the time----and the reflection.

Quiet Time--Break Away From Email, Phones, Blackberry's

Interesting article in today's New York Times: Lost In E-Mail, Tech Firm Face Self-Made Beast. The article examines efforts by many companies to understand the impact of constant interruptions on productivity.

Companies are finding tremendous results in forcing people to stop distractions for a period of time each day, devoting that time to thinking or getting real work done (such a concept!). The article cited a Basex study which placed the impact in lost productivity in the U.S. due to distractions at more than $650 billion annually!

Take the time to read the article.

Better yet, everyday, try to take at least one hour off---don't check email, don't answer the phone (landline or mobile), don't use your Blackberry, don't surf the web, don't sit in a meeting. Use the time to think, prioritize, or get some real work done. You'll be amazed at what you accomplish.

Meetings, Meetings, Meetings!?#?!!%&*

"A person's stature in business is measured by the number of meetings on their agenda!" Sometimes I actually believe people think this is true. I see too many people participating in too many meetings---that accomplish absolutely nothing!

The problem is worse in today's "always available" global business environment. People are always on, conference calls, and other "meetings" consume our lives. I recently did an informal audit of a number of clients and found many scheduling meetings from 5:00AM through midnight! I also found, that during this 19 hour period, many were in meetings for as many as 12 hours during that time.

The meeting is not an end--it is a means. Increasingly, I believe meetings should be the last alternative we choose to get things done.

I was struck today by Fred Wilson's A VC Blog. He outlines some guidelines to managing "Unproductive" Meetings. They included (with very liberal interpretation by me):

• Limit the length of time up front--keep it short.
• Have a hard stop that you enforce.
• Set an agenda at the start of the meeting. Here I disagree with Fred a little. I think the agenda should be set and distributed before a meeting. If I possibly have the option, I do not attend meetings where an agenda has not be pre-distributed.
• Don't say yes to every request that is made.
• Do it right in the meeting, if you can: Here Fred is referring to quick emails or phone calls. We all know that "to-dos" don't get done. Those that can be accomplished by emails or calls, I do immediately.
• Ask the person who called the meeting to follow up: Have them send the notes with what is being requested or has been committed. If they don't, then it can't be important.

I'd add some other rules that help me:

• All meetings should be held in rooms without chairs.
• Never-never-never order coffee or other refreshments for a meeting. Consider not allowing refreshments---even water brought into a meeting. People's thirst of caffeine addictions will keep meetings short.
• Any presentations should be distributed as position papers beforehand. People should be required to review these before hand so that you can use the meeting time to get things done. Lou Gerstner used a variation of this technique very effectively at IBM. If a participant has not reviewed the materials before the meeting, then they don't get to speak.
• If decisions are to be made, make sure these are clearly identified in the agenda.
• Decide what the meeting is about and keep it focused on that one thing. Is it an informational meeting? Is it a decision-making meeting? It can't be both.
• No multitasking involved--if you are at the meeting, be In The Meeting! No email, except at the end to do follow ups. No phones except at the end, No blackberry's or anything else. If those are more important, don't waste your time and those of others in the meeting.
• Calculate a cost to each meeting, make sure there is a positive ROI to meetings. For consultants, time is money--I am very sensitive about my time. Assess the investment in time (on a fully burdened cost basis) that each person is making in the meeting. Is the time justifiable?

The most important thing is block large portions of your time for yourself. You need time to think about what you are doing. You need time to to the work. You need time to plan.

What You Stop Is Important

Everyone I encounter, professionally and personally, has more on their plates than they could possibly accomplish. In virtually every business, organizations are trying to do more, with fewer resources and people, in shorter periods of time. That seems to leak over into our personal lives, with each of us over committing to each other.

At some point, you start seeing very dis functional behaviors: Stress levels high, tempers short, people unhappy, people frustrated, fingers pointing, blame being passed and so forth.

I'm working with one large organization that has undergone a series of severe resource cutbacks over the past 2 years. They have cut the resources, but they haven't reworked the work. I encounter a lot of "thrashing." This is characterized by a lot of start and stop, immense levels of activity, but nothing is ever completed and results aren't being produced.

Too much of the time, I see people focused on improving the productivity and effectiveness---sometimes translated into, "How do I accomplish more in less time." People never consider stopping things, they look at how they can change to do more. This breaks at some point. Organizations literally break, they fail to perform, management and shareholders find new people to do the job. Personally, we break down. Illness is up, bills to analysts/shrinks/pharmacists/our local barkeeper are up, the quality of our relationships is down.

Something has to stop! Actually that's the answer--perhaps figuring out how to do more is really about what we need to be stopping. We can't continue to do thing in the same way or faster, perhaps we should be focusing on what we stop.

Recently, in working with a client in a major restructuring, we spent most of our time focusing on what we had to stop. There was a significant reduction in resources (read people were gone). Rather assuming we would just accomplish the same thing with fewer people, the management team had the wisdom to sit down and focus on what they had to stop. This approach freed the team up, enabling them to redesign the work, finding better ways to execute their strategies and achieve the goals they hadn't been achieving before. They are on a good path, only time will tell, but I suspect they will be successful. Prior to this, even with more resources, they were trapped they could do more. That wasn't working, but they never took the time to look at stopping things. It took a painful restructure to get them to consider the question.

Professionally and personally, for those who aren't achieving the results they expected, for those that are frustrated or can't find the time to do what they "need to do." Perhaps it's time to stop---take the time to figure out what should be stopped and get back to basics and essentials.

Perhaps doing this will also enable us to take some time to stop and smell the roses------sorry, I couldn't resist.

Why Multitasking Only Works To A Point

I've written before about the perils of multitasking and will continue to rant on this topic. I'm at fault for multitasking too much---I do emails on conference calls, update my calendar during web conferences, and manage to focus on watching the news rather than listening to my wife in the evenings.

Somehow multitasking has become the test of how important or how busy we are. I've been convinced that productivity and quality of results actually declines the more we multitask. Most of my evidence, however, has been anecdotal, or personal. (Sure I can quote accident figures about people talking on cell phones while driving.)

I read an interesting post in t the Wall Street Journal BizTech blog by Ben Worthen on February 1. In the post, he cites a study by researchers at the University of Oregon. Some points from his post: (paraphrasing Mr. Worthen's observations.)

• Researchers found the average person can only focus on four things at once.


• Despite claims to the contrary, there is no correlation to age. Younger people cannot multitask more.


• The complexity of things doesn't matter. There is little difference in trying to recall very complex/intricate items or simple things. That means little things that we take for granted, like following the car in front of us, take as much effort as something more complex, like a difficult phone conversation, or reading.

He concludes, that new technologies provide us the capability to multitask even more, however, human evolution has not kept pace and we have real limitations. It's an interesting post and worth reading. I still feel four tasks is overstating things a little.

The study does explain one thing.....why I still have problems walking and chewing gum at the same time......

In Praise Of The Checklist

Fast Company has an interesting short article, Heroic Checklist, that is a worthwhile read. I'm a tremendous fan of checklists, though in our consulting practice we find too many people resist them as either too structured or too simplistic.

Checklists are great, there greatness lies in their simplicity:

• They help keep us disiciplined and focused.
• They make sure, that in the rush of everyday activity, we don't overlook critical items/activities.
• They free us up to identify and focus on the most critical issues.
• They help us be more effective.
• They free us up to be more creative and innovative.
• They help us produce results.

Use checklists, keep them short and simple. They make a difference. They help us be more productive and effective.

It's the Message, Not Messaging

We're all inundated with emails, messages, and other forms of communication. To be fair, we probably do that with our own communications to others.

In working with many organizations, I have found email and messaging taking over from face to face and voice communications. The quality of communication has declined and many organizations are facing "death by Blackberry."

I've been curious to read about the emerging backlash---"email free Friday's" (we know what happened with casual Fridays.).

I just ran across a great post by Leo Babauta in WebWorker Daily.

“We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate. … As if the main object were to talk fast, not sensibly.” - Henry David Thoreau

This comment from Thoreau’s Walden was made more than a century and a half ago, talking about telegraph communication … and yet 160 years later, with the rise of a million means of instant communication, it’s just as appropriate.

Just because we have instant communication doesn’t mean we should do it. Sometimes it makes more sense to talk less, to deliberate, and to communicate more important ideas.

Sure, being a part of a network of constant flowing information can be a thrill, and can be useful. But we are a part of dozens of such networks, and with information and communication flying all around our heads, like a thousand buzzing insects, it can be hard to catch your breath and realize that most of it means nothing.

Let’s remember the words of Macbeth, hundreds of years ago:

“it is a taleTold by an idiot, full of sound and fury,Signifying nothing”

Step back, and think about the importance of what we are doing. Is it so urgent to send off and respond to dozens of emails? Is it worth our time to participate in instant messaging, when we don’t have much to say? Will the world end if we don’t stay up-to-date on what’s going on in the blogging world, or on Digg, or on Twitter? And do we really want to know what people are doing, all the time?
What does it all mean? And is it worth saying, and listening to?

These are the kinds of questions we might ask ourselves, on a daily basis. I’m not saying that I’m perfect: I participate in these networks as much as anyone else. But I am saying that the focus these days seems to be too much on finding new ways to communicate … and not enough on finding important things to say … and making sure that what we’re saying is worth saying.

To that end, I’d like to make five suggestions:

1. Step back. It’s vital that we take a step back from what we’re doing, and what we’re communicating and participating in, every now and then. And more now than then. Without pulling our heads out of the information stream, we can’t get any kind of perspective. How far do we step back and for how long? That’s an individual question I can’t answer, but I think we should step back far enough that we can see the entirety of the network (whether that’s email, blogs, IM or whatever) … and can actually see how the networks relate to each other … and can actually see the relation between these networks of networks and the rest of the world. Only then can we see what’s important.

2. Cut back. It truly isn’t critical that we communicate so much, and participate so much. Find ways to cut back so that you’re not in such a rush anymore. Do email and the other communications in your life less, send less, and read less.

3. Communicate only the essential. What is it that we really want to communicate? What’s truly important? What should we be saying and doing, as opposed to what we have been saying and doing? When you step back and figure these things out, you can learn to communicate just the essential stuff.

4. Learn to let go of the noise. There is a lot of noise in our world. More than we’re willing to admit to ourselves. Let it drop away. Sometimes it’s difficult, because we’re so used to doing it, and when we hear noise enough it no longer sounds like noise. But noise it is, if we learn to focus on the essential. Life will go on without it!

5. Find new ways to communicate the essential, not the noise. As we find new ways to communicate (and new ways seem to pop up every day), let’s not focus on ways to communicate faster, or more, or more frenetically … let’s not find ways to connect with more people, or increase our network … instead, let’s find ways to communicate only what’s essential, to cut down on the noise, to figure out what we should be communicating and not what we can communicate, to reach only those we need to reach and no more. Let that be the focus of our new technology, and let it serve us, and not the other way around.

Focus Until It Hurts! Then Focus More!

Most of the organizations I encounter have one common challenge----focusing. In the past week, I have been involved in projects with 4 companies---2 Fortune 50 companies, a large company, and a very early stage start up. All had exactly the same problem:

They had not identified and committed to executing the 1-2 things critical to accomplishing their goals. As a result, each was failing to achieve their goals. Consistently, failure to focus is the biggest issue I see confronting organizations and people.

This got me to thinking, why is it so tough? Some thoughts:

Focus is boring: It is so much more exciting to look at new ideas, to try new things. If I focus, I am forced to complete one thing before moving to the next.

Focus is not cool: After all, we seem to measure our worth by how much we can multitask----multitasking is the enemy of focus---but it's what we are all about---how many meetings can we manage simultaneously, how many emails, phone calls, and the story goes on.

Focus requires thought: If I am going to focus on something, I have to think---really think----what is it that I need to focus on, what do I give up, is it the right thing to do, should I be doing other things? Once I've decided, then I have to continue to think. It's much easier to wander and react to crises.

Focus requires discipline: Discipline---it's such a boring word---isn't it much more fun to react? Why do I want to be so predictable?

Focus demands accountability: If I commit to one thing and just do that----people will have an expectation---I will actually be responsible for doing something---for accomplishing something. If I choose not to focus, then it is more difficult to pin me down---I can move from crisis to crisis, issue to issue, but I never really have to produce a result.

Focus demands courage: What if I choose the wrong thing, what if I am wrong? Everyone around me is not doing this---you can't pin them down---this makes me responsible for what I do---for the result I produce. Sometimes, we are all alone in doing this.

Lots has been said about focus, but we do everything we can to avoid it. Imagine the difference in each of our lives if we could just start to focus. Imagine what each of us and our organizations could accomplish.

Multi-tasking Is Dead

Just a quick post, I was reading Michael Hyatt's Blog: From Where I Sit, and saw this great quote from Tmothy Ferriss. It expresses what I have been clumsy at expressing in past blogs. It does it in one sentence.

“Multi-tasking is dead. It never worked and it never will. Intelligent people love to sing its praises because it gives them permission to avoid the much more challenging alternative: focusing on one thing.”

I'm reading his Tim's book right now, The 4 Hour Work Week. I've just started it, appears to be well written, but I am a little skeptical. Will write later, but had to post this quote because it is so on target.

Real Business People Multitask

Ever wonder why we don't get things accomplished in meetings these days? There are lots of reasons, but my pet topic right now is multitasking. The scenario is always the same.....

A critical meeting is finally scheduled, it took weeks to do, but everyone is scheduled to attend The Meeting.......

.......people drift into the conference room......12 minutes late.....

Everyone spends the first 5 minutes jockeying for power outlets, network connections, etc.

You finally start, it's now 17 minutes into the hour....

Fortunately, you're organized, you have an agenda, you're focused, you persevere. Things get going, in the background you hear the sound of fingers on keyboards.....

...No it's not people taking notes, it's people responding to emails.....

With one ear, people are listening to the meeting, but part of their mind is distracted by the latest critical email......

"Can you repeat what you said, I missed it." Fantastic, you caught some one's attention, they have stopped doing emails for a moment. You begin to answer, then the inevitable sound......

....The deadly Nokia ringtone....

or, Hello Moto.......

Politely, someone gets up, desperately putting their mobile phone to their ear and walking out of the room......

You're 30 minutes into the meeting......

....You try to regain control of the meeting... present the agenda again, start over....

A couple of people are sitting quietly at the end of the table, eyes demurely downcast, hands seem to be neatly folded in their laps below the table.......

......no, they have the "blackberry pose"....blackberry held below the table, both thumbs fully engaged in dealing with email.

Time to get assertive---or maybe a desperate plea, "Would everyone please turn off emails, cell phones and blackberry's so we can get on with the meeting?"

You're now 40 minutes into the meeting....present the agenda again, things start going well, people are paying attention, you are finally accomplishing something....

....10 minutes later you start seeing it, fidgeting and restlessness, suddenly one person's eyes are again demurely downcast......

55 minutes into the meeting, activity starts.....no you haven't caught their attention, they are starting to close their computers, pack up their things, after all there is the next meeting to go to.......

....well maybe we can continue by scheduling another meeting........



We all know the story. Today, we protest our busy lives and the number of worthless meetings we participate in, yet we have met the enemy and it is our own obsessive behavior. Too often, it seems we measure our worth by how busy we are......or at least how busy we can appear to be. It used to be back to back meetings and a full daily calendar was a test of one's business worth. Now, multitasking has added another layer on top of it. We can sit in a meeting, do email, blackberry's, and listen on mobile phone calls all at the same time.


In the end, we accomplish nothing. One blog I read says that multitasking adversely impacts productivity by 30%---I think that is understated. Another described the computer phenomenon of thrashing--I think that's a good description.

Everyone today is genuinely busy, each of us has a lot going on. But then I look more deeply at things, aren't many of us just thrashing. We're doing a lot, but not accomplishing a thing. This blog is about making a difference---it's about producing results.

Multitasking hurts us, we actually accomplish much less. As an advisor to many organizations, I preach the importance of focus. The principle is as important for our own personal behavior. We are more effective and more efficient when we focus.

Technology is wonderful, it has provided us tools and capabilities to do a lot, but let's use it appropriately. When we are in meetings, let's dedicate our attention to the meeting...it will both shorten the meeting and reduce the numbers. When we are on a phone call, don't do email. When we are doing email, do email.

My mother was visiting and I asked her to read a draft of this blog. She's old school, she finished, looking at me confused saying: "Isn't it just good manners to demonstrate your respect by paying attention to the people you are meeting with?"

Hmmmmm........... Mom's really smart.