As a student I was tested and identified as gifted in both reading speed, and comprehension. This God-Given talent when combined with my grandfather and mother’s modeling of a strong work ethic, meant I did well school always finishing near the top of my class from grammar school through college and post graduate studies. I also read, a lot.
As I entered the professional workplace, I used my work ethic and educational experiences to early success I quickly jumped into starting my own business and took on managerial responsibilities. Here I found my true passion – developing others and building high performing teams.
As I my success grew, I discovered as the quantity of relationships increased so did my work load. I went from 40 to nearly 80-hour work weeks. In order to get enough done I needed to work when everyone else was gone for the day. I was constantly in a state of being behind, running late, and missing client deadlines.
I couldn’t keep it up, mental and physical exhaustion started to hit me, hard. Here’s my journey to a better life!
The First Endeavor – Conventional Time Management
- ‘Work Smarter Not Harder”
- “Use this new revolutionary calendaring system!’
Ideas and books – I tried ‘em all. I did get back from time (about 10%) by reducing digital and ‘analog’ clutter by cleaning up my desktops organizing much better filing systems. It wasn’t enough, my business growth just swallowed that time up, too.
Clutter is your enemy.
The Second Endeavor – Interruptions are Constraints
While working on a project with Rick Pay, a terrific Theory of Constraints expert told me about studies with engineers and interruptions. Studies at the University of California at Irvine found, when interrupted, it takes an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to get back to the task! Our brains essentially ‘forget’ where we were and have to go back and start the task over.
While designing systems with Rick around Theory of Constraints – I concluded interruptions were constraints! I was trying to get my people and me just to do tasks faster, instead of reducing interruptions!
Shoulder tapping was the worst offender – super charged by new technologies like Slack, Teams, and SMS texting.
My management team and I went on a mission to reduce interruptions for my people and myself. We reengineered our customer service, production, and operations workflows and processes to reduce interruptions. This worked very, very well. Both my people and my productivity more than doubled!
Personally, I was able to stop working Saturday’s and cut my work hours from 12 to 10 hour days, and was showing up on time more often and missing fewer deadlines.
The Third Endeavor – Stopping the Multi-Tasking Madness
Multi-task = Task Switching. Human brains cannot multi-task only switch from one task to another. Task switching results in up to a 40% reduction in productivity and measurable increases in anxiety.
When I started to look at the how my people and I succumbed to task switching, I quickly realized the software industry is fighting and winning by taking my people’s and my time. The technology is much stronger than any policy or procedure.
I found that there is a direct and measurable increase both in productivity and mental health by limiting task switching.
Action Plan – What Worked for Me:
I was successful in more than doubling my company’s productivity and nearly tripled my own. I took the following actions:
Simplified messaging technologies
- Chaos and confusion is the result of using multiple systems to communicate without regard to the content, priority or timeline. Slack, Email, Teams, Zoom, Voicemail, SMS Texting, Google Search, each have their own way to steal time (or sell stuff)
- Reduced to one of each application, email, chat, video. Use the same applications on desktops and smartphones.
- Set priorities for response times and communicated it to everyone. If a customer calls about a payment problem, the response is one day. If they call about a non-working product, the response is one hour. If a vendor calls about a new product, ask for an email to setup an appointment. Use chats for figuring out where to have lunch, not solve an engineering problem.
Simply your devices
- Cut down the number of screens and limit the number of visible applications. Task switching is much too easy when you use multiple digital screens running multiple programs at the same time. A smartphone is a screen.
- Turned off alerts to my smart watch.
- For me it is best to turn off all alerts, everywhere, and learn to schedule time to view and respond.