The next Holy Grail of collaboration is to kill the 28% of our day spent on distractions
In June the NY Times reported that the average information worker is distracted for 28% of their day. Unstructured email communication makes it difficult to stay focused. I know I loose focus daily from some of these email offenses:
- Rambling thought dumps
- The “FYI” atop a monster string of replys
- The CYA email that the sender incorrectly assessed needed to be CCed to you
- Noisy DLs
So, if unstructured email is a distraction, what’s the solution?
Ultimately email is just a way to communicate. It’s not the one to blame. It is the lack of structure that allows people to ramble off topic, play “I didn’t get that email” games, and forward long conversations. IBM and its clients have known this for years, which is why they’ve earned and defended market share with their Lotus software. Lotus added much of the structure around email that was needed to make it productive.
But, mail, electronic or otherwise, isn’t a silver communication bullet. Sometimes you need to IM someone. Sometimes you want to share something, but not with a particular person. Sometimes you want to have a group discussion that is easier to follow than a chain of “reply all” emails.
Consumer social media burst into businesses to fill these other communication needs. To those of us used to consumer social media, we saw a ton of potential applications and value in bringing these tools to work. But, wise naysayers kept pressing for a better explanation. They wanted to know how these communication tools were going to serve a purpose. They didn’t want to invite another distraction inside the firewall.
What’s the fear of microblogging in the enterprise? That it will be a distraction.
What’s the fear of social networking within the enterprise? That people will be goofing off instead of working, ergo distracted.
Slowly, the reality has set it for me. They are right to be concerned! If Enterprise 2.0 doesn’t help a business structure their communication, they can’t help workers be less distracted. If we introduce a bevy of content management tools (social or not) without some context and attention management, we’re just trading seats on the Titanic.
What can we do about our distractedness?
There are some tools available today that can help a person reduce their distraction. Unfortunately, the harsh reality is that today, it requires a ton of elbow grease to manage your attention and to stay on top of your communication. The current wave of communication innovation started in the consumer sector, and has only recently spread to businesses. Unfortunately, the communication needs for a business are different than that of a social scene. Vendors have popped up to meet the unique needs of a business, but it’s taking a few years because their needs are different than consumers—both drastically (needs lots of development time) and subtly (hard to recognize).
Individuals need an unstructured, flat playground in order to pursue life, liberty, and property, which seems to make people happy. Businesses, on the other hand, have a mission that requires some structure in order be a productive, which seems to make them money and that makes them happy. So, when flat, unstructured tools emerged unplanned within businesses, it caused some commotion from the needs disconnect.
Collaboration vendors have been busy focusing on interoperability and integration for the past couple of years, which is necessary because the innovation we really need requires this foundation to be in place. At the moment, we can buy many tools to create and receive content, but little to nothing to help make sense of it, much less automation assistance. However, that is changing.
2009 is going to be an interesting year for attention management tools in the enterprise. Socialtext is working on some innovative stuff with Signals, which provides automated context updates. Several vendors offer dashboards now, which allows workers to focus on the info that helps them do their jobs. Platform players are separating from the crowded pack of point solutions, and it will be interesting to see how the market shapes up by the end of ‘09. There’s also a divergence starting between vendors focusing on internal communication and the ones focusing on external communication needs. I think we’ll see the ones working on the consumer social media loose ground to the ones working on meeting the unique needs of a business. Copying and pasting consumer social media inside the firewall won’t a market leader create in the coming year.
So what?
What if we weren’t so distracted? What if our we had more time to be productive? What if we had that 28% of our day back? Imagine what we could do with that time! Can you think of something else that we could solve that would give nearly everyone a quarter to a third more time everyday?
justinkistner: Retweeting @ginavon: Great piece- Justin Kistner - with 28% of my day back I would do alot more reading http://tinyurl.com/4a5eea 10/02/08 11:24pm
ginavon: Great piece- Justin Kistner - with 28% of my day back I would do alot more reading http://tinyurl.com/4a5eea 10/02/08 11:23pm
Comments
Good post, Justin. Lots of folks have methods for controlling email, zero inbox, 43 folders, etc., I just turn mine off for a couple of hours each day after I make sure I have all the input on the project I am going to work on.
I figure email is like postal mail, same difference, they both deliver packages and/or writing that takes consideration and time. If someone needs me immediately and badly, they can call on the phone (IM works, D Twitter is better, phone is best).
If you try to constantly keep up with email, then 28% of your day isn’t the only you’ll loose, your sanity will be next. Just turn it off.
Hey Justin came across your blog on Twitter.
I am a firm believer that distractions are necessary. It lets your mind take a break and I think makes your work better when you are focused. Now of course there is a limit but it’s one of those things that I think a person needs to figure out for themselves. If i wasn’t getting distracted by email I would find something else to distract me.
Jared
my twitter account – jotoole4
I’m glad you brought this up, Jared. The distractions you’re referring to are different than the ones I mean. It seems like you’re referring to taking a mental break after pounding the keyboard for a couple of hours. Hourly employees are legally guaranteed breaks because they are so important.
When I use the word distraction, I’m referring to time lost parsing messages that in the end didn’t apply to you, turned out not to be important, and/or could have had better word economy.
This is different from prioritization, which is concerned with the order that tasks be completed. Managers would use the word distraction to describe tasks that are being done out of order, but that’s not the activity that’s killing 28% of our day. To me, the criteria for defining something as distracting comes down to whether or not you felt your time was wasted when it was over.
Mike, I agree with your tactics for managing personal email. The problem is, many people I interface with use email when they should use IM or the phone or something else. I can’t tell you how many emails I get that need a reaction in less than an hour. If I turned my email off during the core of the day, I’d get fired
From Recent Links on Ma.gnolia at Fast Wonder Blog: Consulting, Online Communities, and Social Media on October 4th, 2008 at 1:02 am
[...] Justin Kistner – The next Holy Grail of collaboration is to kill the 28% of our day spent on distrac… [...]
I’m juggling a couple thoughts on solutions/problems here:
a) simplify and specialize your business (or job desc); specialization = focus = shrinking the domain of things that qualify as “justifiably on-topic”
b) if we accept a), specialization inevitably leads to increased coordination costs as we must interface with other specialists in our firm/business network.
c) social norms are going to cut it in terms of deciding when to email/IM/call, etc. I think there should be more leadership from executives/etc on this.
d) radical transparency within the firm…not sure what all the downsides to this are, but ultimately I can imagine that it’d be beneficial for everyone to be able to see what everyone else did all day/how they spent their time.
“D” is mostly about designing incentive structures so that productivity can be shaped and management can be scaled…
I like your thoughts Ethan.
a) Specialization seems right. The work created by the emergence of networked communication devices demands specialists.
b) I wonder if specialization has to increase coordination costs. I think that was more true for industrial media. I think social media tools offer specialists the ability to be just as connected to other specialists as I am with the employees I work with at Voce, who are located mostly in the Bay Area with a few more who are remote like me.
c) Love your thought about social norms needing to come from execs on how to use these new tools. It would be awesome to see a book of social media etiquette come from an influential exec!!
d) I’m beginning to wonder if radical transparency is required because as a society, our knowledge of how to use these new communication tools and the interaction protocols that come along with them is in its infancy. I have a feeling some transparency will stick around and some will go away once we understand all of this better. Transparency that provides visibility that helps with coordination and provides context definitely helps with productivity. Flattened chains of communication that allows unstructured engagement across the org chart, while honest, doesn’t seem to provide productive value. I’m just starting to think about this, so I could be off base
re: b) specialization
I shouldn’t have said “specialization increases coordination costs”; in fact the whole reason that specializing (i.e. shedding things you’re not the best at) is productive is because coordination costs are now much lower (as you point out).
What I do mean to say is that the coordination among specialists in a network is a vital talent, arguably one of only two necessary “core competencies” (the other being: the thing you actual specialize in)
Confused yet?
re: d) radical transparency
What I’m getting at is leveraging cheap information to put additional pressure on employees to do their job, without any additional work from management.
If management flipped a switch, and every singly thing that an EE wrote or worked on was completely visible to everyone else in the firm, EE’s would have a very strong incentive to work harder (because they don’t want to be humiliated).
Dark, but likely. The socialtext signals thing kind of gets at this…
The hardest hack of all will be to figure out to overcome the simple human response to the intermittent positive reinforcement embedded in most electronic communication mediums we use. Addiction is almost inevitable.
The key might not be more communication but be more information (supporting the “radical transparency” idea). The less we need to ask to know what someone is doing, the less we need to create interruptions: more context, less content?
I know I want less communication and more information. Automated presence and status updates would eliminate a lot of time spent on social pleasantries. It’s not that I want to interact with people less, in fact, I want more time spent talking with people about things that matter. Nothing worse than a small talk conversation that started because a person felt socially obligated to stay on the phone longer than their quick question.
From Content is cheap, context is expensive: Is it any surprise which one we lack? | Unstructured Thoughts by Taylor Davidson on February 14th, 2009 at 11:54 am
[...] We’re inundated with interaction. [...]