A survey of more than 2,000 employees found that only 45 percent of time at the office is spent on primary job duties.
Following on from my little rant earlier in the week about the concept of blocking off time on your calendar in which to do your actual job, I’ve come across the infographic in the article above.
Does this ring true for you?
If you’re feeling overwhelmed, block off time in your day for flexible, unscheduled activities. You read that correctly: create chunks of time that won’t be disturbed by clients or colleagues so you can focus on your tasks or education.
I don’t know how I feel about this article. I think it goes against much of what’s represented by ROWE, and just generally feels a little infantile – my calendar is my own to manage, and if I’m not able to come to your meeting then I’ll have to decline your request or suggest an alternative time.
That said, I do find myself doing this more and more often. There’s an assumption that if outlook shows me as having some time available then that time is up for grabs for whomever gets to it first.
I work hard to keep my calendar pretty flexible, but I certainly find that the weeks where it fills up are the weeks where I accomplish the least, and instead I find myself in meetings talking about what I’m going to do the following week, or the week after that. I don’t have the capacity to do something productive any sooner than that because I have other meetings to go to in which I’ll also talk about why it’s going to be several weeks until I can do some actual work.
Part of the problem is that I don’t think I perform especially well in “meetings.” I’ve never had a great idea in a meeting – those always come to me when I’m driving home afterwards, or when I’m in the shower, or another time when my mind is free to wander.
Nevertheless, I don’t think blocking off chunks of time in my calendar is the solution. That would just make it more difficult for me to get time with people when I need their input, and for people to get time with me when they need mine.
So what is the solution? Is the system broken here, or am I doing something wrong? Let me know your thoughts!
Block Out “Unscheduled Time” In Your Day for Proactive Tasks
Over at his blog, Carson Pierce recently wrote about increasing the perceived value of project managers. As he says, “if a project goes smoothly, everyone shares the credit. If it goes off the rails, it was probably all your fault.”
“Project management is like air quality. If you can see it, it’s probably killing you.”
I once had a conversation with my boss at the time following a meeting she’d attended. She’d been told to show up and provide a quick informal update on the progress of some projects, which she did. The leaders of other teams, though, had arrived with carefully crafted PowerPoint decks explaining why they were awesome and the saviours of our business unit.
My boss felt the value of our team’s work wasn’t being recognized, and worse, was being further diminished because she hadn’t had an opportunity to present it on a level footing.
My advice was to recognize that regardless of our job description, we all work in sales.
I work in banking, but I don’t sell mortgages or credit cards like some of my colleagues do. I sell a framework and set of methodologies for successful project delivery, and the customers I sell to are internal. I know that the framework is a successful one, so I can craft just as compelling a value proposition as anybody who’s talking about how a low APR and no annual fees will help you achieve your dreams.
Essentially, I sell the value of me.
I don’t work in the freelance world or even for a contracting company: my next project will arrive because somebody will simply hand it to me, along with my next paycheque and the several after that.
My customers are not hypothetical, though, and nor is the need to sell to them, or the effort sometimes required to make that sale.
This applies to your job too, whatever it may be, but it’s especially true if you work in a field like mine which, as Carson notes, can often be a thankless one.
About three months ago I wrote a post called The Two Most Poisonous BPR Dangers, in which I talked about why you shouldn’t necessarily design processes with the “lowest common denominator” in mind.
My argument was that if you demand perfection in the output of your processes, you’ll pay for it in terms of (amongst other things) unnecessary checks and rework embedded within the process itself.
Recently I’ve been taking a project management course at Mount Royal University here in Calgary, and one of my classes featured a little nugget of wisdom that was initially very surprising to me, and then immediately familiar. In short, it was something that should have been obvious to me all along. Nevertheless, it wasn’t something that I realized until somebody explicitly broke it down for me, and in case you’re in the same boat, allow me to pass on the favour to you.
Can you ever have too much quality in the output of your process? Yes you can, and I’m about to use actual math to explain why. Brace yourselves, and join me after the break.
Conventional wisdom will tell you that the cost of preventing mistakes is lower than the cost of correcting them after the fact. Our goal in this story is lower costs, so extending that logic out would suggest that the way we optimize costs would be to demand perfection from our processes, right? Prevention is better than cure, so with 100% prevention of defects we don’t have to do any of that expensive fixing of things after the fact.
Actually though, this is not the case – it depends on how you frame things. Let’s imagine our process is a manufacturing one, and we’re producing widgets. The cost of making a single good widget and delivering it to our customer is certainly lower (and probably significantly so) than the cost of inadvertently producing a bad widget that gets shipped. If that unhappy process path is followed then now our customer service team needs to be engaged, the bad widget needs to be shipped back, and a replacement good widget sent out. All that stuff is expensive. Just think how much money we’d save if we didn’t have to go through all that rigmarole.
Here’s why this is too much of a simplification, though: we’re not making a single widget here, we’re making thousands, maybe millions of them. We can’t view our process only in terms of producing that single widget, we have to see this process how it is: something that’s repeatable time and time again, with each execution of it featuring some probability of producing a defect.
Broadly speaking, the cost of preventing mistakes looks like this:
As we move closer to 100% quality in our process, costs start to rise exponentially.
This makes intuitive sense. Let’s say our widget producing processes are resulting in a happy outcome just 25% of the time. That’s very bad, but we can be optimistic! There’s at least much we can do about it – we could improve the machinery we use, we could add an inspector to pick out the bad ones and prevent them from reaching our customers, in fact almost any adjustment would be better than maintaining the status quo. Essentially there’s lots of low hanging fruit and we can likely make substantial improvements here without too much investment.
Now let’s say our production processes result in a happy outcome 99.9% of the time. We’re probably achieving this because we already have good machinery and an inspection team. How do we improve? Do we add another inspection team to check the work of the first? And a third to check the work of the second? Perhaps we engage the world’s top geniuses in the field of widgetry to help us design the best bespoke widget machinery imaginable? Whatever we do is going to be difficult and expensive, and once it’s done how much better are we really going to get? 99.95% quality?
This is the argument I was making in my previous post. Would further improvement here be worth it from a cost/benefit standpoint? It’s highly doubtful, but we’ll get to the answer soon!
The cost of fixing mistakes looks a lot like this:
This makes intuitive sense too. As we move closer to 100% quality, the cost of fixing mistakes shrinks to nothing – because at that point there are no mistakes to fix.
Down at the other end of the chart on the left, we have problems. Back in our widget factory with a happy outcome 25% of the time, three quarters of our customers, upon receiving their widget, are finding it to be defective. They’re calling our customer service team, and asking for a replacement. Those guys are tired and overworked, and even once they’ve arranged for the defective widget to be returned there’s still a 75% chance that the replacement will be defective too and they’ll be getting another call to start the whole thing over.
In our version of the widget factory with a 99.9% happy outcome, things would seem pretty rosy for the business. There’s barely any demand on our customer service folks. We probably have just the one guy manning our 1-800 number. Let’s call him Brad. Brad’s work life is pretty sweet. He probably spends most of his day watching cat videos on YouTube while he waits around for the phone to ring.
If we were to spend the (lots of) money needed to increase quality to 99.95%, we’d probably still need Brad. He’d just get spend even more of his time being unproductive. We’d save some money on shipping replacement widgets, but really there’s very little payoff to the higher quality we’re achieving. We’ve managed to get ourselves into a position where conventional wisdom is flipped on its head: the cost of fixing a problem is less than the cost of preventing one.
This same construct applies to any process, not just manufacturing. So where, as business process engineers, do we find the balance? Math fans have already figured it out.
Cumulatively, costs are at their lowest where the two lines meet – where the money we spend on preventing mistakes is equal to the money we spend fixing them. For me this was the thing that was initially surprising, but should have been obvious all along. It seems so simple now, right?
Well, it isn’t. Determining where that meeting point actually falls is no easy task, but nevertheless the moral here is that as much as we all want to strive for perfection it actually doesn’t make business sense to achieve it! We should keep striving, because in reality the meeting point of the two lines on the chart is further to the right than the simplistic graph above might suggest – prevention is, as everybody knows, less expensive than cure and conventional wisdom exists for a reason – but if our strive for perfection comes at the exclusion of all else, if we refuse to accept any defects at all? Then we’re doing it wrong.
When an appointment on my calendar has a location, my phone attempts to figure out where it is. It uses this information to tell me when to leave to arrive on time, and provide me directions.
Lots of the meetings on my calendar have locations it doesn’t understand – meeting rooms in my office building, conference lines, etc.
It’s suggestion in such cases is apparently that I travel to 0 latitude, 0 longitude and start my search there.
When an appointment on my calendar has a location, my phone attempts to figure out where it is. It uses this information to tell me when to leave to arrive on time, and provide me directions.
Lots of the meetings on my calendar have locations it doesn’t understand – meeting rooms in my office building, conference lines, etc.
It’s suggestion in such cases is apparently that I travel to 0 latitude, 0 longitude and start my search there.
It’s mid-year performance review time where I work. I am not really participating.
It’s partly because I’m a dangerous rebel with a maniacal aversion to authority figures, and partly because my peers and our leadership team have talked it through and we all agree the whole thing would just be a bit of a waste of everybody’s time. Mostly it’s the latter, but anyway.
There are several reasons why this exercise wouldn’t represent time well spent: For one, I have a new role at work – a spot on the org chart that I actually acquired just yesterday. It’s a title bump more so than some kind of seismic shift in my career, but nevertheless discussing how I performed in the position I held last week is a little bit moot, and even more so is discussing how I plan to progress upward. I don’t plan to progress right now, I plan to more firmly establish myself in the metaphorical chair in which I newly sit.
The biggest reason it would be a waste of time, however, is that we work in a results only work environment. I’ve written about ROWE plenty of times before, but in as few words as possible the ethos here is that as long as I’m delivering results then what I do with my time is up to me. If I’m not delivering appropriate results then I get fired – which is entirely fair. Throwing out the more traditional (outdated!) clock-punching approach to work means the more traditional approach to performance reviews goes out of the window as well, however. In order to know I’m delivering the results that are expected of me my performance becomes a constant, ongoing conversation with my leader. Even if we wanted to we couldn’t possibly confine the discussion to twice-yearly meetings and still continue to be effective, so why continue to hold the twice yearly meetings if we’re already addressing this stuff as a matter of course? They’re not necessary.
So if all this is true (and it is, you can trust me), why am I asking for a twice-yearly performance evaluation that focuses on my methodologies and ignores my results?
The reason speaks to what I see as the biggest gotcha in a ROWE – you have to be fastidiously careful about what a “result” is. In my workplace ROWE has been around for a little while now, but it’s a concept still well within its formative years. I’m confident that on balance we’re doing it very well, but I don’t know that we’re yet sophisticated enough within the framework to not be making mistakes, or that our implementation of the framework has yet evolved to become sophisticated enough for our organization.
If I worked on an assembly line producing children’s toys then the results of my work would be obvious, very tangible and very easily definable, but this is the knowledge economy here! Nobody I’ve ever met or heard of produces toys anymore, with the notable exception of Bertha, the toy making machine.
I digress.
I work in a project environment, which I believe has the potential to compound the problem I’m talking about. I’m taking plenty of liberties with the details here, but basically what happens in my work life is a project comes along and my leaders assign it to me. I then go away and do some things, and eventually a “result” (hopefully but not necessarily a completed project) pops out the end. My leaders of course take some interest in how that all happens, but nevertheless that bit in the middle is the Jason show to all intents and purposes.
I agree entirely that the end result is the most important part of that story, and that’s absolutely the result on which I should primarily be judged. It’s certainly not the only result here, however.
Every meeting I go to has a result for which I hold at least some degree of responsibility. Every conversation I have, every action I take, every action I don’t take… there are results to all of those, and you’re kidding yourself if you think those results are entirely unimportant.
The best way to explain my point is probably with a negative example: it’s possible to achieve results by treating people like idiots, micro-managing them into the ground and generally making their lives miserable. I’ve never worked for a boss that managed that way and I hope you haven’t either, but they’re out there, and they’re where they are because they’re presumably achieving the results upon which they’re evaluated.
I have no desire to be that guy. It goes against my own moral compass most importantly, but it also doesn’t measure up against the way that my employer (or indeed any enlightened organization, I would hope) defines leadership. Eventually behaviour like this would come back and bite me, and this is my career we’re talking about here, my livelihood.
There are many reasons, then, that being that kind of leader isn’t an avenue I would ever wish to explore. But could I get away with it in the short term? Sure! Could I do it long enough to achieve a positive result or two? Probably! Could I be doing some scaled-back, less villainous version of it right now without even realising it? Ah! Now there’s the important question.
There are things I do to actively solicit feedback about myself and my methods from the teams with which I work, but I can understand why somebody may not feel comfortable giving me criticism to my face and could be holding something important back as a result. Nevertheless, criticism is what I want. It’s how I’ll ensure that I continue to be a leader as opposed to a boss, how I’ll grow, how I’ll evolve, and how I’ll firmly establish myself in my new metaphorical chair.
So that’s why once or twice a year I’ll be asking my leaders to reach out to some of the people I’ve worked with and provide them an opportunity to give feedback about me in a safe, anonymous environment.
Because results matter. All of them.
A couple of weeks ago, the Moto 360 went on sale here in Canada. I got up at 5am and hit the internet. My intent was to reserve one in a local store so that I could go and pick it up later that day, but I was out of luck there. Instead I ordered one from Telus.com and it arrived in the mail two days later.
I’m not a tech reviewer – not much of a writer either, for that matter – but I wanted to post to talk about my first impressions during the week and a half I’ve had this thing on my wrist.
When you take the device out of the box and fire it up it takes you through a few brief setup steps, a quick usage tutorial, and then that’s really it. If I had to describe my first 10 minutes with this $280 device in a single word then I’d go with “underwhelming.”
It doesn’t take long, however, to figure out that’s the beauty of the 360 (and, I would assume, all Android Wear devices): this is, first and foremost, a watch. It doesn’t try to be a computer on your wrist, and nor should it.
Aside from telling the time, the functionality my watch provides is more or less just another screen on which to view my Google Now cards and Android notifications, but in practice this is more useful than I ever thought it would be, and I am a huge fan as a result.
When I get a text or an email, or even a Lync message, a quick glance at my wrist is all it takes for me to decide if it’s something important enough for me to take my phone out of my pocket (or maybe even sit down in front of my computer), or if it’s something that can wait. If I want to open the message (or whatever) on my phone then a quick swipe left and a tap is all it takes – when I get my phone out, the relevant content is already on the screen.
If a quick (one or two word) reply is all that’s needed then I can just talk into my watch. I don’t know that I’d do this in public necessarily, but it is actually a useful function despite my knee-jerk initial opinion about it.
The watch face itself is configurable and there are several designs to choose from. I’ve gone for “classic,” a simple watch face that displays free/busy information from my calendar in a subtle, unobtrusive way.
Talking of my calendar, this is yet another killer feature for me. Being able to see details of my next meeting at a glance (and being able to swipe to see the upcoming stuff that follows it) is hugely useful (although again, I didn’t realize how use useful it would be until I had it).
Battery life has been a talking point in early Moto 360 reviews, but I have no concerns in this area. I have ambient mode turned on, and when take my watch off at the end of the day it usually has 30%-40% battery remaining. It certainly requires charging every day, but that’s fine by me.
So should you get one? Well I love mine and I’m glad I bought it. I recognize that this is a first-generation device though. It will be followed, no doubt, by versions with improved functionality, better displays, better battery life… in a year or so there will probably be smartwatches available that make my watch look like a relic of time gone by. If you’re not OK with that then wait until version 2 hits the shelves. For me, I’ll consider upgrading when that happens but the functionality I get from this model is worth the money to me, even if it turns out that I change to a newer model in 18 months time. If you think in the same (geeky) way as me, get your chequebook out and snap one of these things up. I’d recommend it to anybody.
Let me know in the comments if you have questions about it! I’d be happy to answer them.
A couple of weeks ago, the Moto 360 went on sale here in Canada. I got up at 5am and hit the internet. My intent was to reserve one in a local store so that I could go and pick it up later that day, but I was out of luck there. Instead I ordered one from Telus.com and it arrived in the mail two days later.
I’m not a tech reviewer – not much of a writer either, for that matter – but I wanted to post to talk about my first impressions during the week and a half I’ve had this thing on my wrist.
When you take the device out of the box and fire it up it takes you through a few brief setup steps, a quick usage tutorial, and then that’s really it. If I had to describe my first 10 minutes with this $280 device in a single word then I’d go with “underwhelming.”
It doesn’t take long, however, to figure out that’s the beauty of the 360 (and, I would assume, all Android Wear devices): this is, first and foremost, a watch. It doesn’t try to be a computer on your wrist, and nor should it.
Aside from telling the time, the functionality my watch provides is more or less just another screen on which to view my Google Now cards and Android notifications, but in practice this is more useful than I ever thought it would be, and I am a huge fan as a result.
When I get a text or an email, or even a Lync message, a quick glance at my wrist is all it takes for me to decide if it’s something important enough for me to take my phone out of my pocket (or maybe even sit down in front of my computer), or if it’s something that can wait. If I want to open the message (or whatever) on my phone then a quick swipe left and a tap is all it takes – when I get my phone out, the relevant content is already on the screen.
If a quick (one or two word) reply is all that’s needed then I can just talk into my watch. I don’t know that I’d do this in public necessarily, but it is actually a useful function despite my knee-jerk initial opinion about it.
The watch face itself is configurable and there are several designs to choose from. I’ve gone for “classic,” a simple watch face that displays free/busy information from my calendar in a subtle, unobtrusive way.
Talking of my calendar, this is yet another killer feature for me. Being able to see details of my next meeting at a glance (and being able to swipe to see the upcoming stuff that follows it) is hugely useful (although again, I didn’t realize how use useful it would be until I had it).
Battery life has been a talking point in early Moto 360 reviews, but I have no concerns in this area. I have ambient mode turned on, and when take my watch off at the end of the day it usually has 30%-40% battery remaining. It certainly requires charging every day, but that’s fine by me.
So should you get one? Well I love mine and I’m glad I bought it. I recognize that this is a first-generation device though. It will be followed, no doubt, by versions with improved functionality, better displays, better battery life… in a year or so there will probably be smartwatches available that make my watch look like a relic of time gone by. If you’re not OK with that then wait until version 2 hits the shelves. For me, I’ll consider upgrading when that happens but the functionality I get from this model is worth the money to me, even if it turns out that I change to a newer model in 18 months time. If you think in the same (geeky) way as me, get your chequebook out and snap one of these things up. I’d recommend it to anybody.
Let me know in the comments if you have questions about it! I’d be happy to answer them.
I’ve written recently about SSL and how you can enable it on your website without spending a lot of (or even any) money. I’m a big fan of Cloudflare and their free service offering, and this feature just makes it better still.
Google dancers have been in a tizzy recently after the company announced that secure websites will be ranked higher in listings, a move that has made a..
CloudFlare Adds SSL To All Customers In Advance Of Google’s Focus On Security