KNOW WHAT IS WORK
From time to time I am contacted by companies that make time-tracking software, which is generally designed for employers who wish to discourage employees from goofing off. Often, these pitches feature intriguing statistics such as “Businesses lose nearly $1.1 billion a week in time spent on fantasy football teams.” Monitor your employees’ time to see how many minutes feature screens full of ESPN.com instead of Outlook and boom! Productivity will go through the roof! Right?
Well, maybe. I seldom write about such programs because, aside from the Big Brother aspect, the truth is that most professionals don’t consider spending 8 hours a day watching cat videos on YouTube as a good use of time. You may do a quick check of your fantasy football team’s status after an intense meeting, but this wastes, maybe, a few minutes, and no one is under any delusion that this is “work.” A more insidious problem—a problem that drains far more cash than the $1.1 billion lost weekly to fantasy football—are the things that look like work, but aren’t actually work. They may, theoretically, be part of your job, but they’re not work if they’re not advancing you or your organization toward your goals.
Take e-mail. According to a 2012 McKinsey Global Institute report on the social economy, knowledge workers spend 28 percent of their time wading through their inboxes. According to Lookout, the mobile-security firm, 58 percent of smartphone users say they don’t go an hour without checking their phones. And not just waking hours. Lookout reported that 54 percent of smartphone users check their phones while lying in bed. Almost 40 percent say they check their phones while on the toilet. Some 9 percent admit to checking their phones during religious services. Much of this constant connectivity is about checking e-mail, and e-mail certainly looks like work. But if checking e-mail 10 times per hour means that writing a presentation takes two hours instead of one, it’s hard to say that was a better use of time than writing for 30 minutes, checking e-mail for 15, writing for another 30 minutes, then watching cat videos for 45 minutes straight. And if some of those e-mails didn’t need to be read at all—think of how many threads you delete after coming back from vacation—then you would have done just as well to cruise over to your fantasy football Web site while you were at it.
Or consider that bane of white-collar existence, meetings, and their remote-work sibling, conference calls. I’m often astonished by the sheer volume of meetings that show up on people’s time logs. Jackie Pyke, vice president for brand strategy and governance at Capital One, estimates her meeting load is 70 percent of her schedule “And it could be 100 percent if I let it and if I did not actively manage who is making meeting requests. We’re an extremely inclusive and collaborative culture, so people err on the side of including lots of people.” Collaboration is wonderful, but it has a downside because the volume of meetings soon turns into a vicious cycle. The best way to get people to pay attention to a project is to schedule a meeting—because meetings become deadlines. If you don’t schedule a meeting, your project will fall behind the other 6 meetings people have for that day in the priority list. That’s not because your project is objectively less important. It’s because things that happen at a specific time and involve commitments to other people automatically seem more important than they are.
To be sure, people do need to meet, just like they need to send and read e-mail, and in many cases, meetings—at least the one-on-one sorts—are critical to good management. What successful people do is to constantly calculate the opportunity cost. Pyke says that “I challenge myself once a year or more to study how I’m spending my time and see if I can make some game-changing moves.” She’ll clear the calendar of meetings scheduled in perpetuity, so those meetings have to earn their way back into her life. She’ll look at meetings she used to think she had to be in and ask “How could I not be there? Maybe it’s uncomfortable, but it presents an opportunity for someone else on my team to step up.” Or sometimes she’ll notice that someone is already stepping up—and that’s a red flag that she doesn’t need to be there. Her team members are smart people, and they can probably handle it. Of course, part of working with good people involves meeting with them and supporting their development. “I really try to protect an hour a week with each of my direct reports,” Pyke says, but she realized “That’s not realistic for me or them. They’re moving up in seniority as well. An hour a week is a lot. They’re much more autonomous than when they were at the more junior level.” Maybe the check-in should be an hour every other week.
Or you can block an hour but not take an hour. Colin Day, CEO of iCIMS, an HR software company, has time in his calendar to meet for an hour, weekly, with each of his 5 direct reports at his 250-person company, but they “don’t feel the need to hang around for an hour because it’s an hour,” he says. Nothing makes him happier than to get everything clarified in 5 minutes, or just via IM. Then he and they can go recapture that time—because successful people are always asking some version of the question what else could I do with that hour? A good reason to mind your hours and to know how long things take is that you can then translate any given request for your time into those terms. You know that calling six old clients—and spending 20 minutes on the phone with them apiece—is quite likely to result in at least one request for a proposal. A two-hour meeting is thus the equivalent of giving up a good lead on new work. Is it worth that? Or could the meeting take only an hour, giving you the other hour to reach out? Sometimes it helps to put this question in terms of cold, hard cash. A recurring meeting that involves 10 people getting together for 2 hours per week costs the same as having another part-timer on staff. Are you getting as much value out of that 2-hour meeting as another employee would add? Or are the first 15 minutes critical, and the rest is just a voluntary tax on your organization’s time?
This question of opportunity cost is particularly important if you’re running a small business. Entrepreneurs often have a terrible time delegating the tasks they know they’re good at, but the problem with having just 2,000–3,000 work hours per year is that a choice to write the first draft of that report yourself, because you have a zesty way with verbs, is a choice not to figure out which of your revenue streams is growing fastest and deserves more attention. Those who leap from microbusiness to million dollar business tend to make this calculation. Traci Bild’s Bild and Company provides consulting services for senior housing companies. The organization generates $4 million in revenue each year, yet Bild leaves work at 3 p.m. to tackle the after-school shift at home. Her secret? “I’m constantly trying to replace myself,” she says. “In my work, my number one strategy as a leader is to replace myself. If I give my duties away, it frees me up to go to the next level. That’s been my strategy for years and it’s worked incredibly well.”
Josh Skolnick, a 20-something entrepreneur, started mowing lawns in high school in suburban Philadelphia. He was so entrepreneurial that by the time he graduated, he had multiple crews working for him. He decided to go into tree care and trimming after sensing it was a profitable market. A client asked him to deal with a dead tree, so Skolnick hired a contractor and, since the guy was there, started knocking on doors to see if the neighbors needed any tree services too. He sold $20,000 worth of work in a day. Clearly, Skolnick is very good at retail selling. But as he’s building the company that became Monster Tree into a national franchise, it no longer makes as much sense for him to go knocking on doors, even though he does it well. So, he’s trained his crew foremen to walk around properties with homeowners and point out looming limbs and potential rot. He’s also trained them to say hello to neighbors who are out in their yards and make soft sales that way. “People will shock you. It’s amazing what people are capable of doing,” he says. “I’ve got guys working for me who I’d never guess would be able to sell tree work,” but they’ve learned and mastered it and generated thousands of dollars in sales, which Skolnick makes sure to reward them for. “What I find with my business is that I gain respect from employees when I treat them as I would want to be treated,” he says. “From a financial perspective, I take care of my employees, and provide a bonus structure to incentivize them to accept more responsibility.”
Of course, in your quest to make sure you don’t mistake things that look like work for actual work, there’s a corollary, which is that you shouldn’t fail to see as “work” things that really are. Productivity involves working with your temporal body, as opposed to against it. All kinds of things that don’t look like work, when viewed from the right angle, are in fact great uses of time.
For most of us, that means activities like taking breaks. Pham gets up and does yoga stretches every hour. I’ll go for a walk, a run, or to run an errand during my low-energy time in the afternoon. I know that if I stay at my computer, I’m likely to find myself drifting over to e-mail every 30 seconds rather than cranking things out. Curiously, these breaks often enable me to process ideas that haven’t quite fit together during my active work time. While writing this book, I considered canceling a 6-mile jog with my running partner because I was falling behind on my deadline. But I went and hashed out the outline with her as we puffed along. Perhaps it didn’t look like work. But I got a lot more done than I would have sitting at my desk.
Some research finds such breaks—and general self-care—have a fairly strong financial return. In 2006, Tony Schwartz and Catherine McCarthy studied productivity at several Wachovia bank branches in New Jersey. They put 106 employees through a 4-month wellness program that involved instruction on energy management, with guidelines for eating regularly, defusing negative emotions, and getting up from their desks from time to time. Compared with a control group, the energy-management group achieved a 13 percentage point greater increase in revenue from loans and a 20 percentage point greater increase in revenue from deposits. (As Schwartz and McCarthy pointed out in their 2007 Harvard Business Review write-up of the study, Wachovia used those metrics to evaluate employees.) To be sure, it’s hard to know exactly what motivates a person. A wellness program may simply make someone believe that her boss cares about her as a person—and that’s the key motivating factor, not the program itself. That said, plenty of people who’ve tried scheduling regular breaks have found that the time “lost” is more than made up for with renewed focus.
Matt Hall builds such breaks into the culture of Hill Investment Group, a wealth-management firm in Saint Louis. Hall cofounded Hill Investment Group in 2005 with the goal of helping clients to “take the long view.” Good investing is about achieving maximum sustainable returns—with the emphasis on sustainable—and likewise, Hall tries to manage his hours like he manages his clients’ money: carefully.
The week as a whole, and the hours within it, are well choreographed. On Monday and Friday he does the work of scheduling and prepping so that he can focus on clients on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. Hall knows that 10 a.m. to noon are his peak-focus hours, so “I treat it like real estate. What’s the most valuable real estate you have? You wouldn’t just give it away,” he says. The week is scheduled with the aim of matching his most valuable time—the 6 hours comprised of the 10 a.m. to noon block on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays—to the task of nurturing the firm’s most important relationships. “That sets us up for success,” he says.
Lunch follows these peak productive hours at noon. It’s a group affair, which encourages people to take this break, often with continuing education built in. “We have frequent lunches where we stay in and watch a video together and discuss it,” Hall says. There are TED talks to watch, or someone talks about a book that inspired her. After lunch can be a somnolent time, so these hours are for activities like writing communications for clients, or other activities where no one can see you yawn. The civilized ritual of tea time is observed daily around 3:30 p.m. Everyone tromps down to Starbucks, which is a few blocks away. “None of us really drink tea,” says Hall. “The whole point is to get up, get the blood moving, and get out.” That enables people to focus for the last stretch until 5:30 or so.
It’s a very sustainable schedule. It’s one that—despite growth of 35 percent per year during a time when the economy hasn’t been booming—“lets us maintain some sense of balance that allows us to feel good when we go home.” Things weren’t always like this. When Hall and his cofounder Rick Hill launched Hill Investment Group in 2005, things “felt chaotic.” With client meetings happening all over the place and no sense of rhythm, “at some level we got overwhelmed.” They realized that “We needed to get a structure—not the kind of structure that overwhelms creativity and spirit, but the kind of organization that allows us to do more.”
Hall has a particular reason for wanting to monitor his energy. In 2007, at age 33, he was diagnosed with chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML), a form of blood cancer. Staring cancer in the face as a young man had a stark effect on him. “What that does is give you a pretty good perspective on your life,” he says. “You really get a very clear sense that there is a finite amount of time.” When he came back to work, Hill Investment Group reorganized the calendar, designing each week with the goal of making work meaningful and leaving time for happiness in other spheres. “We wouldn’t have a meeting, a phone call, or go anywhere with any relationship if it didn’t create any energy back to us,” he says. “We are picky and selective and serious about that.”
Because CML is now treatable with a class of drugs that includes Gleevec, Hall can expect to live a relatively normal life. In other words, his time is no more limited than the rest of ours. The difference is that Hall can see this more clearly than other people. He sometimes fields jokes from friends who drive past him and his colleagues all enjoying the afternoon sunshine on the way to Starbucks. “I think people associate hard work with sitting in a workplace crunching the numbers, but we don’t see it that way. We don’t view activity and value as connected,” says Hall. “I could create a lot of activity but it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s doing anything for you or for me.” It’s just the white noise of white-collar work. Better to have work be about getting what matters done.
And if that means watching a few cat videos? So be it. Successful people know that astonishing productivity—particularly in creative fields—requires filling the pot. Pham browses through book stores and art blogs. You could try getting a library card and checking out something serendipitous from the stacks. You could visit an art museum. You could read professional journals in related but not immediately similar fields. You could pop over to Starbucks and talk to fascinating people. That might not look like work if your definition of work equates watching a Khan Academy video on differential equations with stealing money out of your employer’s wallet. But if your definition of work focuses on output—knowing that at your retirement dinner no one will talk about your daily achievement of Inbox Zero—then it all looks perfectly fine.