Extreme Productivity

I end this book with a reminder of the goals of productivity. Why are you reading this book? What’s the point of getting more done in less time? In my view, the point is not just to build a more rewarding career but to enjoy a more rewarding life. The more efficient you are at work, the more time you’ll have for your family, your friends, and other aspects of life that you care about.

When I was a child in the 1950s, the relationship between home and work was quite traditional: a man was expected to be his family’s breadwinner, and a woman was expected to take care of the children and the home. Today, the gender balance at work has roughly equalized,¹ but traditional gender roles still persist to some degree. Although many men have assumed a broader role at home, women often face unrelenting demands on their time from their children, their spouse, and their career. Moreover, there has been a sharp rise in households with only one parent, who must earn a decent living while still caring for his or her children.

At the same time, advances in telecommunication have made it possible to stay connected to the office while at home. This has brought its own mixture of good and bad news.² On the one hand, greater flexibility in work location can help you resolve practical home issues, such as caring for a sick child. On the other hand, you may resent the constant pressure to check your email or make a phone call while tending to your family at home.

WHAT WOULD YOU DO WITH AN EXTRA FIVE HOURS A WEEK?

Below is a short exercise to gauge how you value different types of activities. I have listed fourteen activities and put them into four categories: Work, Family, Community, and Yourself. To start with, estimate roughly the number of hours you spend each week on each activity.

Now imagine that suddenly you have five extra hours to spend each week. Please estimate how much of that extra time you would devote to each of the activities listed above.

The answers to this exercise can be quite telling. Suppose you would spend most of that extra five hours per week spending time with your children. That means that extra time with your children is more valuable to you than extra time at work. Or suppose you would spend most of the extra time on yourself. That choice implies that you feel you have given up too much of your personal life to tend to your job and your children.

On the other hand, if you would spend most of your extra time at work, that may mean that you’re generally satisfied with your family life and would like to make a larger commitment to work. Although some of you would choose that, most professionals—even those without children—come to the opposite conclusion. In a survey, 68 percent of professional women without children said that they would choose more time over more money, roughly the same percentage as professional women with children.³

To shift the balance from work to personal activities, there are two areas you should focus on: your employer’s attitude toward flexible work schedules and your own style of working.

FIND A FLEXIBLE EMPLOYER—OR TRY TO CREATE ONE WHERE YOU ARE

As you know from earlier chapters, I’ve always emphasized results over hours. As a boss, I was comfortable if a brilliant analyst worked from 5 p.m. to midnight, as long as he or she identified good investment ideas.

Fortunately, I’m not alone: many employers allow workers to choose when to work to some degree. According to the 2012 National Study of Employers, almost 80 percent of employers permit some workers to periodically change their starting and quitting times within specified ranges.⁴ In particular, many high-tech companies and customer service firms allow employees to work from home.⁵

There will be times in your life when you have special needs for flexible working hours, such as when you or your spouse gives birth or your child falls ill. Fortunately, more than half of the employers in the United States offer paid maternity leave to female workers. And almost half of those firms allow employees to take a few days off, with pay, to care for sick children.⁶

So investigate your employer’s policies on paid leave and flextime before you accept a job. If, however, you don’t happen to work for a flexible employer—and if you don’t want to change jobs—you can still try to persuade your organization to change its work-life policies.

Start your campaign with the officials in your organization’s human resources department, who will likely be sympathetic to your concerns. In a survey of two hundred HR managers, two-thirds said that family-supportive policies such as flexible hours are the single most important factors in attracting and retaining employees.⁷ Employees agree: in a survey, a plurality of workers said that their employer’s policies on work-life balance were the most important factor they considered when mulling a job offer.⁸

THE CASE FOR FLEXIBLE HOURS

Once employees are hired, flexible policies on hours and place of work can help reduce the costs associated with employee turnover. When the Detroit Regional Chamber of Commerce began allowing various flexible scheduling options in 2000, retention rates increased from 75 percent to 90 percent.⁹ And many economists have showed that paid maternity leave significantly increases the probability that a new mother will return to her previous job.¹⁰

Similarly, flexible workplace arrangements help reduce absenteeism. Back in the 1980s, a large public utility in the western United States agreed to help researchers confirm that hypothesis. The company temporarily adopted a flexible work schedule (allowing its employees to distribute their working hours during the day as they wished) in only one of its subunits, while maintaining rigid schedules in similar subunits. In the following year, the subunit with the flexible schedule reported a 20 percent decrease in the rate of worker absences, while the rate in the other subunits remained essentially the same.¹¹

CHANGE THE WAY YOU WORK

Though you should push hard to improve your organization’s flexibility as a workplace, you can’t dictate its policies. So use the tools within your control to achieve your personal goals as best as you can.

When our children were living at home, I tried very hard to be home for dinner every night at 7. During dinner, we usually talked about what had happened that day and sometimes about current events. When our children were small, I would play with them until their bedtime. When they became teenagers, I’d watch TV with them or discuss their homework. My wife and I would also chat about personal matters.

Unfortunately, I have seen many professionals work to 8, 9, or 10 every night and go into the office every day of every weekend. They always have a pile of work to finish and never seem to have enough time to do it during normal business hours. Although you may occasionally have to work late at night if there is a real emergency, there cannot be one every day. And on most weekends, you should be able to get away with (at most) a few hours of work at home when the babies are napping or the teenagers are sleeping late.

However, I acknowledge that in certain professions, such as consulting or investment banking, it is expected that every professional will work late six or seven nights every week. And for a variety of reasons, some organizations operate in a permanent state of crisis that keeps employees chained to their desks. Such a demanding job may make sense if it really turns you on or if it will dramatically expand your career options down the road. Nevertheless, if you really want to build a relationship with friends and family, you may want to leave the job after a few years.¹²

To keep a balanced schedule, you will have to be assertive and learn to say no. When I was an SEC official, I was offered the chance to cohead a special study on the then-fledgling topic of mortgage-backed securities. Although I found the subject fascinating, I initially turned down the offer because the task force was going to meet from 7 to 9 p.m. three times a week. When I explained that I was declining in order to make it home for dinner with my family, the initial response was shock and silence. But after a few days of standing my ground and tinkering with work schedules, we managed to reschedule the meetings from 5 to 6:30 p.m. And we had no trouble completing the special study and handling ordinary business during regular hours.

Hank Paulson, the former CEO of Goldman Sachs and later secretary of the Treasury, has written about how his long working hours began to take a terrible toll on his young family. In response, he had a candid discussion with his boss, who was receptive to a revised work schedule that let Hank arrive home in time to read a bedtime story to his children. Although his wife complained that he read the stories too quickly, his children soon embraced the “daddy style” of story reading.¹³

Paulson admits that when he subsequently became a boss at Goldman Sachs, he demanded that his subordinates meet project deadlines even if that meant working long hours in the evenings and on weekends. Yet when his subordinates criticized this demand, he clearly put the burden on them to assert their needs and insist on more flexible schedules: “It’s not your boss’s job to figure out your life. You spend so much time planning your work schedule and your career, you need to make that kind of effort to manage your private life, too. Learn how to say ‘no.’ ”¹⁴

Depending on the culture of your organization and your boss’s personality, you may be anxious about setting such limits with your boss. But remember: if you have shown that you are productive and trustworthy (see chapter 11, “Managing Your Boss”), your boss knows that you will get your work done with a more flexible schedule. When I first asked to leave early on Wednesday afternoons to watch my children’s sports games, I was worried that my boss would get upset, so I offered to arrive early that day to make up the time. However, to my surprise, my boss saw it as an opportunity to show how much the company valued me and wanted to be flexible. When I became the boss and continued to leave early on Wednesdays, my example freed up other employees to attend the sports games, school plays, or violin recitals of their children.

Decide Who’s the “Caretaker” in Your Marriage—or Hire Help if You Can

Even if you establish a routine that allows you to spend quality time with your family in the evenings, there aren’t enough hours in the day for you to meet your obligations at work and spend the time it takes to raise children. So every successful professional with children needs one of two things: a spouse whose primary focus is child rearing or supportive outside child care.

Spouses who assume the child-rearing role don’t need to be full-time homemakers; many “stay-at-home” partners have fulfilling part-time careers. While our children were in school, my wife, Liz, had a private practice as a psychotherapist, which allowed her to be flexible with her hours. Outside of her practice, Liz was also a talented oil painter. Nevertheless, she spent much more time with our children than I did.

Though Hank Paulson and I were each lucky enough to have a talented and compassionate wife whose main focus was caring for our children, there is no reason why this role should automatically fall on women. I’m glad to see more couples where the wife has a high-pressure job and the husband is the primary caretaker.

In my view, the decision about staying at home isn’t about fulfilling gender roles at all. Consider the following: according to Census Bureau data, same-sex parents are just as likely as opposite-sex parents to have one partner stay at home.¹⁵ Obviously, a same-sex spouse who takes on a child-rearing role isn’t trying to satisfy antiquated gender expectations. Rather, those couples have decided together that the family is best off when one spouse stays at home while the other works. Those couples echo the sentiments of my wife, Liz, who says, “Every successful executive needs a wife—male or female.”

Nevertheless, I freely admit that this approach will not work for everyone. If neither you nor your spouse can reduce your hours at the office, or if you are a single parent, you should get as much outside child support as you want and can afford. For those with deep financial pockets, a daytime nanny may be a partial answer. For those with nearby parents or other family members, those close relatives may be ready to supply child care. Other couples can sign up with a nearby day care center.¹⁶

• Establish support networks at your job so you can give and get coverage for periodic events, such as doctors’ appointments or school plays.

• Befriend other parents (at work, school, or elsewhere) with similarly aged children. These relationships can be a tremendous resource for information, playdates for your children, and emergency babysitting.

• Set up regular arrangements for carpooling, with friends or family members as backups for emergencies.

• If you can afford it, hire a housecleaner every week or every other week, and pay a local teenager to mow your lawn.

• Find a few healthy take-out restaurants that are on your way home from work. They can allow you to have a family dinner without having to spend time preparing the meal or cleaning the pots and pans afterward.

• If you choose to cook, prepare more food than necessary and freeze the leftovers—to be warmed up as needed on days when you have work emergencies.

When you finally arrive at home, you should concentrate your full attention on your family. This is not a place for multitasking of the sort I extolled in chapter 3. First and foremost, avoid interruptions from work such as phone calls and emails. If you really have to make a last-minute phone call or send an email, do it before you open the front door. Once you are with your spouse or family, they will justifiably become quite irritated if you are interrupted constantly by business messages.

The ubiquity of communications technologies does have its benefits. If your boss can reach you on your cell phone, he or she might be more willing to let you leave early for the day. Similarly, broadband technologies have opened up new opportunities for working from home, which can be very helpful for new parents. But cell phones and email also cause significant stress: they create a perceived need for constant accessibility and interrupt personal time.¹⁷

How can you avoid your family time being interrupted by constant calls from your office? The key, again, is to be assertive and set boundaries. Many professionals decide that they will not answer a call from work after hours, unless it’s from their boss—and that’s great! You can help yourself reinforce that boundary by assigning your boss’s number a separate ringtone, letting you ignore most calls without even having to look at your phone.

Nevertheless, there are times—such as during the family dinner—when you really won’t want to answer a call even from your boss. Here, you need to use a little bit more tact. Let your boss know about such “reserved” times and request that he or she avoid calling you during those times, if at all possible. If your boss repeatedly violates this request, it may be time for a frank discussion of the kind I advocated in chapter 11, “Managing Your Boss.”

Similarly, if you are taking a much-needed holiday, ask your boss to respect the fact that you’re on vacation. If you are fortunate enough to have an administrative assistant, you can also ask him or her to intercept incoming communication during this time. If something is truly important (say, the factory is on fire!), he or she can pass it along to you.

NOT EVERYTHING IS URGENT

Setting boundaries is absolutely necessary to maintaining a healthy family life. Professor Glen Kreiner of Penn State University led a team of researchers in a project to investigate how Episcopal parish priests set boundaries between their home and their work.¹⁸ Priests, like many professionals, must deal with demanding expectations of access: a parishioner in distress expects to be able to talk to the priest at any time. Nevertheless, the researchers found that the priests were typically very clear about boundaries and expectations. As one priest said: “Thursdays are sacred time.... I am absolutely not available unless you have just been run over by an 18-wheeler. If you are headed to the emergency room, you call me, I’ll be there, but don’t you call me if you want to know whether something ought to be in the bulletin or not.”

You may feel that many of your interruptions reach the level of importance of “getting run over by an 18-wheeler.” Some interruptions surely do—that’s why doctors are often on call at night, for instance. Nevertheless, many problems can wait until the morning to be resolved.

One priest in Kreiner’s study described how he responded to a parishioner coming to his home seeking help one evening: “Oh, how long have you had this problem? Okay, you’ve been drinking for twenty years. Well, how about if we talk tomorrow morning?” In the same way, when confronted with a seeming crisis, you should step back and look at the big picture. Is this task so important that you should stop talking to your children and start working right this minute? In most cases, the answer is no.

The principle of avoiding interruptions illustrates a broader challenge: shifting your internal mind-set. When you get home, you need to be able to take off your “work hat” and put on your “home hat.” This is not a trivial task. Between leaving work and arriving at home, your entire social structure changes. What was desired at work may be inappropriate at home. As one manager put it: “When I come home and try to get involved with my family I have a difficult time switching from my cognitive, directive management style to a more emotional, cooperative one. The very things I’m paid to do well at work create disaster for me at home.”¹⁹

Sociologists have closely studied this challenge. They have observed how people change their various roles throughout the day—say, from mother to insurance agent to recreational tennis player and back to mother. A group of researchers from Arizona State University identified various “rites of passage,” such as a regular morning routine or an evening commute, that help people make such daily transitions. Without those rites of passage, the researchers maintain, people have a very hard time switching among different roles.²⁰

This is part of the difficulty of completing your day’s work at home. It is easier to shift mental gears if you leave your work behind at the office; the act of leaving the physical space of your office helps to trigger subconscious changes in your mind. The reality, however, is that most professionals occasionally need to bring work home—at least 20 percent of managers do some work at home on a given day.²¹ When you must bring work home, the key is to create a separate “mental space” for your work. This “mental space” includes separate dimensions of time and physical space, as well as your own mind-set.

On the time dimension, you should reserve certain times for your family every day, no matter what. For many professionals, that time is early evening, before the children go to bed. If you need to work after that, slip off to a separate physical space: your home study. A home study does not need to be fancy; it can just be a desk in your bedroom. The key is that it needs to be a work space, not a shared work-family space such as the kitchen table. You want the act of leaving this work space to help cue your subconscious mind to transition to your family role.

Just as you should establish a separate time and place for work activities at home, so you should separate your home and your office in your mind. The Canadian researcher Kiran Mirchandani observed the working habits of female professionals who do most of their work from home.²² She noticed that they carefully differentiated between the work they did for pay and the tasks they did for their families. Even though family obligations, such as doing the laundry or watering the garden, seem a lot like “work,” those individuals generally thought about their household chores as a “break” from work. In their minds, they constructed a rigid boundary between work and family activities.

In short, you cannot concentrate on your family if you’re still thinking about work. So when you arrive home, don’t lead off by complaining about something that happened at your office. That will just keep you mentally at work. Instead, ask your spouse and children about their day. Become an active listener, reacting empathetically and asking questions of your children. And save a little quiet time later in the evening for an intimate chat with your spouse. It is up to you to figure out how to shift out of work mode and devote your full attention to your family.

TAKEAWAYS

1. Look for employers that provide flexibility on when and where you work, and that offer paid leave for childbirth and other life events.

2. If you are in a position to influence your organization’s policies, try to institute flextime policies to improve your organization’s retention and productivity.

3. Commit every day to leaving work early enough to have dinner or spend time with your friends and family.

4. Be assertive to obtain more flexibility: assure your boss that you will get your work done even if you take an hour out of the day to take your child to the doctor.

5. If you are a busy executive, it really helps when your spouse is willing to spend more time with your children.

6. If neither you nor your spouse can reduce your office hours, hire a daytime nanny or make extensive use of child care.

7. Such couples should also get backup support at work and in the neighborhood to help out in jams.

8. When you are with your family, avoid all but the most critical interruptions from work. Most issues from work can wait until tomorrow morning.

9. Put your boss on a separate ringtone, but also encourage him or her not to call during private family time.

10. If you do have to bring work home, establish a separate time and place to do the work. Your mind needs to move from you as a professional to you as a family member.