Sync with Stakeholders at Work
Unlike the other life domains, I don’t need to remind you to make time for work. You probably don’t have much of a choice when it comes to this area. Given that work likely takes up more of your waking hours than any of the other domains, it’s even more important to ensure the time spent there is consistent with your values.
Work can help people live their values of being collaborative, industrious, and persistent. It also allows us to spend time on something meaningful when we labor for someone else’s benefit—like our customers or an important cause. Unfortunately, many of us find that our workday is a hectic mess, plagued by constant interruptions, pointless meetings, and a never-ending flow of emails.
Thankfully, it doesn’t have to be this way. We can do more and live better by clarifying our values and expectations with each other at work. Clarification around how we spend our time at work fosters and reinforces the central quality of a positive working relationship: trust.
Every company has its policies. However, when it comes to how employees manage their workloads, many managers have little idea how their colleagues spend their time. Similarly, perhaps the biggest unknown to the employee is how they should spend their time, both inside and outside of work. How responsive should employees be after hours? Are they required to attend happy hours or other events full of “mandatory fun”? Will managers and clients expect employees to fulfill last-minute deadlines? Should they let their spouses know to expect late-night outings when company execs drop into town?
These questions are significant because they directly affect our schedules and, subsequently, the time we have for the other domains in life. A recent survey found 83 percent of working professionals check email after work. The same study notes that two-thirds of respondents take work-related devices, such as laptops or smartphones, with them on vacation. And about half the respondents said they’ve sent work-related emails during meals with family or friends.
Staying late at work or feeling pressured to reply to work-related messages after hours means spending less time with our family and friends or doing something for ourselves. If these demands become more than the employee bargained for, trust and loyalty can erode, along with one’s health and relationships. The trouble is, we don’t typically know the answers to these questions until we are already in a role.
There are also many unknowns from the employer’s perspective. When tasks and projects take longer than originally planned and expectations aren’t met, managers are left guessing why. Is the employee not capable? Is he not motivated? Is she looking for another job? How are they spending their time? In response to underperformance, managers often ask employees to do more and work longer hours. But this common knee-jerk reaction asks employees to give more than they expected, stressing the working relationship and prompting them to push back in subtle ways.
What does this pushback look like? While often done unknowingly, we find ourselves doing low-priority work, slacking off at our desks, chitchatting too much with colleagues, and generally reducing productive output.
Other times, we (perhaps unconsciously) sabotage our companies by doing pseudowork, tasks that look like work but aren’t in line with the company’s top priorities. (Think: spending time on pet projects, corporate politicking, sending more emails, or holding more meetings than necessary.) This sort of pushback seems to increase when people work more hours. In fact, studies have found that workers who spend more than fifty-five hours per week on the job have reduced productivity; this problem is further compounded by their making more mistakes and inflicting more useless work on their colleagues, resulting in more time spent to get even less done.
What’s the solution to this madness?
Using a detailed, timeboxed schedule helps clarify the central trust pact between employers and employees.
Through regular review, the two parties can make informed decisions regarding whether the employee’s time is spent appropriately and help them allocate time to more important tasks.
An advertising sales executive at a large tech company in Manhattan, April struggled with her schedule. The mounting pressure to sell more and do more in pursuit of a management role had embittered her friendly disposition. Those pressures infected April’s schedule in the form of more meetings, more unplanned conversations, and more emails. Those additional tasks crowded out the time she had to focus on her priorities: caring for her customers, closing more sales, and demonstrating greater results.
When I met with April in her office, she looked frazzled. She had two months left to close over a third of her annual sales quota of $15 million, and I could tell her mind was elsewhere. April feared she wouldn’t meet her goal and had concluded that she was the problem—she just wasn’t working hard enough and therefore had to do better. In her mind, better meant working even more hours.
Striving to be more productive was making April miserable and was causing her to neglect the other domains of her life. But productivity itself wasn’t her problem; she was a productive person who could squeeze a lot out of a small amount of time. Rather, the problem was her lack of a timeboxed schedule, compounded by the self-limiting belief that she, and not her management of time, was the problem. “I’m too slow,” she told me over lunch one day. But there was nothing wrong with April. She wasn’t slow, but she was lacking the productivity tools for her new role.
Though scheduling her time at work didn’t come naturally to her, April subdivided her workday to account for the most important tasks she wanted to accomplish. She carved out time for focused work first, aware that creating new client proposals could be done faster and better if she did it without interruption. Every diversion slowed her down and made it more difficult to get back to customizing the pitch. Then she reserved a block of time for client calls and meetings, followed by time in the afternoon for processing emails and messages. I encouraged April to share her work-related timeboxed schedule with her manager, David.
To her surprise, when they sat down to discuss her schedule, April found that David was extremely supportive of her intention to stick to a more planned-out day. “He knew I was burning the candle at both ends,” she told me. “When I proposed a weekly schedule, he actually seemed relieved. He told me it was helpful to know when he could call or message me instead of guessing if I was with my family.”
When she sat down with David, she realized many of the commitments clogging her calendar weren’t nearly as important to him as the time she spent closing deals. Thanks to their newfound alignment, David agreed she didn’t need to attend so many meetings or mentor so many people and reassured her that this would not adversely affect her career ambitions, as long as she put in the time for her most important task: increasing revenue.
To help them stay in sync, April and David decided to meet for fifteen minutes every Monday morning at eleven o’clock. Reviewing her schedule for the week ahead would reassure them both that April was spending her time well and enable them to adjust accordingly, if necessary. At the end of the meeting, she realized she could gain greater control over her workday and also cut back on the time she spent tethered to her phone at night—time that came at the expense of her personal life. April loved the outcome: a detailed view of her entire week that respected her values, reduced distractions, and, ultimately, granted her more time to do what she really wanted.
April’s story is not everyone’s story. The way April allocated her time won’t be the way you spend your time, but schedule syncing is essential, whether with a family member or an employer. Regularly aligning expectations around how you’ll spend your time is paramount, and must be done in regular, predictable increments. If your schedule can be synced weekly, then review it and get agreement for that period, but if your schedule changes daily, getting into the routine of a brief daily check-in with your manager will serve you both well. If you report to multiple bosses, a timeboxed calendar can serve as a way to get alignment around how you spend your time. There’s no mystery about what’s getting done when there’s transparency in your schedule.
Remember, the Indistractable Model has four parts. Mastering internal triggers is the first step and making time for traction is the second, but there’s much more we can do, as you’ll soon learn. In part five, we’ll also dive into the role of workplace culture and why persistent distraction is often a sign of organizational dysfunction. For now, it’s important not to shortchange the simple yet highly effective technique of schedule syncing.
Whether at work, at home, or on our own, planning ahead and timeboxing our schedules is an essential step to becoming indistractable. By defining how we spend our time and syncing with the stakeholders in our lives, we ensure that we do the things that matter and ignore the things that don’t. It frees us from the trivialities of our day and gives us back the time we can’t afford to waste.
But once we’ve reclaimed that time, how do we get the most out of it? We’ll explore that question in the next section.
REMEMBER THIS
• Syncing your schedule with stakeholders at work is critical for making time for traction in your day. Without visibility into how you spend your time, colleagues and managers are more likely to distract you with superfluous tasks.
• Sync as frequently as your schedule changes. If your schedule template changes from day to day, have a daily check-in. However, most people find a weekly alignment is sufficient.