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From Our Team

COGITUS INTERRUPTUS

By Dan Markovitz

Cogitus Interruptus is the disease of the modern workplace. Its symptoms are familiar to any executive: the inability to complete a thought or a task without losing focus under the onslaught of relentless interruptions. It results in a lack of efficiency, a loss of time to solve problems, to think strategically, to plan, to dream – to get your company from here to there. But there’s hope: there are techniques to help you regain the opportunity to think without interruption.

It’s no surprise that our ability to focus on a single task without interruption is waning. What is a surprise is the extent to which interruptions define our workdays. In a survey of 1000 senior executives, technology research firm Basex found that knowledge workers lose about two hours per day due to unnecessary interruptions such as instant messaging, spam e-mail, telephone calls and the Web. Of course, some of the damage is self-inflicted: more than 60% of the respondents read email immediately or nearly immediately.

Gloria Mark, a researcher at UC Irvine, found a similar situation. Each employee she studied spent only 11 minutes on any given project before being interrupted. Moreover, it would take 25 minutes on average to return to that task.

To some extent, an increase in interruptions is an inevitable result of today’s larger, more complex organizations. Managing sprawling enterprises requires more team interactions, and dotted line relationships in matrix structures abound. The pervasiveness, ease, and zero cost of email, IM, and SMS has exacerbated the situation by encouraging communication, even when it’s not valuable.

But in fact, there is a real cost to this communication; it’s just not borne by the sender. It’s borne by the recipient. Mary Czerwinski, at Microsoft Research Labs, found that 40% of the time, workers wander off in a new direction when an interruption ends, distracted by the technological equivalent of shiny objects. As the New York Times put it,

The central danger of interruptions, Czerwinski realized, is not really the interruption at all. It is the havoc they wreak with our short-term memory: "What the heck was I just doing?"

But even when people remember what they’re supposed to do, they’re less efficient in completing those tasks. But even when people remember what they’re supposed to do, they’re less efficient in completing those tasks. David E. Meyer, a cognitive scientist and director of the Brain, Cognition and Action Laboratory at the University of Michigan, says,

Multitasking is going to slow you down, increasing the chances of mistakes. Disruptions and interruptions are a bad deal from the standpoint of our ability to process information.

And René Marois, a neuroscientist and director of the Human Information Processing Laboratory at Vanderbilt University points out that for all of the hundred billion neurons in the brain, “a core limitation is an inability to concentrate on two things at once.”

The University of Michigan and the FAA found that people who switch between different types of tasks – say, email and spreadsheets, or drafting a contract and talking to a colleague – lose 20-40% of their efficiency. Just as there’s changeover time for machines on a production line, the human brain loses time in changing over from one type of task to another. Peter Drucker saw this forty years ago: in The Effective Executive, he wrote,

To be effective, every knowledge worker, and especially every executive, therefore needs to be able to dispose of time in fairly large chunks. To have dribs and drabs of time at his disposal will not be sufficient even if the total is an impressive number of hours.

On a less quantifiable – but no less important – note, the interruptions prevent executives from achieving what psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi describes as the “flow” of work. In his book, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, he theorizes that people are happiest when they’re in a state of flow (or “in the zone”), totally immersed in a task that is fulfilling and intrinsically rewarding. One of the prerequisites for getting in the “flow,” of course, is the ability to focus and concentrate on the task at hand – which is impossible in an environment of constant interruptions.

I believe that at their core, talented, motivated people yearn for uninterrupted periods of work when they can feel both productive and fulfilled. I know the president of a mid-sized residential construction firm who goes to the office every Saturday for three hours to design new homes; only then can he find such a large block of time for his work, and only then does he “get in the groove.” Similarly, partners at a large law firm I’ve consulted to regularly work at home at night and on weekends for the same reason: it’s the only time when they “can get things done.”

So what’s the solution? If you’re Sandy Weill or Warren Buffet, you just don’t use email – and although that doesn’t eliminate interruptions (there are still phone calls and knocks on the door, after all), it does reduce them. But that’s not a practical option for most people. For those who can’t unilaterally dictate modes of communication, here are some ideas:

1. Group similar tasks into blocks of activities in order to reduce the time lost to switchover. Do your budgets, your drawing, your contract reviews, etc. at one time rather than switching between them.

2. Establish meeting “corridors” – essentially office hours when you’re available to meet with colleagues. Obviously, during emergencies people will disturb you, but this will reduce the non-urgent interruptions. A company I know has a totally open floor plan. They don't have any offices, and the cube walls are low – about chest height – so there's no privacy. They've found a simple solution: each person has made two paper signs. A green sign (made with green highlighter) says "open," which means they're available to talk. A red sign has a time written on it – in other words, "do not disturb until ___ o'clock." Even better, set up standard check-in periods during the day for the people with whom you interact the most: when they know they’ll get to see you for 10 minutes each morning and afternoon, they’ll be more willing to wait.

3. Turn off email alerts to reduce distractions. Even if you don’t respond to an email immediately, the very act of reading (or hearing) the alert fractures your concentration. Learn to deal with email in blocks – twice a day, four times a day, once an hour – whatever is the appropriate interval for you and your firm.

4. Set “service level agreements” that support your work. With email in particular, there’s an assumption that because a message can be sent immediately, it must be answered immediately. And in point of fact, we’ve trained people to expect instantaneous response. But more often than not, people don’t really need an immediate answer; they need a predictable response – say, within a few hours or within the day. To address emergencies effectively, set up a “white list” for certain people, and an email rule that notifies you when those people send you a message. Or better yet, have people use the phone for urgent issues. After all, if the issue is that critical and time-sensitive, asynchronous communication tools are not the best option.

Making these changes can be disruptive, so it’s important to inform clients and coworkers in advance. And while these new ways of working may seem odd and cause friction at first, in the long run, they’ll make you – and your team – more productive.

A technique for greatness

Most people are mediocre. I don't want to put too fine of a point on it but that's the definition of the word – mediocre: the median, the average, the ordinary. So how does this sit with you? Care to ramp up your performance to "excellent" or "great"? There are a number of techniques you can use to achieve this, let me share one with you.

The mediocre performer goes through the motions trying his/her best with the task at hand. Often the performer tries their best to the point of exhaustion. But that is not what elevates your output. The key is what I call "conscious practice". Some people are concerned when doctors and attorneys say that they "practice" their field of expertise. But if we were to be honest with ourselves, which of us has perfected our daily activities and can recreate that perfection on daily basis? We all have better days than others. We are all in a constant state of practice. So step one is to recognize that every time we sit down at our desk we are, like physicians and lawyer, "practicing our professions".

The second step is to be "conscious" of your practice. This simply means taking a moment and observing what are the parts of your work day which cause the greatest points of resistance, waste or frustration. And then search for a solution. Just like Tiger Wood and A-Rod making slight adjustments to their swings, we can make small changes in our daily routines which can provide significant returns. Here's an example. A client of mine several weeks ago told me when I visited him on the Day 2 part of our program that I had "saved his marriage". I asked him for more details. He told me that he has a young family and that his typical routine gets him home between 7 – 8pm. He kicks off his shoes in the foyer, drops his bag and goes upstairs where he finds his wife putting the children to bed. On a typical day he greets her only to find her berating him for leaving his stuff in hallway. This point of tension between the two of them, particularly after an exhausting day, didn't elevate either of their happiness quotients much.

After doing Day 1 with me he went home, exhausted yet again, but as he slipped off his shoes and dropped his bag he said to himself, "Look, I'm going to have to put this stuff away eventually why don't I just do it now?". So at that moment he put his shoes and bag in their appropriate place and then headed upstairs to his family. His wife met him at the top of the stairs and just out of habit started to yell at him. She stopped herself though when she looked at the foyer only to find his things put away properly. She paused a moment and then kissed her husband. My client smiled as he told me this story and finished with, "This was way cool. Such a small thing can make such a big difference".

I can't tell you how much I enjoy hearing about participants getting as much benefit from our programs in their personal life as well as their professional life. Your business's bottom line is important, and our programs support that, but having a great work/life balance is critical to success in life. Let's work on the small details together to make it all work well together.

The Myth of Multi-Tasking from Dan Markovitz

Focus on the product. Not on you. In their seminal book Lean Thinking, Jim Womack and Daniel Jones state, �things work better when you focus on the product and its needs, rather than the organization or the equipment.� This is a simple and deceptively powerful concept. Even people who aren�t directly involved in providing a product or service to a consumer have a customer somewhere in the organization. All too often, we focus on the equipment (ourselves): our schedules, our to-do lists, our responsibilities. But what does the world look like when viewed from the perspective of our work rather than our role as a worker? Let�s say you�re in the finance department and you�re involved in the budget rollup. From its perspective, the budget wants to get rolled up and finalized so that it can fulfill its duty of guiding your customers (the other departments in the organization). Any delay means that its �productive capacity� � that is, its ability to guide people in making resource allocation decisions � is wasted. Or let�s say you�re manager of the product development team, and you have to finalize new product specs. From its perspective, the spec sheet wants to move down the value stream so that it can fulfill its duty: guiding the production of the new product. Any delay means that its productive capacity is idled, and the people in charge of production can�t do their work. And that�s waste, too. You get the idea. The information you manage has a job to do, and when you don�t move it downstream, there�s waste. Your customer is waiting (waste), the productive capacity of the information is waiting (waste), and ultimately the product or service you provide to the end user takes longer to get there (waste). Obviously, you can�t do everything at once, and you can�t do it right now. You have limited productive capacity, too. But when you view the world from the perspective of your work, you begin to ask important questions about the way the workflow is structured. Are you consistently a bottleneck? What�s the root cause of the bottleneck and can it be fixed? Can the workflow be improved so that there�s less waiting and less waste? Can you improve the way you manage information so that it can fulfill its purpose more quickly? These aren�t easy questions to answer. But you�ll never even raise the questions if you focus on your needs instead of the product�s.

The Honeymoon is Over

Well, the big day has come and gone. Jen and I got married this summer and enjoyed a wonderful summer honeymoon in Greece and Israel. Unfortunately while we were gone the world didn�t slow down much.

On my return a fascinating corporate dilemma came across my desk. A colleague in one of the world�s biggest banks called to ask for some advice. It seems that a young, very promising, recently promoted VP was having problems keeping his affairs in order. While the woman whom this young man reported to was reprimanding him on how he organized his office, she pulled a random crumpled piece of paper out of a stack of papers that was sitting on his desk. When she straightened the paper out she was horrified to discover that it was a check from the IRS. It was a check for 14 million dollars. No joke! 14 million dollars! When she questioned the young man about the check he kept responding with, �I was going to get to it, I was going to get to it.� She continued to press him about the over sight and he finally broke down and said, �At least I sent along the check for 7 million dollars.�

�What check for 7 million dollars?�
�The one that came after this one.�
�Where did you send it?�
�I sent it to John in the Manhattan office.�
�John who?�
�I forget, it was inner-officed to accounting."

I can go into much more detail but it just gets uglier and uglier. All along the way this young VP just kept saying, �I was going to get to it, I was going to get to it.� I don�t think I need to share much more but to say the obvious. By the end of the day the young executive was escorted out of the building by security never to enter the building again.

Do you think this is a fluke? An anomaly? An urban legend? Think again. Although hopefully for not the amount mentioned here, this is happening in the vast majority of offices all around the world every day of the week. It is the 900 pound gorilla in the management of your operations which people turn a blind eye to. Things drop through the slats regularly and it is adversely affecting your company�s bottom line and share holder�s value. How do you improve individual employee�s performance? This requires leadership. And the most fundamental principle in leadership development is �role modeling�. Your senior leadership must set the benchmark for effective habits and productive behavior. An Integra Workshop may be just what your company needs to make sure your most important asset, your people, are performing to their optimum potential and able to enjoy a reasonable work/life balance.

The Freedom of Discipline

Barry Schwartz, a social scientist at Swarthmore, has written a book called The Paradox of Choice. In his view, our nearly unlimited options in cellphones, salad dressing, toilet paper, even careers (dotcom entrepreneur? painter? firefighter?) create suffering for people as they try to find the best option in each of these areas.

Schwartz is primarily concerned with people as consumers (single-ply or two-ply? creamy or chunky? organic or free-range?). But I�d argue that his thinking also applies to people as producers � as workers and employees who must attend to overflowing email boxes, endless to-do lists, stacks of paperwork, and continual meetings. How do you choose what to do? How do you select one item from the four-page to-do list?

It�s simple � too simple � to say, �just focus on the most important item.� It�s not always clear which is the most important. And besides, what�s unimportant for you might be absolutely essential for someone else.

More to the point, the act of constantly choosing among the options on your to-do list is itself both time-consuming and fatiguing. (Do I answer email now or later? Do I begin writing Sarah�s performance review, or should I review the latest budget numbers?) When you're constantly spending time and energy making choices, when you never have the option of running on autopilot, you impair your ability to think creatively. You get so mired in making small decisions that you can�t free your mind to attack the really big stuff. As the psychologist William James said,

The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automation, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their proper work. There is no more miserable person than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision�.

I�ve written before how standard work can help make you more productive precisely because it automates simple tasks, in keeping with James� recommendation. But there are other ways to reduce the constant decision-making, too: by designating time in your calendar to handle specific tasks or projects.

Rather than carrying around a to-do list that provides you with nearly infinite choice about what to do at any moment, block out time in your calendar to handle the important stuff. When you�ve pre-committed to tackling the first draft of the press release at 2pm on Tuesday, �the higher powers of mind will be set free� to focus on that task when the time comes, rather than on the decision about what task to do.

How do you do this? Get into the habit of reviewing and processing all the stuff you have to do with your calendar open. It doesn�t matter whether you do it once at the end of the day or several times during the course of the day: the key issue is that you put a stake in the ground and choose a date, time, and duration for the task.

This, then, is the freedom of discipline: you discipline yourself to �live in� your calendar and follow your own pre-determined directions. You�ve reduced the number and frequency of the decisions you have to make so that you have the freedom to think deeply.

To some extent, your to-do list reduces the number of decisions you need to make. But it doesn�t work that well, because it only addresses half the problem: What do you need to do? However, it doesn�t account for the very real limits on your time -- when can you do what you need to do? A calendar entry tied to a specific date, time, and duration is the only way to address your boundless commitments in light of your very bounded time.

Undoubtedly, you�ll still have to modify your calendar. Nothing ever goes according to plan, and when there�s a crisis with a major customer, whatever it is you planned on doing goes out the window. But if you can eliminate some of the choices during the course of each day (prepare my expense report? confront my manager? order new toner for the copier?), you can eliminate the constant mental juggling of tasks, enhance your productivity, and reduce your stress.

Barry Schwartz states that �the choice of when to be a chooser may be the most important choice we have to make.� By embracing the discipline of your calendar, you'll liberate yourself from having to make choices all the time. And in a world where attention and focus are the most valuable commodities, that's a priceless kind of freedom.

What your lawyers can learn from Toyota.

One of the most important business concepts of the late 20th Century was Six Sigma as promoted by General Electric CEO Jack Welch. Six Sigma at many organizations simply means a measure of quality that strives for near perfection. Six Sigma is a disciplined methodology for eliminating defects in any process -- from manufacturing to transactional law. Six Sigma training and practices are still common place in many Fortune 500 corporations. Following this efficiency explosion, LEAN Processing, as developed by Toyota, is without question the most important approach to business process of our times. Toyota lives this approach everyday which is why they will soon be the largest, most successful car company in the world.

Two Magic Words.

LEAN processing essentially comes down to two words; Kachi and Muda. For those that don�t speak Japanese, kachi means value and muda means waste. To simplify this even further, your job as a well paid professional in your firm is twofold. It is to use your time, intelligence and experience to simultaneously increase value and eliminate waste for both your clients and your firm. By increasing value and eliminating waste you instantly increase your firm�s profits and your client�s satisfaction.

Three Real World Applications in your firm.

1) We have done a number of studies on how the average person interacts with their technology. First let�s look at the simplest of technology; the telephone. In one study we had participants work on an intensive document (for your purposes let�s assume it is a brief or court appeal). In the middle of this work the phone rings and the participant picks up. They speak with the other party for 15 minutes. They then hang up the phone and resume their work on the document. We�ve measured the average amount of time it takes an individual to get �back in the groove� of their work. The results were between 15 � 20 minutes! 15 � 20 minutes to reread what you had done up to that point and refocus your mind to where it can continue to process the document. The critical question now is - WHO do you bill those 20 minutes to?!? You�ve added no real value to the document in that period. You simply created 20 minutes of waste. We need to seriously look at these habits and correct them.

2) Take a tour of a Toyota plant and you�ll have an amazing experience. As you walk the facility you will notice that all of the equipment has a specific form and function. Each function adding important value. This is not the case with most attorneys� offices. Many attorneys don�t know how to properly use their offices, resulting in huge unmanageable piles of papers which dramatically decreases productivity. Remember the essential rule of design, form follows function. Your desktop, your floor and your chairs were not designed to be storage facilities so get the papers off of them, that�s what drawers are for. Create a comprehensive file system based not only on matter but also on the time/value of your documents. We recommend a working, reference and archive division. Make sure the system includes all of your work responsibilities and areas for personal documents. Establish the proper home for all objects in your office, put them away and watch how your stress immediately decreases and productivity increases. This will also do wonders for the brand that both you as an individual and the firm would like to project to potential and current clients.

3) How many messages are in your e-mail inbox? If you require a scroll bar, you are creating waste by not processing your electronic communications efficiently. Your electronic world should be just as organized as your physical world. At the end of the day both your physical and electronic in-box should be empty. The vast majority of �fires� that have to be put out on a daily basis were not emergencies when they first appeared in your office. They became high priority due to individuals not processing the information in a timely, effective manner. Just as Toyota is able to follow each and every step of their manufacturing process, with precision and accountability, we need to establish a process by which all information which enters our office can be moved along in a precise fashion. Every time we �touch� a piece of information we need to add value and move it towards completion. At Integra we use the 4D method of: Do it, Designate it, Delegate it or Dump it.

Remember, attorneys and clients don�t leave firms, they leave the partners they work with. The cost of recruitment and retention is enormous. Any adjustments we can make to our management style using LEAN processing techniques can significantly beef up the firm�s bottom line. Remember every day, your job is to increase value (kachi) and reduce waste (muda). Do it now![html]

Is your environment helping your lean efforts?

Many lean transformations (and more broadly, "change management initiatives") fail because the organizational environment isn't conducive to making and sustaining that change. As a result, it's tough for people in that environment to alter their behaviors.

A case in point: at a company I once worked at, we had a consulting group come in and tell us (for a large fee, of course) that lack of clear communication from the exec team was one of the behaviors causing problems. They advocated open door policies for individuals, and avoidance of closed-door meetings for the team. Ironically, this advice was given in a closed door meeting with the execs -- and that should tell you just how far this idea went.

There were a lot of causes of this behavior, but one of the main reasons is that the exec team spent a lot of money outfitting a really swank executive meeting room: big leather chairs, nice wooden table, fancy conference call hardware, cut glass pitchers, etc. If you were an executive, wouldn't you want to have meetings in there? And their individual offices were pretty fancy, too, which created an unfortunate tendency for them to stay sequestered in their well-equipped digs.

If you want people to change their behaviors, you have to make it easy for them to change. And you have to make them *want* to change. In a recent Harvard Business Publishing article, Peter Bregman describes how he wanted to eat outdoors more when he moved to Savannah, GA. He dutifully set up a table and chairs outside the French doors leading to the kitchen. And they never used it. Apparently, the 10 foot walk from the kitchen to the table was too much. His solution? Move the table right outside the doors. After that, his family ate every meal outdoors. Ten feet was all the difference.

Bregman tells the following story:

One of my clients wanted everyone in the company to fill out a time sheet, and they were having a very hard time getting people to do it. Their mindset was compliance. They made it very clear that people didn't have a choice. Everyone was required to do it. That worked for about half the employee population. The rest simply ignored it.

The leaders were about to send out a memo saying no one would get paid unless the time sheet was handed in. But wait, I asked, do we know why they aren't doing the time sheet? We assumed it was because people didn't care. But we asked around anyway.

Well, it turns out that people didn't mind the idea of filling out a timesheet, but they were frustrated by the technology. The online system required people to go through a series of steps (a wizard) in order to put their time in. It was meant to help them, but it took longer and needlessly delayed them. Not by much -- 10 seconds at most -- but that was enough to dissuade 50% of the people from following through.

Once we changed the form and the technology it was on, everyone started using it. They weren't being defiant. They simply weren't walking the 10 feet and four steps to the table. The solution isn't to explain to people why they should take the walk or force them to take the walk. The solution is far simpler: move the table.

This is lean thinking at its best: showing respect for people and creating a simple, no-cost solution to a problem. (Not quite lean at its best: the employees should have been in charge of changing the form and the technology.)

Now, think about the lean initiatives that you've undertaken that aren't being accepted. Is it possible that the environment isn't conducive to adopting those changes?

Think about 5S. What would happen if you reduced the number of filing cabinets in the office, or had people use smaller desks: would that reduce the amount of useless crap that people hoarded? I once wrote about the president of a custom prosthetic company in Seattle who gets a smaller desk every year in order to keep him from accumulating junk. Nature abhors a vacuum, after all, even if it's just on your desk.

Better yet, what would happen if you set up offices from the start to support 5S, with clear areas marked for Working, Reference, and Archive files? That would certainly increase the adoption of administrative 5S.

Do people have whiteboards in their offices to make their knowledge work visible (a la Jon Miller's experiments with a kanban system -- here, here, and here)? Have you tried Nielsen's trick of disabling the "Reply All" function within Outlook?

Think about it: how can you make people want to change?