For your Monday morning.

[randomness]

Jason Fried, of 37Signals, a web productivity tool company, giving a fifteen-minute TED talk on why work doesn't happen at work.

In short, he says it's because "meetings and managers are two major problems in businesses today, especially to offices." "what you find is that, especially with creative people -- designers, programmers, writers, engineers, thinkers -- that people really need long stretches of uninterrupted time to get something done." "managers are basically people whose job it is to interrupt people." "what's even worse is the thing that managers do most of all, which is call meetings." "The manager calls the meeting, so the employees can all come together, and it's an incredibly disruptive thing to do to people"..."Because meetings aren't work. Meetings are places to go to talk about things you're supposed to be doing later."

Now truthfully, he's talking his book, because later he talks about how one can use technologies which he asserts interrupt less to make the office less disruptive. But I do think there's a useful point here: that the modern office is an interruption factory, and that this is a problem for productivity.

I've worked in an office, and I've worked from home. Working from home makes me more productive, but this is only useful if I'm doing the right things, which is where working in an office is useful: it's where you talk to your co-workers to make sure you're doing the right things.

My ideal work place would include working from home interspersed with occasional visits to the team I was working with. How occasional those visits would be really depends on the nature of the work and the team.

But yes, he's totally right about the interrupting managers.

(via Farnham Street blog)

Comments

[in-parentheses.livejournal.com]

the modern office is an interruption factory, and that this is a problem for productivity

That completely depends on what type of person you are. If I have a long stretch of uninterrupted time, I'll feel like it's infinite and procrastinate forever. Whereas if I have 20- or 30-minute blocks of time punctuated by interruptions, I get a lot more done. Your better managers will figure out what type of workers their employees are and manage accordingly. (Or figure out what type of office environment they have and hire accordingly, I guess.)

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

That completely depends on what type of person you are.

And what kind of work you do, I agree. There are some kinds of work which are nothing but interruptions. I think he's looking specifically at one kind of work and trying to extrapolate from that.

[lillibet.livejournal.com]

I usually estimate that an average 8-hour work day in the office includes four hours of work. More than that is doing very well.

A reasonable presentation of a well-known problem

[drwex]

Peopleware, and others, have been making this point for about 30 years.

There was another great talk (I think it might even have been a TED talk) on how the modern office is geared toward interruption.

[doctordidj.livejournal.com]

I'm with you on that. I've always been my most productive when I'm working on my own, at home or in an unbothered office. I can sympathize with the people who need external structure to keep them focused and productive, but that's not me.

If my grant gets funded (fingers crossed), I'll have a lot more of that.

[cerridwynn.livejournal.com]

Interesting. I'm actually not sure i agree with all of this. Maybe i'm lucky, but i have found (most of) the meetings at my company to be totally necessary and very useful. The idea of a "no talk" day is horrifying to me -- it makes me think of my miserable, isolating grad school experience, where i could go weeks without talking to anyone. I couldn't get anything done in such a vacuum.

I guess it's a personality thing? Some of us need to collaborate -- we need to talk to people and share ideas in order to get excited and be productive.

Now, of course, I DO work from home. I pretty much have that ideal work place you mention -- i visit the office every 2 months or so. But i also call in every day to a 15 minute meeting and that is so key for me. It keeps me connected to my team and makes me feel accountable. I'm also regularly on the phone with people -- IM and email just aren't the same. And, frankly, i am at least as productive in the office as i am working from home -- i talk to people less at home, sure, but i make up for that with time on LJ and FB (and i don't feel bad about those breaks -- they keep me sane).

Also, as someone in exactly the kind of creative job he's talking about, i can't imagine not collaborating. If i didn't meet with the production team how would we share ideas? How would i explain things to the artist? How would i hear and incorporate his great ideas? These are all things that are very difficult to communicate in the passive modes he proposes.

I'm sure this talk is backed up by research, but so much of it just doesn't make sense to me.

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

Well, I don't either. I think there's a balance to be struck. And, as in_parentheses points out above, it depends on what kind of person you are.

One thing I said above and would emphasize is that it's all well and good to have plenty of time to make progress on your own...as long as the progress is in the right direction. And that's where the meetings come in.

I think his talk is backed up by the fact that his company produces software tools for passive communication. :)

[epi-lj.livejournal.com]

One problem that I have with some of the extensions to allow people to do more work from home and with the idea that "work doesn't happen at work" is that while it may sound idyllic the way it's initially presented, in virtually every case where they really buy whole-hog into technologies that allow you to work remotely, in the long run it means that you go to work in an office all day and then work all night off the clock getting your work done at the expense of having any free time or a life at all. I've seen this happen more times than I can even begin to count. Also, I find that companies who use distributed technologies get off to a good start but end up having *more* meetings rather than less, because eventually they put managers in place who feel more disconnected from their distributed workforce than they would in a traditional workplace. I know a lot of people who basically go into an office and have meetings for the entire workday and then work from home in the evening trying to catch up on the tasks they were supposed to be doing during the workday, and then when they do work from home they basically either spend the whole day playing catch-up or they just take it as a "mental health day" and do no work at all.

I'm sure not every company is quite that dysfunctional with how they use these technologies, but then, not every company is dysfunctional in how they use meetings either. Like, I work in a very traditional office, and I would estimate that most of our people spend maybe an hour a week in a formal meeting, tops, and spend most of their time having long uninterrupted stretches of focused time, touching base via e-mail. Being able to pop by someone's desk to discuss something does seem to be useful and is not all that disruptive to most people as far as I can tell.

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I agree. Many of the technologies make it possible for managers to monitor and interrupt their employees no matter where they are, which I think is not any kind of improvement.

But then, his company is in the technology business, so.

As you say, how dysfunctional the company environment is to start with has a lot to do with how it uses its tools.

[browngirl.livejournal.com]

Until my current manager, I thought managers were entirely one of the things someone has to endure in order to be employed. Even so, he sometimes has to struggle to keep from being in my way -- but he does, and I love him for it.

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

Good managers recognize that one of the habits they need to cultivate is how to stay out of the way.

[karakara98.livejournal.com]

I haven't watched the video yet(not allowed to from work), but based on your sumamry I am wary of unilateral statements such as "all offices are bad" and "workers are always more productive when working from home." Not only are individuals highly variable, organizational structure, job goals, culture, etc. are all very different. I'm an individual who does much better with structure, and working from home makes it hard for me to be productive.


I will also say that in my management experience, leaving someone alone too much to get things done can be very bad and lead to lots of wasted time. Some interruption to make sure things are on track is necessary. I look forward to watching the video though.

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

Yes. As I said, he's talking his book.

One thing I've discovered is that how you manage people who are self-directed is entirely different from how you manage those who aren't. The former generally do very well with managers who let them know what's expected and then get out of their way. The latter need more direct involvement. But managing either with the tactics for the other results in serious problems.

I think the video can be a useful corrective to managers who only know how to manage people who aren't self-directed.

[karakara98.livejournal.com]

hmm, I think the trick is to make sure that the manager in this case is able to let the self directed employee "know what's expected." I think my challenges as a manager have been about conveying that information up front and providing the appropriate level of guidance. One of my team is highly self directed and efficient, but for about the first year we had a problem because we didn't have a good understanding between us of what the expectations were for outcomes. I didn't know what or how to explain, and she didn't know how to ask. This resulted in a few projects that were very well done, but the wrong thing, which was frustrating for both of us. I've found that insisting on a couple of check ins per week (one in person, one email) on general work and meetings as needed on projects gives us the needed contact. That may be "getting out of the way" for the purposes of this discussion, but in general I've found that no contact between project beginning and finished product doesn't work so well.

[achinhibitor.livejournal.com]

As P. Fred Brooks noted, as the number of workers on a project goes up, the fraction of the time devoted to coordinating between workers goes up. As techies, we don't count time spent coordinating with others as productive, and yet that is vital work, as any number of disastrous software projects shows. If we systematize coordination, the level of interruptions goes down, but formal communication systems tend to be dangerously brittle when performing creative work.