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

[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.