Time's up for timewasting behaviour

Boosting personal productivity is one thing, but to be truly industrious workers need to develop strategies to stop other people wasting their precious time, writes Dermot Crowley.

Productivity is one of the hottest learning topics in the modern workplace. The pace of business and the deluge of productivity-sapping emails have created a workforce that is desperate for solutions to their productivity problems. But often the focus is on our own personal productivity and the techniques and systems that we need to apply to ensure we work more effectively. The problem with this singular approach is that our own personal productivity will always be disturbed by other people’s urgency, lack of planning and poor productivity behaviours. It is very likely that we, in turn, are a disruptive influence on our co-workers’ productivity. Whenever two people interact or collaborate, there is a risk of disruption.

Often it is unintended, but it happens every day. To truly create a productive workplace, we need to look at productivity from two viewpoints: the individual productivity perspective and the productive collaboration perspective. By developing awareness around disruptive behaviours, and agreeing to a simple set of productivity protocols, we can minimise disruption enormously, and therefore give people a fighting chance to successfully implement their personal productivity systems.

Four collaboration modes
There are four key collaboration modes which run the risk of productivity disruption. The first is when we communicate with others, especially via email. The second is when we congregate, or meet, with others. The third is when we delegate work, and the fourth is when we collaborate on projects or shared work. All of these collaboration modes will potentially disrupt the productivity of some or all of the people involved. So what can we do to minimise this disruption as much as possible?

1. Productive communication
It is easy to whip off an email on the go, but poorly constructed messages just create work for the reader. In the end, this will also have a negative impact on you because your colleagues will soon start ignoring long-winded and poorly written emails. You end up having to chase responses, wasting more of your own time. Try the following strategies to make sure your communications are read and prompt quick action.
• Get to the point quickly – write emails like a newspaper article. Start with the headline (the key point or action required) and put supporting information below this. Make sure your emails have a relevant subject line, and try to state what is required from the email in the first couple of lines.
• Send YNAB emails – when you need a decision on something, especially from a busy senior executive, send YNAB emails – Yes, No, A or B. Make it easy for the reader to make the decision quickly by providing your suggested options. Write a short email that simply requires them to respond with Yes or No or, if there is a choice to make, A or B. Busy people appreciate it when you help them keep the work moving.
• Who really needs to know? – before you Reply All or Forward the email to a bunch of people, think about who really needs to know. Are you just creating noise for them, or really adding value? Try to minimise Reply All as much as possible. Before sending your response to everyone, imagine that the server has gone down and you cannot email your response. Who would you pick up the phone to call and communicate your response? They should be the only recipients.

2. Productive meetings
Research shows that many of our meetings are unnecessary and participants see them as a waste of time. There is a strong case for having fewer meetings in most workplaces. If you are organising or attending meetings, at least make sure they are as productive as possible using the following strategies.
• Set clear objectives – make sure your meetings have clearly stated goals. Meetings without a clearly stated objective run the risk of meandering and going nowhere. If not stated in the meeting invitation, at least make sure every meeting begins with an agreement about what you hope to achieve by the end of the meeting. This will bring focus to the session.
• Make them shorter – Parkinson’s Law states that the work will always expand to fill the time available. If an hour is scheduled, it will take an hour. If 30 minutes is scheduled, people will be more focused and it will take 30 minutes. Do everyone a favour and schedule less time. However, this does depend on setting clear and realistic objectives.
• Follow through on actions – every meeting will generate actions for someone. Make sure everyone in the meeting has a robust process for putting their commitments into action, or use a central agenda/action tool such as OneNote so that there is clear understanding about who is doing what and by when.

3. Productive delegation
A key strategy for leveraging your time is delegation. Yet too many of us do not delegate enough. Part of the problem might be our own poor delegation style, which can lead to disappointing results and which, in turn, makes us less likely to delegate. We often delegate on the run, which means the quality of this collaboration can be low.
• Delegate early – try to delegate the work at the earliest opportunity. If you leave the work sitting in your pile, there comes a point where you can no longer delegate it and you must do it yourself. Early delegation reduces the pressure on the delegate, and gives you time to properly delegate it.
• Delegate clearly – outline what needs to be done, by when, to what level of quality, and what your expectations are about reporting and decision-making. Under what circumstances should they check with you before proceeding?
• Track progress – agree on how progress will be tracked. Will you meet to discuss issues at regular times, or will they email you? Try not to micro-manage the delegation. Leave them to it and trust in your reporting agreements. If you have clearly delegated, this should give them what they need to do a good job.

4. Productive collaboration
Collaborating on projects and shared work can be the biggest area of productivity disruption. How do we harness the time and attention of multiple busy people and keep the project moving? How do we ensure that the work is not getting bogged down by the urgent ‘business as usual’ needs of the organisation?
• Share the vision – when everyone involved understands the what, why and how of a project, they take more ownership and will fight for the time in their schedules to move the project forward. When they have been involved in the planning phase of the project, they will understand the implications of delays, re-work and blowouts on budgets. So get them involved – do not just produce a project plan and shove it down their throat.
• Align to personal schedules – project plans are great to see a zoomed out view of what needs to happen, but the rubber only hits the tarmac when there are actions scheduled in people’s calendars or tasks lists to actually do the work. Make sure your team regularly reviews the project plan and then makes time to work on the next steps in their schedule.
• Update progress and what is left – a project plan is a dynamic document, not a freeze-frame snapshot of the project. It is out of date shortly after being created, so it needs to be updated regularly to be of use. The key is to not focus on the amount of progress made with each task, but the amount of work that is left to be done. The last 10 per cent of a task can take as long as the first 90 per cent if you are not careful. Always ask for estimates of how much time it will take to complete the task from here.
So, productive collaboration requires a bit of effort and thought. But some simple agreed protocols and processes in your team can make a huge difference to the productivity and motivation of all involved.

Dermot Crowley is the founder of Adapt Training Solutions, a Sydney-based personal productivity training and coaching organisation which specialises in the smarter use of technologies. For more details, visit www.adapttraining.com.au or www.dermotcrowley.com.au.