It's Time to Stop Managing Time
TIME WELL SPENT DOES NOT INVOLVE TIME MANAGEMENT
In 2009, our business world collapsed. Much like today, we were forced out of an office and into remote teams that were working from home regularly. For nearly two and a half years, I spent my days managing one of those remote teams while being managed remotely myself. Several key learnings emerged from that time. How you communicate (style, frequency, accuracy) is key. Demonstrating empathy to what EMPLOYEES might be going through in the work from home adjustment is necessary. Of course we spent a lot of time discussing how to actually empower staff to “get stuff done”, to stay productive. My biggest learning takeaway from this period of time? Most people can manage time. It’s distraction they can’t manage….. at all.
If we were to borrow from Steven Covey’s 7 Habits content, not only is your life filled with the four quadrants (see image), but each hour in your day can be filled with actions in these quadrants as well. We will never be able to live lives as productive as a constant Quadrant I existence. But we can aspire to do so. And as a manager of others, it is incumbent upon us to empower our people by getting them “there”, getting them to Quadrant I, as much as possible.
But we live in a world where even Quadrant 4 is moved into Quadrant 3. Our technology, presumably there to help us, makes non urgent time wasters and distractions SUPER urgent. Pings, notifications, banners, alerts. We cary our distractors with us and put them front and center on a daily basis. At every down moment, we seek distraction - faces fully in phones. Productivity expert Maura Thomas sees technological pervasiveness as habit inducing. Workers have come to rely on distraction from their worlds to get that dopamine fix.
“We’ve become habituated to distraction.” - Maura Thomas
So rather than fight dips in productivity with more and more efforts to better time management amongst our teams (huddles, software, time tracking), perhaps we should put our attention on an actual solution: Focus Management. The goal there is to empower employees with the knowledge and skill sets that can help them break distraction habits and enter more productive mind states.
Humans spend their days in four main states of mind: 1) Reactive and Distracted, 2) Focused and Mindful, 3) Daydreaming or Mind Wandering, and 4) Flow. Reactive and Distracted is where we spend most of the day. It’s where our environment comes crashing in and forces us to multi-task. Not good. Focused and Mindful is great because it is where Deep Work gets done. This is where conscious effort is applied to the work at hand and garners better results. Daydreaming or Mind Wandering is a bit of some “time off” for the brain. But actually, it’s more than that. It is when random connections get made that lead to innovative thoughts and ideas. Filling this time up with distraction (your Instagram feed, that Facebook debate, your Candy Crush high score) only serves to suppress breakthrough thought. And Flow, well, that is the highest state of performance according to Hungarian psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi. You can’t take a Lyft there. You have to fall into it. But once you are there, it’s self-propelling.
Managing employees’ focus means helping them take control of several key aspects of their days. Environment, technology, project sprints and habits are the top areas of guidance employees need to truly thrive in the work from home era. And they are the areas managers need to become experts in so they can engage their teams in the right way, the new way, the most effective way possible. I can’t get back that time over a decade ago when I managed employees by over-managing their hours. But I can take that time as a true learning moment and apply it to teams moving forward. THAT is our focus now.
STRATEGIC EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT