I think you will agree that as a small business owner or worker of any kind, you want to be more productive.
Certainly if you are an employer, you would like your employees to be productive, and increasing their productivity would make your business more successful.
I have been joking for years that “less is the new more” and that we need to ruthlessly prune our to-do list and concentrate on the important projects and tasks, the ones that will have impact.
I also have been saying that having alerts ping and buzz all day triggers anxiety and derails your train of thought.
But while I have my personal experience, and the experience of my clients to base this on, I am not an expert, which is why I loved this video so much.
This video backs up everything I believed. We can’t multitask. Even machines can’t do it. Like machines, we can shift our attention, but there is something called “attention residue” that I am thinking is a bit like a hangover. 😂
Basically, some of what you were previously working on is lingering there in your mind and it takes a while to focus on the new task or topic.
What this might look like at work is you are getting interrupted by emails, texts, and Slack notifications while you are trying to think strategically about something important, which means it will take you longer and your work product probably won’t be as good.
That doesn’t sound productive to me.
If you are reading this, you are a knowledge worker. You do some kind of work that requires strategic, creative, or analytical thinking. But the way your work situation is set up can feel like your brain is getting knocked around like a ping pong ball.
I don’t know about you, but my process for creating any kind of work is noodling on the subject for some time, which might look like I am not doing anything, and then it comes pouring out of me. Generally this work is of good quality and only requires minimal editing or reworking. The overall time spent creating is reasonable, but if I were in corporate, I would likely be called a slacker because much of the time, from the outside, I wouldn’t look like I was doing much.
But the reality is I am doing a lot!
Now let’s move on to metrics you might track for yourself or your employees. Tracking time spent in the office or time spent logged into some system for many white collar workers is worthless. It’s a remnant from tracking manufacturing. Knowledge workers don’t have much in common with workers on a production line.
And humans don’t have unlimited mental resources. Our brains get tired and stop working well. Putting in extra hours to put in the time for optics with your executive team or to be a role model for your staff might mean you are getting less done, not more. It could be tanking your productivity, not helping it.
And you run the risk of burning out yourself or your team, which then puts more work on everyone else and decreases their productivity.
Small business owners and managers, support your people and let them do their work the way they need to do it. And stop tracking the wrong metrics just because they are the easy ones to track.
Photo by charlesdeluvio on Unsplash
