Ben Gran

I recently read a great blog post called The Myth of Efficiency. The premise is that for knowledge workers, trying to build more efficient work processes or implementing time saving “efficiencies” is not an effective way to boost productivity.

Here’s a (lengthy) excerpt that I especially liked:

The idea is that time has a monetary value (say, the per-hour employment costs of each employee), and if you save time, you save money. One example that LeBlanc mentions is moving printers. It seems to make sense on its face. You spend time walking to and from the printer. Therefore, printers should be located to minimize the total time people spend in transit, which could mean moving the printer closer to the heavy users of printing. Then those people can spend more time at their desks being productive.

But there is a serious fallacy in this argument: the assumption that the constraint on productivity is time at your desk. Let’s leave aside the issue of whether you are productive walking to the printer. The more serious issue is that you aren’t equally productive the whole time you sit at your desk. What if you spend your extra two minutes (in reduced time picking up printouts) at I Can Has Cheezburger?

Well, the efficiency expert may counter, all I need to assume is that a fixed percentage of your desk time is productive. But that’s still a big assumption. Maybe the real constraint on your daily productivity is mental energy, and you only have enough mental energy to do four hours of real work a day. Then your extra two minutes will all go to looking at pictures of cats with ungrammatical captions. Even more likely, maybe the real constraint is your internal sense of what a reasonable day’s work is.

With knowledge workers – those who work with information, ideas, numbers, words – the most important factor driving productivity is not the sheer amount of time spent at our desks. Work sometimes happens in surges and bursts. Great ideas sometimes materialize out of idleness. Breakthroughs happen when you step away from your desk and take a walk outside and return to the problem with fresh eyes.

The operations and systems of most knowledge work is already about as “efficient” as it’s going to get – we can send e-mail and get Google search results instantaneously. So we’re not really able to get much “faster” at how we do this kind of work.

The real question for knowledge workers – and their employers – is not, “are you doing things efficiently,” but “are you doing the right things?”

Increasingly this will be the only question that matters.

How much “work” actually gets done in the course of a typical eight hour workday?

3 hours? 4 hours at most?

So much of the typical day is wasted in meetings, small talk, coffee breaks, checking e-mail – and of course, interruptions. According to this article, interruptions – phone calls, e-mails , take up approximately 28% of the typical knowledge worker’s day. (That’s 2.25 hours out of an 8-hour day.)

This is yet another reason that the standard idea of the cubicle job with the 8 hour day is outdated.

Why are companies paying people to sit around and hang out and be interrupted all day? Very few people are actually “working” the entire time (or even most of the time) that they’re at “work.” Why not just figure out what the “stuff” is that most needs to be done, and pay people for the actual hours of focused effort that are required to get the job done?

For most “knowledge jobs,” it’s getting to be easier and more efficient to measure and reward focused effort. And both employers and employees will benefit.

A family member of mine recently went through a serious health scare. She’s doing better now, but it was quite a frightening experience, to say the least.

Times like these remind me of the great play “A Man for All Seasons.” The last lines, spoken by the play’s narrator, The Common Man:

I’m breathing…are you breathing too? It’s nice, isn’t it? It isn’t difficult to keep alive, friends. Just don’t make trouble. Or if you must make trouble, make the sort of trouble that’s expected.

Today I’m going to spend some time just being grateful for breathing.

I found a hilarious article the other day in the Newsweek archives…back in 1995, a guy named Clifford Stoll penned an op-ed for Newsweek titled: “The Internet? Bah!” He goes on to talk about all the ways in which the Internet had been overhyped and wasn’t going to turn out to be that big of a deal.

Reading it now, in 2010, is deeply entertaining. Here’s a sampling:

The truth is, no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works…

How about electronic publishing? Try reading a book on disc. At best, it’s an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book. And you can’t tote that laptop to the beach. Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we’ll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Internet. Uh, sure.

This next part is my favorite:

Then there’s cyberbusiness. We’re promised instant catalog shopping–just point and click for great deals. We’ll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obselete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet–which there isn’t–the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople.

In the author’s defense, the Internet really was pretty bad back in 1995. There was no Google, it was wildly inefficient to search for information, most people didn’t even have e-mail addresses, and there was no online social networking as we know it today. And Stoll wasn’t railing against technology so much as he was debunking the utopian visionaries talking about how The Internet Will Change Everything, and warning against the tendency of technology to isolate people from each other – real human connections are more important than mindless data points in an ocean of information.

But what this article ultimately reminds me of is that a lot of our predictions about the future will often turn out to be wildly wrong. While it’s true that techno-visionaries can be overly optimistic, we shouldn’t discount the ability of technology to change the way we interact with our world – and we shouldn’t underestimate the human potential to adapt and embrace change.

As Slate’s technology columnist, Farhad Manjoo put it:

Many of the technologies that we now take for granted—online social networks, Web video, and photo libraries—weren’t invented a decade ago and were only in their infancy five years ago. (YouTube celebrated its fifth birthday this month.) In a decade from now, I predict, we’ll be using gadgets and tech tools that nobody has conjured as of 2010.

In the realm of outlandish predictions, I feel more comfortable with the extreme optimists.

The only truly stupid prediction to make about the future is that nothing is going to change and that none of our technology is ever going to get any better.

Thinking back on the recent brouhaha of Jay vs. Conan and who’s going to be the host of the Tonight Show, I was ultimately reminded of how outdated that entire model of entertainment has become.

Now that we have Facebook and Twitter and Youtube and Hulu and Google, we don’t need “The Tonight Show” anymore. We don’t need late night hosts to do monologues at 11 p.m. to recap on the day’s news and the latest celebrity foibles. We don’t need a tiny club of highly paid white guys on TV who tell us what is funny and what is worth paying attention to.

Of course, being the host of the Tonight Show is still a prestigious and well-paying job. There are still millions of people who watch it. But it’s no longer the pinnacle of pop culture, and its relevance and influence is going to continue to fade.

So what does this have to do with your job?

The Tonight Show is just the latest and most visible example of how, with the Internet, we no longer need to access information at a particular time and place. We no longer need to wait for the newspaper to arrive at our doorstep in the morning, we no longer need the evening news to tell us the weather forecast, and we no longer need to watch TV or go to a  movie theater at an appointed time and place in order to be entertained.

Most white collar jobs – cubicle jobs – are all about accessing and disseminating information. So why do these jobs still have to take place at a certain set time and location?

If we can get our Tonight Show highlights on Hulu and watch them on our smartphones while we eat breakfast, then why do we have to sit at a particular desk and a particular cubicle just to create value and earn money?

Just as people have gotten accustomed to accessing their news and entertainment at any time and place, before long, “work” will no longer be a place you go; it will be something you do – anywhere and anytime.

Is there any other kind?

Doesn’t all rage originate from feelings of powerlessness?

Think about the times in your life when you’ve felt really, really angry. Were you angry because someone disrespected you, because you felt helpless, taken advantage of, bullied, deceived? Is there anything more frustrating than being put into an unpleasant situation that you cannot change or control in any way? (I know we’re supposed to learn to “let go” in situations like this, but I still struggle with this – and I think a lot of other people do too.)

When we lose our feelings of personal empowerment, everything seems hopeless. That’s when we feel trapped, stymied, stuck. There’s a reason why “air rage” happens – people get tired of sitting on a runway for five hours waiting to take off, or being trapped in a cabin with no leg room. “Road rage” happens when someone else’s stupid driving endangers your life or wastes your time – leaving you feeling powerless. Don’t you think most people would be more polite to call center employees if they didn’t have to wait on hold listening to insipid music for 15 minutes while being asked to re-enter their account information seven times along the way?

Anger and rage and negative feelings are part of the human condition. But every day, companies should look for ways to empower their customers and employees. No one likes to feel trapped and powerless. (And as for me, I’m going to keep working on learning to let go…)

If you’re working toward a goal, maybe you should try doing just one thing each day.

It’s great if you’re a disciplined, detail-oriented goal-setter – some people make elaborate to-do lists and spreadsheets and databases to help them reach their targets.

But what if you’re not wired that way? Or what if your goal is too amorphous to reasonably be captured on a to-do list?

Just do one thing a day.

For example, right now, my goal is to bid on one new Elance project every single day. Some days I bid on two projects, or more – but I always make sure to bid on at least one. Even if I’m tired, even if it’s late – that bid has got to be done.

And then, once I’ve bid on that one project, I can relax – because I’ve reached my goal. Anything beyond that one project is a bonus.

Start with one thing a day. The larger goals will come into focus from there.

When I worked at a marketing agency a few years back, we measured the results of our public relations work in column inches.

As in: take out a ruler, measure the length of the news columns that our client’s story was featured in, and multiply times 2.

Everything is so much more measurable now!

• You can tell how many hits your Web site is getting.
• You can tell how many people are clicking on your ad.
• You can use pay-per-click Google ads so that you only pay for qualified leads who are searching for what you sell.

Search is going to keep getting better and better – more precise, more obscure – people are increasingly going to be able to find information on whatever it is that they want to buy.

In the olden days of advertising, companies were trying to reach a mass audience through TV, radio and print ads. The assumption was that advertising needed to interrupt people (from their TV viewing or their magazine reading) and capture their attention – “And now, a word from our sponsor.”

With online marketing, things are totally different.

There’s not the same need to “interrupt” your audience with an ad. Instead, there are people online who are already actively looking for what you have to sell. The challenge becomes: how can you engage with them once they find you?

How can you present yourself – your company, your brand, your product – in a credible, compelling and authentic way?

People are already paying attention to you. The important thing now is to find ways to reward their attention – and build a relationship over time.