Spend Some Quality Timeat the Office© 1998 Chris Miksanek
Forget about the Franklins, Day-Timers, and PIMs. Our time management system is the only one guaranteed to increase productivity! |
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Publication history: Originally published in Datamation Magazine September, 1998
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Remember when the proverbial 9-to-5 gig actually meant you started at nine and left at five? Today, you literally need to put in fourteen hours to accomplish what you used to do in eight. Why? We've become a society of time-wasters. Cripes, when the audio version of Milo O. Frank's bestseller, How to Get Your Point Across in 30 Seconds or Less, runs 60 minutes it's time to stop and take inventory. What happened? Technology. You know, that thing that was supposed to make us more productive; well, it's actually dragging us down. For example, back in 1984 we merrily pecked away on DOS XTs updating project schedules in the primeval DisplayWrite. Life was simple, there was plenty of ozone, and the IBM guys still wore white shirts. Then came multitasking, something that was supposed to make our computers more productive, ergo, make us more productive. The reality, however, was the direct opposite. Whereas in the past, staff could execute only one application, like a word-processor or spreadsheet, multitasking permitted them to execute several concurrently. Sales of BattleChess and Leisure Suit Larry boomed. And the trend continues today where the average 233MHz workstation has at least a 19" monitor, 5 gig of disk space, 64 meg of memory, and a 24x CD-ROM that plays anything from Don Giovanni to Don Henley (but seldom anything with actual data on it). Even requests for sound cards by AS/400 RPG programmers are routinely approved when all they really needed was a 5250 terminal emulator. But technology alone is not to blame for this productivity decline. Urban sprawl is a co-conspirator. When we're not wasting hours flipping-off slower moving vehicles on tranquil spring morning commutes, we're telecommuting, i.e., sitting in on a conference call with the phone on mute and practicing the harmonica. (See the August 1998 Over the Edge column, "The extended enterprise: Facilitate it or nip it in the bud?") According to the Gardener Group -- a consortium of lawn care professionals not to be confused with the Stamford, Connecticut guys--the average worker is 50% less productive today than twenty years ago. "The wee hours of the morning have always been the most productive of the day," Gardener's Merl Jusik says. "In this new order, we've turned those once-productive hours into waste. But like the process of composting," he says, "we can transform that waste into something useful. In this case, we can recover the lost productivity by effective implementation of time management." Simply put, if we can reclaim the hours up through and including lunch which were taken from us by the empty promise of technology and suburban utopia, we can double our productivity.
Primping And if you were thinking of pressing your slacks or running the wrinkle-guard over your dress, you're wasting time. In the dense fog of sexual harassment paranoia we work in these days, you're not allowed to complement a co-worker's choice of skirt anyway, even if it is your boss, Mr. Murdoch. So why not wear what you're comfortable in: the same sweatpants and Pink Floyd t-shirt you slept in. Now jump in your Passat and congratulate yourself. You've just reclaimed 45 minutes of your day.
Commuting Downside: multitasking at 100+ MPH is dicey. It's not a good time, for instance, to give yourself an insulin injection or pop in your contact lenses, especially if the roads are riddled by pot-holes. There are other commute strategies to employ, as well. If you're driving something big and funky like the old Partridge Family bus or a lime green funeral hearse and laying on the horn the entire time, you'll be surprised at how many people move out of your way. This allows you to move swiftly among them.
Phonemail Phonemail was supposed to make us all productive. It meant we could get rid of the telephone operator and dozens of those while-you-were-out notepads. Instead, it's fostered little more than frustration. Two words sum it all up: phone tag. If someone calls you and you're not there, let them try again...and again... and again. After all, they called you. Why should you hassle trying to get back to them to see what they wanted in the first place? Nine times out of ten they either forget by the time you connect or they found the answer elsewhere. Here's what we need to do: get rid of phonemail altogether. Office policy may prohibit you from totally disabling your voice mail, but you can discourage callers. For example, here are two extremely effective greetings:
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E-mail You'll find three types of e-mail greeting you each morning:
Want to cut your morning email processing time down from an average of an hour and a half to five minutes? Ignore the SPAM (it's faster than complaining) and ignore the cc:s. If it was important it would be addressed directly to you, not just sent as something you might be interested in. See that delete key on your keyboard? Guess what it's for. It's for reclaiming unproductive time. Use it.
Lunch Consider this all-too-common scenario: you're updating your status report and a fork-full of your microwave Oriental-vegetable-rice-noodle-marinara-lean-choice dinner falls onto your keyboard. In desperation, you try to flush it out with a Diet Caffeine-free Classic Coke, but that just makes the keysss ssssstickey. You put an emergency call to your sssssupport center and three dayssss later you get a new keyboard. Alternative: Instead of taking an hour to drive somewhere for lunch... put the pedal to the metal and hit that drive-through at 155 MPH (call ahead and have exact change). Sure youre eating your taco supreme in the car, but you just reduced your lunch hour down to ten minutes. Viva Gordidas!
Afternoon Delight Now lets go for it. The whole enchilada. Why be satisfied reducing the 14-hour work day to eight. Let's get it down to the 7.5 hours we're actually paid for. We can squeeze additional time out of our afternoon tasks, too:
Time Off For Good Behavior You could certainly use this newfound bounty of free time to schedule a few additional staff meetings, but that makes about as much sense as a hernia transplant. We started out saying that technology has made it possible for us to accomplish our 8-hour workday in 14 hours. The scarce hours of the day, those after dinner and before Conan, are what we affectionately call "quality time." Those are the hours we spend with our spouses, significant others, or, if you're really serious about making the best use of your time, both of those people. Well, here's today's lesson: quality time is for the office, not for your family. Get to work, do your job, and get the hell out of there. Oh, yeah, and take a shower and put on some decent clothes before dinner, these are the people you love, remember.
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Sidebar:Surviving the test of timeAre you a time-waster? Take the quiz:
If you answered "yes" to any of these questions, or are even bothering to read this scoring section, you're wasting time. Go home if you have nothing to do! |
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