I just read Joel Spolsky’s blog entitled “A Little Less Conversation” which discusses something I’ve blogged about in the past here and here, communication overload.

After reading that post I began to consider my own personal experience in meetings over the last dozen or so years and decided to add an addendum to the communication node problem that was so eloquently detailed in the Mythical Man Month by Brooks.

The problem with Brooks’ theory of intercommunication is that it doesn’t take into account the “Number of Managers” in any given meeting.  He assumes in his calculation that all nodes in a communication network are equal.  This is a mistake.  All nodes are not equal, as anyone who has sat through a meeting with more than one manager participating can attest to.

Managers have keen insight into every major (and minor) issue at hand and willingly share that information with the team in a seemingly endless discourse that greatly adds to the meeting’s productivity and value.  In fact I’ve been in meetings with multiple managers that have lasted two, maybe three, times longer than the scheduled meeting length due to the significant wisdom that each of the managers was imparting to their counterparts and the team.

This imbalance in communication node weighting should be reflected in a revised formula for group intercommunication (especially meetings).  Brooks’ original formula can be stated as n(n-1)/2=communication pathways. The revised formula adds the significance of management communication to the pathways problem by accurately describing the impact of management on the original formula.  This new formula can be expressed as (n(n-1/2)) ^x (^x indicates raised to the power of x) where x is the number of managers.

As an example I will restate the original example given by Brooks and then show the difference when true communication weighting has been added…

Example: 50 developers give 50 · (50 – 1) / 2 = 1225 channels of communication.

However, given our new formula and assuming the presence of 3 managers (or significant stakeholders) into our team we now see the impact of the additional management on our communication overhead.

Example: 50 developers + 3 Managers give (50 · (50 – 1) / 2)^3  = 1838265625 channels of communication.

There, that’s better.  This new formula clearly shows the benefit of adding additional management resources to any project.

You can thank me later Fred .

Related Reading

• The Mythical 40 Hour Workweek
• Productivity and Multitasking
• What Do Potential Energy and Collaboration Tools Have in Common?
• Lost Productivity

Nearly 35 years ago Fred Brooks wrote his seminal book Mythical Man Month detailing his experiences managing a large team of developers.  He observed that adding resources to a project could actually impede progress due to communication overhead between increasing numbers of project members.  Everyone needed to keep apprised of what everyone elese was doing.  This communication overhead actually slowed progress.

Brooks looked specifically at software development projects, but I believe his conclusion holds true across all projects.  With the proliferation of matrix style organizations and the lack of strategically focused planning, we’ve created a corporate culture that reacts to every crisis by sending lots of email and having lots of meetings in the hope that something positive must happen due to all this communication.  The secret is, it won’t.  Lots of communication only exacerbates the problem.  What we need to do is remember that communication does not solve business problems; strategic planning and productive action solves problems.

The Quest for the Empty INBOX

This is the time of year we think about our jobs and how our actions map to our company’s goals.  It’s objection setting time.  Year after year we define meaningful, seemingly attainable goals only to see them gradually slip away during the course of the year due primarily to one thing, too much unfocused and unproductive communication.  As crazy as that sounds, how many times have you went to work full of enthusiasm for finally knocking out that project only to find that your schedule has been hijacked and now includes 2 or 3 new meetings?  On top of that, your boss has suddenly found his “next hot thing” and sent you a dozen emails that leave you scratching your head as to (a) how they all relate to one another and (b) fit into the corporate strategy.  Adding insult to injury he also wants an action plan on how to handle those twelve seemingly unrelated emails… by EOD.  As you may have guessed, that project you wanted to finish never finds its way onto your desk and the worst part of it all is that finishing that project IS actually ON YOUR GOAL SHEET.  Go figure?

Reacting seems to be the only goal we need to define on our objective sheet for the year.  Forget getting any real work done. All that seems to matter anymore is getting through our email and meetings and making sure that everyone on the email chain knows we’re “on top of that”.  Maybe we should create an automatic outgoing email that simply replies to every message with “I’m on it”.  We’d be the company hero.  Does it really matter if we get anything done as long as people think we’re working on it?

Herein lies the problem.  Not only has excessive email communication become the norm in business, it’s also how we are defining success in our workdays.  In times gone by we defined our success by how we contributed towards the company’s objectives and whether or not we influenced the bottomline.  Today we define success by whether or not we’ve processed all our incoming email and at least looked like we handled all the day’s “hot” issues.  How many times have you gotten nothing productive done during the day, but felt successful just because your INBOX was empty?  We’ve become a slave to our communications systems and reacting to them rather than intelligently planning and using email and IM as tools for thoughtful articulation of messages.

So is there any hope for reestablishing our productivity and becoming an agent of change rather than an instrument of reactionary behavior?  Here’s my list of things to do to obtain the Mythical 40 Hour Workweek.

Cleanup Your INBOX

In Get Your Productivity Groove On I discussed the problem of context switching between tasks and how it effects your overall performance.  Because the use of email is so prevalent in our society, my guess is you have lots of extraneous emails sitting in your INBOX; email from your relatives, mailing lists, newsletters, etc.  You should eliminate as many non-essential emails as you can and move them to a personal email address.   Less mail in your INBOX means less temptation to check it everytime you see your notification bar indicating “You’ve Got Mail”.  Less email checking means more focus and more focus means more real work.

This is a bit of a pet peeve of mine.  Everyone seems to hit “Reply All” and/or adds lots of people to the CC list because they think someone might be interested.  Well guess what… WE’RE NOT!  I have enough email that’s directly related to me, I don’t need email that MAY interest me.  If you think it’s important or relevant to me… send it TO: ME.  Many people I know have already resorted to filtering all CC’d email and placing them directly into archive folders.  Maybe you should too .

Train Yourself to Get Things Done  

In the book Getting Things Done by David Allen he defined a system for personal productivity that teaches people to evaluate incoming messages, make a decision and act.  It’s a great system, but may not be necessary if we just focus on a few simple steps to get back our lost productivity.

First, review your yearly objectives and establish whether they still make sense.  If you aren’t sure, schedule time with your manager so that you understand from a high level what you should be working on.  This is also a good way to review the company’s objectives and understand how your job makes “a difference”.

Secondly, create simple goals for each day that help you reach your objectives, and schedule time in your calendar to ensure you can work on those goals.  If you don’t, your schedule will undoubtedly be “hijacked” by someone else’s agenda.

“Productivity is never an accident. It is always the result of a commitment to excellence, intelligent planning, and focused effort.”  –Paul J. Meyers

Thirdly, learn to focus again.  We’ve gotten so used to being interrupted throughout the course of the day that we’ve forgotten how to focus on the task at hand.  During your scheduled time to work on your daily goals, don’t check email, in fact turn it off, and don’t answer the phone.  These are the distractions that drain your productivity.  Focus on your work and only your work.  I’ve even heard of people who have taken to working on non-networked PCs just to minimize the chance they will be distracted by (a) email or IM or (b) distract themselves by surfing the web.  I haven’t gone this far yet, but if you find it difficult to stay on task, maybe pulling the networking cable is not such a bad idea.

Learn to Say “NO”

This one may be the hardest to actually do because noone likes to say “no”.  Probably somewhere deep in our subconscious we believe that saying “no” shows weakness.  If we say “no” our boss will think we can’t manage the load.  The contrary is probably closer to the truth.  By carefully analyzing your incoming work against your defined objectives you’ll prove to be a valuable asset in accomplishing the “important” work that implements your company’s strategy.  However, I’m not suggesting you say “no” to all incoming requests – just be careful in your analysis of what you’re being asked to do.  Is it important to the company’s objectives?  Are you the right person to accomplish the task?  Are there other time critical tasks you need to perform in order to meet your objectives?

Related Posts

Get Your Productivity Groove On

Lost Productivity

Let’s look at a simple fact …

The human mind does not process information in parallel (you may want to go back and read that again).  It just can’t be done.  The Myth of Multitasking by Dave Crenshaw.  In his book he uses a simple example that is very convincing.  Simply take a sheet of paper and draw a line across the page.  Above of the line you will write the alphabet, below it the numbers 1 to 26.  The kicker is that you write one letter and then one number, so you’d write ‘A’ above the line and ‘1′ below the line, then you’d write ‘B’ above the line and ‘2′ below the line, oscillating back and forth until done.  Time this exercise.  Next, time yourself writing just the alphabet and then just the numbers 1 to 26 in serial without switching back and forth.  If you’re like most people you’ll find that it takes about twice as long to do the first exercise as it does the second.  So think about that.  You did the same amount of work in both cases but it took you twice as long.  The only difference was context switching.  Unfortunately, context switching has become the “norm” in today’s offices.

People forget that multitasking isn’t about processing information in parallel, which we just proved was impossible.  Multitasking originally meant juggling or managing multiple tasks during a given period of time, not at the same time.  Somehow the definition was hijacked to mean something more akin to parallel processing.  Now people brag about how many conversations they can carry on at once, but based on what we now know, what they’re really saying is “Look at me, I’m getting less work done”.  Probably something you don’t want your boss to know .

The other thing to remember is that every communication channel has it’s own place and purpose in the world and changing conventions can be unproductive.  Email was born to replace memos and letters.  No one expected you to reply to a memo or letter within minutes of it being issued.  Your memos would gather in your mailbox and you’d pick them up once a day and work through the replies, just like you still pick up your mail once a day from the Post Office.  What’s changed is the use paradigm and expectations.  Now in this world of cell phones and computers that has people linked in everywhere, all the time, we expect immediate responses to our emails. It’s just not realistic.

Similarly, IM changed too.  Originally, it was a social activity done during off-hours.  You would log on to AIM from home when you were actually AVAILABLE and chat with your friends.  Now it’s moved into the workplace, but in doing so kept many of it’s conventions from when it was used at home, such as the default status of “Available”.  The same goes for Twitter.  What used to be an extracurricular activity has suddenly found it’s way onto workplace desktops.  Don’t get me wrong, all these things are useful tools in the right situation, but they need to find a productive place on our desks without being distracting.  NOTE TO SELF:  It’s ironic that I’ll be pimping this via Twitter? .

In 1971 the economist Herbert A. Simon wrote “What information consumes is rather obvious: It consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.”  Sage wisdom, but how do you apply it today without seeming like a Technophobe and dropping “off the grid”.   One thing we can do is remember that newer technologies may have evolved under social circumstances and not business ones.  This means the conventions which were adopted may be perfectly okay at home, but detrimental to the “Productive Desktop”.

Here are a few other tips to reclaim some of your productivity…

Remember when we where in school and had to write all those tedious papers.  Our teachers taught us to use outlines to organize our objectives and ideas.  We need to revisit that same strategy now.  Before logging on to your computer in the morning or after lunch, simply write down what your goals for the next few hours are and what tasks need to get done.  The point here is to set mini-goals for yourself and make sure you understand the steps necessary to achieve those goals.

The next thing on my list may surprise some, Internet Relay Chat (or just chat).  Chat has been around since the dawn of the Internet but evolved mostly in technical communities.  Chat has a different usage paradigm than the “ever distracting” IM.  It’s a communal technology which means its goal is to gather users with similar interests together into a real-time forum.  Once together they can ask questions of the entire group and not specific users.  This means users of the group can monitor the room at their own pace and ask or answer questions to a group of participants.  The goal of IRC is not to query specific users but give participants a forum in which many people are participating simultaneously which reduces the burden on a single user.  Open-source projects use chat all the time but it hasn’t been widely adopted in the business community which is a real shame given it’s advantages over IM.

The thing about IM is that it’s a direct connection to your attention especially since most users maintain the default status of ‘Available’ (that’s just asking for trouble).  I’d say my biggest distracter is currently IM when my status is ‘Available’, but what can you do?  During those periods when you know you need to focus, simply set your IM status to “Do Not Disturb”.  People will rarely bother you if your status is something other than “Available”.

Another great tip for regaining productivity is to only check for email, RSS, or Twitter updates every so often.  Set aside some amount of time in the morning and in the afternoon to go through your email and feed updates.  You’ll be amazed at how much more you get done when your email or RSS icon isn’t flashing at you constantly.

There are several ways to try to take back your life and I’ve only covered but a few here.   The key is to be proactive and manage technology and information the way you manage everything else in your life.  Too much of anything (even a good thing) is often bad.

If you are looking for some good books to read I’d suggest Getting Things Done by David Allen and the Myth of Multitasking by Dave Crenshaw.
Related Posts:

What Really Matters?
Lost Productivity
What does Potential Energy and Collaboration Have in Common?
In Defense of Distraction

6uzt3yf2vb

All information artifacts in the enterprise have “potential” for collaboration we just need to understand how to unleash that potential without creating another “Silo”. For all you Science Geeks out there this is very familiar to the concept of potential energy. Potential energy is the energy stored within an object waiting to be unleashed and converted to kinetic energy. Information artifacts in the enterprise possess the same potential for collaboration if the right conditions exist to release it.

Earlier in one of my posts I defined the Knowledge Cycle and its five key phases for creating and sustaining knowledge within an organization.

• Publish – information is distilled into some tangible form (document, report, wiki, email)
• Discover – finding the information from the Publish phase
• Discuss – bringing relevant parties together to better understand the information
• Personalize – adding your unique perspective to the original information
• Extend – applying newly formed knowledge to new and different scenarios

To effectively use the Knowledge Cycle and tap the potential of an organization you need to release the collaboration potential of your information using tools that understand personal and team relevance and allow information to act as the focal point of discussion and decision making. These information artifacts that have potential for collaboration we’ll call Social Objects. Social objects are information sources that encourage interaction between users due to the commonality users share with the object. They are created during the Publish phase of the Knowledge Cycle and tend to be the center around which collaboration takes place. An effective collaboration architecture allows all information sources available to a user to be considered social objects with potential for collaboration. If we use this metaphor to look across an enterprise it becomes apparent that all data sources available to knowledge workers should be considered social objects and as such collaboration should be, not only encouraged but enabled. This means that not only traditional social media like blogs, wikis, or discussion forums encourage collaboration but also that new information sources such as business intelligence reports or other business data should provide tools that bring users together and provide a platform for effective collaboration.

Let’s consider a perfectly valid business scenario that we’ve all seen dozens of times, a regional sales quota is missed in the Sales Department. The existing interactions that take place in an organization to discuss and solve this problem are broken. The current technology for finding, collaborating, and fixing the above problem relies on human interaction at nearly every level. If we walk through the current situation that most managers face it would contain the following steps:

Existing Steps

1. Get a link to a regional sales report via email at the end of the month
2. Browse the report (when you have time)
3. Discover the failing region
4. Use email to schedule an appointment among relevant parties
5. Discuss the issue at the appointed time among the parties
6. Create action items during the meeting
7. And finally repeat as necessary until you are either fired or the problem has been fixed.

In all honestly I simplified it some. It could have been worse if the manager had to go digging around to find out who the district sales manager was or use “Busy Search” to try to find a time that worked for all parties. Then there is the problem of the excessive amount of email that this flurry of activity will create and having to manage all of that!

Now consider the same scenario but this time using a smart collaboration platform. What if a platform existed that would allow us to place a report filter on the enterprise report server that would flag relevant data based on criteria we set? This platform would then discover the regional sales anomaly for us and understand that this particular object required collaboration. The platform would then automatically discover relevant parties and create a collaboration space that was focused around solving this particular issue. Busy Search is taken care of by the platform, the only thing you do is give your consent for the meeting to take place. Invitations are sent automatically. All the parties come together at the appointed time using both audio, video, and an online meeting space to discuss and archive the reasons for the missed quota. As action items arise during the meeting they are created and assigned in the meeting and associated with the initial report and workspace. As the participants begin working on their action items all relevant data is cataloged with the workspace and when the next meeting occurs the participants can easily check all the action items and progress in one place. Doesn’t that sound better?  We went from seven steps to two.

Reduced Steps:

1. Be at the meeting
2. Plan a course of action

This is the simplicity our collaboration platform needs to give us. Users shouldn’t have to worry about all the minutia involved in trying to create, discover, and manage workspaces and teams. We need tools that do the grunt work for us and let us focus on doing our REAL jobs. We need a platform that is flexible enough to allow connections to other systems for integration with communication services (email, calendaring, IM) and also provides the necessary tools that allow us to add collaboration components like comments, attachments, or tags to our Social Objects.

In the next installment we’ll look at some potential tools to make all this happen .

We can make it …

The problem is an offshoot of a well known dilemma that has been talked about for decades now and was first discussed (that I know of) in Fred Brook’s Mythical Man Month.  The issue is communication coordination.  As teams and organizations grow there are more participants involved in nearly every decision making process.  This means more parties must be asked questions of, or require notification of, certain events.  Basically, more people need to be informed of your actions so that you can — cover your a@@ –.  This means lots of email and lots of meetings and lots of lost productivity.

Are there ways that we can fix this?  Minimize the communication coordination time and take back some of our own time?  Are the tools available yet that can help?  I think so, but it does require a paradigm shift in the way we work.  We must stop trying to work and communicate as individuals but rather as a participant in a team.  That means having a shared team file repository not a personal one.  It means maintaining context across lots of different data repositories (email, files, contacts, notes, bookmarks, etc).  It means having access to documents that are always online and always available.  And it also means being able to manage tasks and calendars more effectively, for the team and you personally.

Let’s look at the typical weekly CorpAm conference call, one of the largest most annoying time drains that was ever created.  Meeting participants are asked to participate via an email invitation that contains, hopefully, background information related to the topic.  Everyone dials in at the appropriate time and the moderator starts the discussion.  As the meeting progresses each participant takes notes relevant to them and the moderator maintains a list of action items for distribution after the meeting.  At the next meeting all the action items are reviewed and new topics are discussed and we start all over again.  In summary each meeting is it’s own little island joined to the next meeting by the action items.  This description probably sums up 90% of the weekly conference calls in existence.  Each call taking at least an hour from your life!  So how do we make it better?  First off, we should start by having  an online shared meeting repository accessible by all participants that allows for the review of relevant information and the addition of shared comments to that information.  Secondly, the meeting should take place using an online tool that provides multi-party note editing and task management as well as phone support.  This will allow meeting participants to co-edit the notes of the meeting, as well as, see the action items as they are assigned.  When the meeting concludes the participants can continue to use the online workarea to add additional detail to their action items and also use it as an online repository for items related to the meeting topic.  At the beginning of the next meeting the online workarea is again used as the basis for the call.  Tools that allow this kind of work already exist and can be used.  Software like Kablink, Sharepoint, or Google Docs all support features that can help introduce this new work paradigm.

Another typical work problem without an adequate solution is task management.  How many times have you came away from a meeting with your boss where he gave you some ginormous (gigantic+enormous) task?  You go back to your desk shaking your head and enter it as a Task in Outlook, but as you start to understand the effort involved in completing the task you realize that it involves multiple steps across multiple organizations involving multiple people    Ouch!  Now what.  That simple little Outlook Task doesn’t seem to get it done any longer and nobody ever, ever, ever wants to open up something like Microsoft Project .  So your left trying to manage the task in a spreadsheet like our executive mentioned above was doing.  What we need is a way to break a task up into it’s component parts and assign those parts to the requisite people while allowing you to monitor the total task’s progress.  Additionally, this task should  also become a context reference point for you so that any information you receive related to the task can be associated with it.  This will include: documents, email, bookmarks, contacts, etc.  This will provide you with a one-stop shopping experience for all information related to that task.  Again, many of these tools are already available today in team collaboration software like Sharepoint or Kablink.

Let’s change the way we work from Personal Productivity (which we know doesn’t exist anymore) to Team Productivity and take back two hours in our day and go see our kid’s soccer game