How do not disturb day can improve your productivity?
How many times a phone ring disturbed you when you are in a high productivity zone? The most common answer will be at least a few times a day.
There are many business books written on management perspective. Which tells how you can get maximum productivity from the employees. But there are not much written from the employees perspective. A typical Manager’s workday is filled with phone calls, emails, and meetings. It is difficult for them to understand how a phone call can affect the productivity of an employee.
Phone calls and emails take a large slice of employees workday. There are about 124.5 billion business emails sent and received each day. The average worker spends an estimated 28 percent of the workweek managing e-mail and nearly 20 percent looking for internal information or tracking down colleagues who can help with specific tasks. Theses statistics does not include the time spent on meetings, phone calls, and followups.
Employees are exhausted after replying all those emails and attending the phone calls. Still, they can work hard to produce the required results. But, You cannot expect any innovation from them.
“ The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing” — Walt Disney
Google’s famous 20% time policy encourages employees to spend 20% of their time working on what they think will most benefit Google. It operates somewhat outside the lines of formal management oversight, and always will because the most talented and creative people can’t be forced to work. This has given great products to google from Gmail to Chrome.
Of course, all companies do not have a Google-like budget for innovation. There should be some way to make employees happy and encourage innovations. You can use new social messaging apps like Slack in work. It partially solves the problem by reducing the number of emails and phone calls. But increases the number of messages and continuous notifications. You can customize and fine-tune the notifications. Still, employees will be in a constant impulse of checking status the same way as we have for common social apps like Facebook and WhatsApp.
Whenever an employee starts working on a task, It takes at least a few minutes to get into the zone. When employees are interrupted by a phone call or a message notification, They stop the current task and focus on the interruption. After finishing the call it will take at least a few minutes for them to go back to the high productivity zone. Businesses invest large money to buy the latest machines to save time and increase productivity. But they are not concentrating on time wasted by employees because of a slow computer, legacy process, unnecessary emails, and meetings. Time wasted by employees on a day because of these avoidable reasons will be a huge amount of money loss if multiplied by the number of employees with the number of occurrences of time wastage. Even if it is a minute of wastage each time, that will be a chunk of budget wastage for a year.
Researcher Sophie Leroy from the University of Washington describes what happens:
“As I am still thinking about Task A while trying to do Task B, I don’t have the cognitive capacity to process those two tasks at the same time and do a perfect job on both.”
Time is what we want most, but what we use worst. — William Penn
The best way of managing employees time is by allowing employees to manage their time. If an employee thinks that no mail and no phone call morning will allow him to give better productivity then let him have that choice. He can reply to all emails and return the missed calls in the afternoon. But, his manager should be ok with the fact that he might get a reply to his mail after 4 hours.
This approach will lead to distributed management approach for employees time instead of the more traditional top-down approach. Nowadays more and more companies are accepting flexible office hours. They can also try accepting do not disturb workdays to improve employees well being and increase productivity. Each employee should have a do not disturb workday as per their preference.
Even if a company is not able to give employees a do not disturb day in a week should create a culture of focused work by encouraging teams to turn all notifications off for a while using Do Not Disturb feature in computers and mobiles.
Companies can have their own version of Do Not Disturb calendar which suits them. They can have 2-hour schedules of power focus session. Employees can work 2 hours without any disturbance and next 2 hours can be a regular mixed-mode of work and communication. The same pattern can be followed throughout the day. Each team can have its own Do Not Disturb calendar. In this way, all members of the team will be in high focus work time. So, there will be less and less chances of disturbances because most likely disturbances are avoided.
Get the arrows straight to hit the target.
Do not disturb should not be a hard-lined rule. There will be times that you have to respond to critical emails and return calls immediately. You have to confirm something to a team member to continue his work. It should be seen as an approach for highly focused work. Not as a fixed rule.
In the business world, exchanging information is essential for any company’s success, and there are many different options available to communicate with the employees and customers. With technical advancements of Fax to Phone call to Video call and with introductions of new apps and tools communication becomes easy and at times overwhelming. So, now we are in time to work on how to reduce communications effectively without affecting the smooth flow of business.