“Why Work Doesn’t Work” is a CBC interview with Jason Fried. He discusses the workplace, sane work hours, and meetings vs. communicating with passive communication tools (i.e. ones that don’t require interruptions).
Communication doesn’t always have to be in real time. It can be in what we call “slow time.” You can post something and three hours later someone can get back to you and then four hours later someone else can get back to you. And everything will work out just fine.
Slow time is “Maybe it takes two or three days to have this conversation. And we do it over periods of 15 minutes here, two minutes there, four minutes there.” And that’s fine. It doesn’t need to happen all at once. Unless it’s really, incredibly, truly urgent. (Which most things aren’t. They’re made out to be that way, but they really aren’t that important.)
Meetings basically make things happen all at once. And that means you’re pulling a bunch of people off their work to have this “right now” conversation. It’s very disruptive for a bunch of people. So if they can communicate over a long period of time instead, it’s much better.
I think companies would benefit from giving employees a lot more autonomy and alone time to do their work. And then when they do need to come together, it can be more special and more meaningful. It’s like seeing an old friend you haven’t seen for a long time – it’s kind of a special moment for a couple hours and then you go break up and go back to your own lives and that’s fine. And that’s how we like to treat our work here.
We also try to have sane working hours. And four day workweeks during the summer. What we’ve found is that when people have fewer hours to work, they put more time into the work. It’s like anything. If you have less of it, you conserve it a bit more. You use it better. If you have fewer dollars left, you’re probably not going to go out and buy a big screen TV if you don’t need one. You’re going to put those dollars to work in a more efficient manner. It’s the same way with time. If you only have 32 hours this week to get something done, you’re not going to waste time.
Related
Don’t break Parkinson’s Law (i.e. “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”)
Note: Text above condensed and compiled from various answers. Listen to the full interview.
Lance Jones
on 27 Apr 11I think people (especially Fortune 500 company employees) would be shocked to see the impact of ‘traditional’ meetings on a year’s worth of their work life. Right now I’m working with a couple of developers to build a Web-based analysis tool for Outlook Calendar… something that will provide people managers with real data about where changes need to happen for increasing productivity and employee engagement. Would love to hear if anyone else has used or knows of other meeting optimization services (consulting-based or technology-based).
Justin Jackson
on 27 Apr 11The point with Rework, or any book, isn’t that you drop everything and just do what we’re doing. The point is to try things out. Try one thing, like a “no talk” Thursday, and see if it works for you.
J. Simmons
on 27 Apr 11I know for sure that I could get more work done in a six hour day, five days a week at job. Just about everyone could and I believe the production and level of quality would increase dramatically.
Raj Patel
on 27 Apr 11At our company too, we find “passive communication” works very well.
Emails, online discussions, and web-based collaboration tend to be much more focused than phone calls, as they require writing.
We’ve found that writing takes more effort, and makes us more focused – as a result, we avoid wasting time babbling on and on during phone/skype calls or in-person meetings! :)
Mattt
on 27 Apr 11@Raj i love email and IM for work because of that extra effort. it is all to easy to use the wrong language during a ‘face to face’ (Skype included) exchange , which in the tech world can make loads of difference. slowing down and thinking about what you are going to say is a definite benefit.
Kevin Ball
on 28 Apr 11To me, the difference between ‘slow time’ and ‘fast time’ is really the difference between doing something synchronously and doing something asynchronously. Sometimes it is far more effective to do something synchronously (some types of design and brainstorming for example), but far more things can be done async than most people believe. However you distribute them, it is important to schedule the synchronous things you do need outside of large blocks of time with no synchronous discussions so people can get into flow and be productive without constantly being interrupted.
And as you point out, the more people that need to be involved in a conversation, the more likely it is that asynchronous will be the way to go. Even a 10 minute meeting chews up a lot of person-hours when everyone at the company is involved.
Adam Hann
on 28 Apr 11Kevin, great stuff. Even at the end where it mentions about work hours being more valuable when there are less, the same goes with meetings. If you have very few, I’d imagine they would be more meaningful when you do have them.
Thanks for sharing!
David Andersen
on 28 Apr 11I’m aware of a manager who calls a meeting after she sees that more than 3 email exchanges have occurred on a topic. She thinks it’s faster and more productive to get everyone together (usually right away) and hash out the issue in person. And often getting everyone together means people from more than one building. One would almost think she’s paid to kill productivity.
Marco
on 28 Apr 11@David A.: I wonder, what industry is this person in? Corporate stuff?
David Andersen
on 28 Apr 11@Marco – She’s in IT at a university.
Draknor
on 28 Apr 11@David A: I think its a fine line—I’ve been in email conversations that swirled in circles for days, where a 5 minute phone conversation cleared everything up. And then of course I’ve been in hours of meetings where nothing meaningful was said or done.
I think the point is - the right tool for the right job. Sometimes async comms (email, IM, etc) is appropriate - perhaps more than most corporations realize. But sometimes, sync comms (phone, meetings), save time in the long run when the message isn’t getting communicated correctly by email.
David Andersen
on 28 Apr 11@Draknor -
There’s definitely a point for a cut off, but it’s contextual. An arbitrary rule of >3 emails = call a meeting is just ridiculous. And email conversations that go for days – assuming an important decision needs to come from the conversation in a timely manner – is, imo, reflective of a bigger problem than the communication tool of choice.
Jon Huther
on 28 Apr 11You can post something and three hours later someone can get back to you and then four hours later someone else can get back to you. And everything will work out just fine.
Jeff Putz
on 29 Apr 11If you compile the statements above, you can arrive at something that works: Team rooms.
For several gigs now, developing software, we’ve used team rooms, and it totally changes the dynamic of how we work, for the better. We need very few meetings, because if we need to figure something out, we just ask each other. (Ad-hoc pairing is sometimes a part of the arrangement as well.) We still get “alone time,” just together. You quickly get a feel for what’s appropriate at what time, and it’s like the “slow time” communication without the technology in the middle. You’d be shocked to hear that my team at Microsoft even does this, which is why we ship our stuff so frequently, and even maintain life-work balance.
I don’t disagree that interruptions are a toxic productivity killer, but it doesn’t mean you need to hole up in a room alone either. I think doors are a barrier to collaboration.
rash
on 29 Apr 11Nice points discussed here. Communication should be effective. In today’s workplaces, skilled workers are more productive in less time.
Andrew
on 29 Apr 11While I agree that face-to-face meetings and phone calls have the ability to disrupt, the biggest challenge to email and other forms of passive communication is that the sender doesn’t control the tone of the message so much as it’s the recipient. As others have noted, email and other forms of writing require the sender to think about the message and how it may be received on the other end. Nuance and other verbal queues are lost in most writing unless the sender is skilled at presenting the message well. Unfortunately, far more often than not, the sender in today’s get it done quickly world doesn’t understand this concept. I find more complex issues may start with written communication, but often get solved faster with conversation. Simpler things can and should be handled with IM, email, etc…
This discussion is closed.