Once again, Cal Newport hits the nail right on the head. Continuing my readings in Deep Work, Newport makes a statement in in Chapter 4: Work Deeply that resonated so deeply that I felt compelled to share his bold, but very true, statement with my own team.
“We instead find ourselves in distracting open offices where inboxes cannot be neglected and meetings are incessant – a setting where colleagues would rather you respond quickly to their latest e-mail than produce the best possible results.”
In one sentence, Newport sums up my experience working at my current company. We are email obsessed. Our teams sit together in an open concept “war room” setting. We expect that emails are answered within the same day that they were sent. We are distracted by pings from instant messenger all day long. We miss project deadlines and spend energy blaming unrealistic project due dates instead of working more efficiently in an environment that promotes focus and drives results. We hide behind our “shallow tasks” and allow our days to pass by moving emails from inboxes to folders.
I work on a very large-scale, corporate-wide, global system implementation. It is a highly complex project made up of hundreds of team members across the globe. The project began in 2014 and is scheduled to complete in 2020. Each of us is a mere cog in a very big wheel, and we are interdependent and directly influence each other’s work. Our deadlines are firm and aggressive. Our executive project sponsors are sharp and engaged. Each and every day the project team is sprinting towards the next task. Our teams are comprised of work-hungry, systems experts, project managers, developers and problem-solvers. This group of people is driven – with a proven track record of successful system go-lives in about 20 countries since 2014. Why, then, does this group of experts have such a hard time delivering completed tasks per the schedule, consistently and without having to work 16-hour days? Yes, I do believe one component is the aggressive timeline we are working against. However, if I pull back the covers on our daily operations, the thing that no one wants to own up to is the day-to-day lack of focus. No one wants to take the time to truly time block their days and remove all distraction from key blocks of time. The team prefers to immerse themselves in answering emails and sitting in meetings where they don’t add or gain value. Why? Because focused work is hard work and hard work is HARD. Email is time-consuming, but it’s not hard work. Anyone can do it. An article by Behavioral Scientist, Remedies for the Distracted Mind states, “Because of its ubiquity, email has proven to be a special case in aggravating a Distracted Mind. You may find it difficult to shut email down, but it is essential that you do so to remove the temptation to respond to the “ding” alert of an incoming message. As we now know, it can take you up to twenty or thirty minutes to return to your work once you allow an interruption.” On an aggressive project like the one I am on, there is no room in the day for multiple 30 minute distraction recoveries! Furthermore, according to an article on Semantic Scholar titled Checking Email Less Frequently Reduces Stress, “Email is among the most widespread online activities—in a 2011 survey, 92% of US adults reported using email to communicate (Pew Research Center, 2011). In addition to this ubiquity of email, people’s inboxes play a central role in their lives: More than one-third of US adults surveyed in 2014 said that email would be ‘very hard’ to give up—more than three times as many people who said the same about social media (Pew Research Center, 2014).” Too often, email replaces other, more appropriate channels of communication. The reason? Because it takes less brain power to fire off an email than to have a conversation with someone to work through a problem, ask a question, give feedback or make a comment.
Back to our team “war room”, besides email, our phones never leave our sides. Most times there are more smartphones on the table than there are laptops (everyone at the office has a personal AND work-issued smartphone) and there are DEFINITELY far less notebooks and pencils. If you look around the room in our meetings, every person is multitasking on their laptops and on average, in a one hour meeting, I’d say people check there phones a good 20 times.
It is clear, our brains gravitate towards the easy work. Because of this, we have developed into a culture that prefers to engage in the shallow work so we can go back and blame that shallow work as the culprit for not having enough time to complete the deeper, harder tasks. I think any one of us likes to think we could give up our distraction addition any day if we wanted to. However, I think most people, even my group of highly intelligent systems experts, would really truly struggle to keep their minds focused and challenge ourselves to really go deep. I think it’s time they give it a try, and I’m hopeful with the learnings from Newport’s book, that I will be able to guide their way.
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