Productivity

My name is Stever Robbins, and I’m here to confess: I’m an overwhelm wimp.

Give me more than three things to handle at once and pop, my head explodes. It’s not just me—everyone seems to be suffering from daily overwhelm. At best, we flounder. At worst, we shut down entirely. You can’t be effective running ragged, living surgically connected to your cell phone, and cutting short every meeting because you’re way too on-the-run. If being the center of attention makes you feel important, go for it. Personally, I’d rather be sane.

I’ll warn you in advance: this article is about what’s good for you, not what’s good for business. How can you take care of yourself amidst the chaos?

Surviving in the moment

When overwhelm crashes down, your emergency rip cord is to physically take a break. Grab something to eat, walk around the block, and get away! Breathe deeply, with a long, slow exhale. And lean forward. I don’t know why, but leaning into overwhelm makes it less overwhelming.

Once you’ve calmed a bit, consider taking longer-term steps to recover your life. Overwhelm comes from too much, too fast. The solution is learning to say “no,” keeping firm boundaries, and going easy on yourself when you are not superman or woman.

If you choose sanity, step one is changing your thinking. Rather than worshipping productivity and efficiency, remember that there’s more to life than living it efficiently. There’s family, quality of life, joy, love, spirituality, and community, for starters.

Some of the following anti-overwhelm suggestions will be heretical. They’ll actually suggest that you reduce your productivity. After all, do you want to be highly productive, or do you want to have a life? You can’t do both.

The root problem is that our tools have become too good. We’ve made our lives so very efficient with our cell phones, PDAs, and e-mail. But does your Palm Pilot make you more efficient? If so, just wait. Expectations will expand to include your increased productivity. You’ll quietly lose your relaxation and recharge time, sacrificed to the Gods of efficiency.

Remind yourself on a regular basis that while a Blackberry tempts you with “efficient” e-mail handling, resist! It slowly infiltrates your life, demanding you to respond to e-mail at any time of day or night. Take it on faith that labor-savings devices demand that you labor more.

“But,” you cry, “I can multitask, getting more done quickly!” Multitasking is a myth. At least, quality multitasking is a myth. If you have several simple, brainless tasks, maybe you can do a couple at once. But if you need reflection or depth, forget it. Attention Deficit Disorder is a problem for people precisely because much of modern life really does demand more than ten seconds of sustained attention. Multitasking is a chance to accomplish many things poorly, all at once. It takes nine months to make a baby, and it takes focused concentration to make great breakthroughs.

In the people realm, multitasking can be deadly. Consider this: Effective leaders connect with their followers. When someone comes to you for direction and motivation, talking while checking your e-mail won’t inspire loyalty and commitment. If you’re not committed enough to give someone your full attention, why should they be committed to you?

The emergency solution

Our whole economy seems “just-in-time,” with lag times and delays removed. Here is one illustration. Recent banking deregulation allows checks to clear instantly, eliminating the “float” that provided many businesses with a few additional days of wiggle room to finance cash flow. Now, everyone must be that much more vigilant about their cash.

Just-in-time brings its own problems, too. Problems can happen, just-in-time. When one piece of our tightly coupled, precision system falters, the entire thing can come tumbling down. We risk utter collapse if we stop if even for a minute. Not exactly a recipe for sanity.

So make use of it: Become emergency driven. If the overwhelm is too great, rather than trying to avoid emergencies, orient your life around them. Ignore your inbox. Choose what you’ll let go, and then let go of it utterly and completely. What’s important will resurface as emergencies. Trust me, there will be some Type-A person in the next cubicle who will raise the alarm when a discarded initiative becomes critical. Then you can step in, do the work, and be a hero for saving the day. Sure, you can get promoted by doing it right the first time (assuming you work where such things are noticed), but you just may save your personal life by not doing it until it’s important.

It’s always possible that you have enough time to do everything, but just aren’t organized. I’ve spent four decades searching for the perfect organization system. The closest I’ve found is David Allen’s Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity. He lays out a system that empties your inbox daily, turning items into “To-Do’s” and ensuring things get done. Of course, he doesn’t have much to say about what you do when you commit to too much that it takes a full workday just to process your inbox.

That’s because, as with technology, better organization will often result in temporary savings followed by increased expectations. This, you can control. Get yourself organized—but don’t tell anyone. Scatter books around your office and season the scene with old folders with papers spilling out of them. Then empty your real inbox (hidden in the corner behind the potted palm) daily, and enjoy an organized life.

Just enough

You’ll probably notice that many of my suggestions can result in slower career growth, less productivity, decreased efficiency. That’s right. In fact, here is the most powerful strategy of all: Settle for just enough. Unless you’re living in a really different world from me, you can’t have it all. You have limited time and attention. You can’t spend it all trying for “the most” in every category. Figure out what “enough” is and make that your target.

Just enough applies to money, too. If you’re driven by money, decide in advance when you can ease up. A real estate investor I know never set an “enough” goal for herself. The last time I saw her, she had been a millionaire for twenty years, and worth over $50 million. Was she enjoying life? Hardly. By not deciding what was enough, she was pushing herself as hard as if she were still working on her first million.

Just enough applies to title and status, as well. An executive vice president of a several-hundred-person company decided that she hated her job. So she decided to downshift to a director-level position that gave her just enough status. It worked like a charm. She later downshifted again, spending a year climbing Mount Kilimanjaro and leading safaris in Africa. “Just enough” gave her the freedom to create a much richer life.

Just enough information

This is big. In our Brave New Economy, information is plentiful, cheap, and usually irrelevant. Lots of information is useless; the right information is invaluable. In preparation for a client meeting, someone will often circulate a dozen pages of client “data dump” the night before. Overwhelming, certainly. But is it worth reading? Who knows?

Don’t just accept information. Start by choosing some good questions, ask them, and collect just enough information to get a good enough answer. You’re not shooting for a perfect decision every time; you want just enough good decisions so you still reach your goal.

Your intuition may be helpful in defining this elusive “enough.” The COO of a company may find she can begin to make the right decision most of the time with just 30 percent of the information she normally would collect.

Scheduled maintenance

One thing you should have “just enough” of is work itself! In the book The Power of Full Engagement, author Tony Schwartz points out that regulating your energy is key to being productive. That means taking frequent work breaks to rest, relax, and recover. The same holds true writ large; schedule vacations throughout the year, and make sure you take them. When on vacation, leave your Internet connection and cell phone at home. Never, ever call into the office.

The last way to reduce overwhelm is to make frequent use of “no.” Say it when someone tries to obligate you for something you don’t have time for. Say “no” when your boss sets targets that can’t be reached without burnout. Say “no” when someone wants your feedback for the tenth time on the same memo—tell them, “it’s GOOD ENOUGH.”

“No” is hard for most of us to say. We like to feel appreciated and useful to others. But far better to say “no” many times and concentrate on a few great wins than to say “yes” after “yes” after “yes” and deliver poor results.

If saying “no” doesn’t work, take a drastic course: Let go. Stop caring. If your environment is demanding too much of you, let go of it. (And if you’re a leader, don’t put your people in the position of having to make this choice!) In a choice between sanity and emotional buy-in, choose sanity.

Detaching doesn’t have to mean that you do less work. In fact, if you detach in just the right way, you can start delegating out work you previously guarded with your life. Find someone who can do the work better, then let them go at it. The key to delegation, however, is striking the balance between sharing the burden and caring enough to make sure things get done.

At the end of the day, it’s not like there’s much choice. You will reduce your overwhelm. Either you’ll do it voluntarily and deliberately, or you’ll do it when you collapse with a nervous breakdown. You owe it to yourself to take control of your own life and make the hard choices now, when they’re uncomfortable, but doable. Something’s got to give. Don’t let it be you.

© 2004 by Stever Robbins. All rights reserved in all media.

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Can you write a refresher on critical thinking?

We business leaders so like to believe that we can think well, but we don’t. Only one in seven even reaches the top 10 percent of quality thinkers.1
The rest of us haven’t even read a book on critical thinking, much less practiced. We could fill a book on the topic, but instead, let’s indulge in the highlights of what makes for good critical thinking about decisions.

What’s logic got to do with it?

Nothing! We don’t use logic to decide, or even to think. And a good thing, too, or the advertising industry would be dead in the water. Unfortunately, all of our decisions come from emotion. Emotional Intelligence guru Daniel Goleman explains that our brain’s decision-making center is directly connected to emotions, then to logic. So, as any good salesman will tell you, we decide with emotion and justify (read: fool ourselves) with logic.

Purely emotional decision making is bad news. When insecurity, ego, and panic drive decisions, companies become toxic and may even die. Just look at all the corporate meltdowns over the last five years to quickly understand where emotional decision making can lead.

Critical thinking starts with logic. Logic is the unnatural act of knowing which facts you’re putting together to reach your conclusions, and how. We’re hard-wired to assume that if two things happen together, one causes the other. This lets us leap quickly to very wrong conclusions. Early studies showed that increasing light levels in factories increased productivity. Therefore, more light means more productivity? Wrong! The workers knew a study was being done, and they responded to any change by working harder, since they knew they were being measured—the Hawthorne Effect.

We also sloppily reverse cause and effect. We notice all our high performers have coffee at mid-morning, and conclude that coffee causes high performance. Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe high performers work so late and are so sleep deprived that they need coffee to wake up. Unless you want a hyper-wired workforce, it’s worth figuring out what really causes what.

There are many excellent books on logic. One of my favorites is the most-excellent and most-expensive Minto Pyramid Principle by Barbara Minto. It’s about logic in writing, but you can use it for any decision you want to think through in detail.

The trap of assuming

You can think critically without knowing where the facts stop and your own neurotic assumptions begin. We aren’t built to identify our own assumptions without lots of practice, yet the wrong assumptions are fatal.

When we don’t know something, we assume. That’s a fancy way of saying, “we make stuff up.” And often, we don’t realize we’re doing it. When our best performers leave, our first (and perhaps only) response is to offer them more pay, without realizing that other motivations like job satisfaction or recognition for accomplishments might be more important.

Finding and busting “conventional wisdom” can be the key to an empire. For decades, the standard video rental store model assumed that people wanted instant gratification and, to get it, they were willing to drive to a store, pay a rental fee for a few days’ access, and then drive back to the store in a few days to return the movie. Thousands of big and small video rental parlors popped up across the country using this model. But Reed Hastings challenged those assumptions. He calculated that people would trade instant gratification for delayed, and would pay a monthly fee if they could have movies mailed to them, which they could keep as long as they liked. The result? Netflix. Estimated 2005 revenue: $700 million.

Assumptions can also cripple us. A CEO confided that he never hires someone who backs into a parking space. His logic (and I use the term loosely): The person will use time at the start of the day so they can leave more quickly at the end of the day. He assumes face time equals results. In whose world? Many people tell me they get more done in an hour at home than in eight hours in an interruption-prone office. How many great employees will he miss because he’s not examining his assumptions?

Some assumptions run so deep they’re hard to question. Many managers can’t imagine letting people work fewer hours for the same pay. “If they go home earlier, we have to pay them less.” Why? “Hours = productivity” is true of assembly lines, but not knowledge work. Research shows that it’s not how much you work, but the quality of the work time that drives results.2 But in most workplaces, hours count as much as results.

Next time you’re grappling with a problem, spend time brainstorming your assumptions. Get others involved—it’s easier to uncover assumptions with an outside perspective. Then question the heck out of each one. You may find that one changed assumption is the difference between doing good and doing great.

The truth will set you free (statistics notwithstanding)

Have you ever noticed how terrified we are of the truth? We’re desperately afraid that the truth will reveal us as incompetent. Our situation really is hopeless. We really aren’t as great as we pretend. So we cling to our beliefs no matter how hard the truth tries to break free.

Guess what, recording industry: Electronic downloads have changed the nature of your business. Start asking how you’ll add value in a world where finding, packaging, and distributing sound is a commodity. Hey, ailing airlines: Oil’s expensive, customers won’t pay much, and you have huge capital costs. That hasn’t stopped Southwest, Jet Blue, and others from making a fortune.

Nothing tells the truth like solid data and the guts to accept it. But it’s difficult in practice. When was the last time you identified and collected data that contradicted your beliefs? If you found it, did you cheerfully change your belief, or did you explain away the data in a way that let you keep your comfortable pre-conceptions?

Here is a great exercise for your group or company. Have your general managers list your industry’s Unquestioned Truths, which they then must prove with data. When a Fortune 500 CEO recently ran this exercise, Surprise! Some “absolute truths” were absolutely false. Now he can do business his competitors think is nuts. Analysts will say he’s off his rocker, until his deeper knowledge of truth starts making a small fortune.

One caveat: Be picky about where you get your data. The Internet can be especially dangerous. The miracle of technology lets one bad piece of data spread far and wide, and eventually be accepted as truth.

Help! I’ve been framed!

Not only may your data be disguised, but the whole problem itself may be disguised! It seems obvious: we’re losing money, we need to cut costs. Not so fast! How you “frame” a situation—your explanation—has great power. Remember assumptions? Frames are big ol’ collections of assumptions that you adopt lock, stock, and barrel. They become the map you use to explore a situation.

You’re negotiating an acquisition. You’re chomping at the bit. It’s WAR!! Competition is all. The frame is combat!

Or, you’re negotiating an acquisition. You’re on a journey with the other party to find and split the value buried at the X. You still track your gains and gather intelligence, but the emphasis is on mutual outcomes, not “winning.”

In a zero-sum one-time negotiation, a combat frame may be the best tool. But in a negotiation where you’re free to develop creative solutions that can involve outside factors, the journey frame could work best. “Instead of $100K, why don’t you pay $75K and let us share your booth at Comdex?”

Frames have great power! Presented with a potential solution to a problem and told, “This course of action has a 20 percent failure rate,” few managers would approve. When that same solution is presented as having an 80 percent success rate, the same manager is going to consider it more deeply—even though a 20 percent failure rate means the same thing as an 80 percent success rate! The frame changes the decision.

Are you brave in the face of failure? Most people aren’t. I recommend the responsibility frame: “What aren’t we doing what we should?” The responsibility frame sends you searching for the elements of success.

The beauty is that no one frame is right, just different. The danger is when we adopt a frame without questioning it. You’ll do best by trying several different frames for a situation and exploring each to extract the gems.

People are our greatest asset. Really

Critical thinking isn’t just about what happens in our own brains. When you’re thinking critically in business, bring in other people! We don’t consider the people impact in our decisions often enough. In fact, we pooh-pooh the “soft stuff.” We feel safe with factors we can calculate on our HP-12B. But in truth, business is about people. Multibillion-dollar mergers fail due to culture clash.

Customers, suppliers, partners, employees. They’re as much a part of your business as that sparkly new PC you use to play Solitaire. How will your decisions change their lives? Imagine being them and let your imagination change your decisions.

The Gallup organization estimates that 70 percent of America’s workers are disengaged, and disengaged workers are dramatically less productive, creative, and committed than engaged workers. Yet few strategy meetings ask, “How can we engage our employees more?” It’s as if we say people are our greatest asset—but we don’t really believe it. If you want to improve your critical thinking, get other points of view.

A stitch in time saves nine

Of course you know you should think about the consequences of your actions. But with information overload, quarterly earnings pressure, sixty-hour weeks…who has the time? We don’t think much beyond the end of our nose.

But technology leverages the effects of our decisions throughout the organization and even across the globe. So good thinking demands that you consider consequences over many timeframes. Think out a month, a year, a decade, many decades. That tanning booth looks great when you consider how you’ll look in a week, but is it worth looking like a leather overcoat ten years from now?

Long-term junkies like me are great at creating ten-year plans, but managing next month’s cash flow? Not likely. Short-term junkies are more common; they’re the ones who discount to make this quarter’s numbers, while tanking the company in the process. You can do better by considering multiple timeframes.

I could go on, but there’s plenty here to chew on. Think about a decision you’re making, and pull in the rigor:

1. Make sure you understand the logic behind your decision.
2. Identify your assumptions and double-check them.
3. Collect the data that will support or disprove your assumptions.
4. Deliberately consider the situation from multiple frames.
5. Remember the people!
6. Think short and long term.

Good luck.

© 2005 by Stever Robbins. All rights reserved in all media.

See other stories in this series.