No Time To Do My Job ⏰
Work coordination is still eating up the lion’s share of everyone’s time
According to a global survey by Asana, work coordination is still eating up the lion’s share of everyone’s time. We’re simply spending more time synchronizing, aligning and collaborating about our stuff to do than actually doing the stuff. Middle / senior managers have it worst, spending 60% of their time this way. This hasn’t changed much since 2019.
Essential Complexity
In the 1960s, with Drucker’s coining of the phrase 'knowledge work’ there was a growing recognition that the command-and-control hierarchies of traditional businesses just couldn’t coordinate work quickly enough to compete. The amount of overhead required to make decisions in such businesses became completely unmanageable when faced with the need to be adaptive.
So began the process of devolving decision making to the edges of organizations and the recognition that alignment was the most important quality in an organization that both wanted to scale and remain agile. The question was how to organize collaboration to minimize overhead and maximize productivity.
From Conway’s law, to Dunbar's number and Brooks’ law, we’ve spent the last half-century coming to grips with the fact that there seems to be an irreducible overhead to having people collaborate. Regardless of which tools, processes and organizational structures we use, there seems to be an inherent upper limit to how efficiently large numbers of people can work together.
Not My Job
When reading the Asana survey report, the following phrase particularly stands out…
“the majority of their day — 58% — is still being lost to work coordination rather than the skilled, strategic jobs they’ve been hired to do”
While the nearly-60% number feels regrettable, it’s not the only interesting thing about that sentence. There is also an obvious implication that people expect to be doing the work they were originally hired to do - at least for the most part. Yet we live in the era of the gig economy, portfolio careers, T-shaped hiring and now the ‘great reset’ - an era almost defined by dynamism in the work people do.
What if it turns out that most things-of-value can only be built by teams of people? What if it then turns out that those teams can’t operate without investing in the time it takes to align and collaborate properly? In other words, if you joined a company to deliver on its mission and you brought a bunch of skills with you (say, as an engineer), why frame the meetings and emails you do as non-work if they force-multiply everyone around you?
The implication of the word ‘lost’ in the sentence above is that the often-intricate work required to keep everyone pulling in the same direction isn’t ‘real’ work. And yet, when it’s done right … and somehow 200 people produce world-leading products together, we call it ‘leadership’.
Focus & Flow
So what can we do to get as close as possible to an ideal state? How do we optimize organizations as much as we can so that productivity is maximized without sacrificing alignment and wellbeing? Our experience is that there are three kinds of activity that individuals in a team need to engage in to achieve this optimality…
Allocate their time effectively
balance the time they spend on thinking, aligning, doing and (of course) resting
prioritize ruthlessly
manage their psychology - avoiding fallacies like sunk-cost for example
Communicate their boundaries and status clearly
minimize interruptions
have a transparent communications policy (listing the specifics of when / how they deal with their comms channels)
make their work visible
Elevate the impact of their time
avoid context-switching / minimize work-in-progress
have crystal-clear roles and ownership (speeding decision-making, increasing focus and reducing collaboration overhead)
apply deliberate, thoughtful tools to meetings (when to have them, how to design them, etc…)
This three-legged stool is something we found ourselves coaching for so often that we chose to design a workshop around it. It’s packed with our best actionable tips for the modern digital workplace, so give us a shout if you’d like to explore bringing that to your team.