About Dan Markovitz

Dan Markovitz is the founder and president of TimeBack Management. Prior to founding his own firm, Mr. Markovitz held management positions at Sierra Designs, Adidas, CNET and Asics Tiger. Learn More...

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I just got back from Germany, where I spoke to the European subsidiary of a large U.S. manufacturing company. The audience was composed of both individual contributors and managing directors, and although the speech was well received, it was clear that the managing directors were a bit disappointed: they wanted me to talk more about big-picture strategic issues, rather than on the mundane details of keeping their desks clean, or dealing with emails, or managing meetings.

I could understand their feelings -- they figured that the banality of keeping their desks clean and their inboxes empty had little or nothing to do with the challenges they face on a daily basis. (How do we winnow down the 153 product initiatives we're considering? How do we raise revenue per employee? Should we exit a market we've been in for 15 years but that has diminishing profit potential?)

Nevertheless, I think they missed the point: the little stuff like managing the flood of email is the critical foundation needed for dealing with the big issues. The reason they could never find time to deal with the big stuff is that they continually lost time and focus to interruptions from coworkers, or stupid emails, or simply searching for information in the debris piled on their desks.

Ask yourself this: what are the obstacles to doing whatever it is that you deem really important? Odds are that you "don't have enough time." You spend far too much energy dealing with email; you can't find 30 uninterrupted minutes to think; you're trapped in endless meetings that run overtime. And if that's true, then you can see that mastering the basics allow you to handle the larger challenges your company faces. To use the popular airplane metaphor (that I find so irritating): how can you get your 50,000 foot view of life and work if you can't even get your damn plane off the runway?

I think an analogy is useful here: surgeons learn to wash their hands before doing a procedure. In fact, they learn a specific routine for washing to ensure that it's done right each and every time. Nothing could be more basic -- or seemingly far removed from the "big picture" issues affecting the case they're about to do. But if they don't wash, the likelihood of a good outcome is minimal -- the patient may very well die from infection.

Hand washing is simple. But it's essential to reaching the key strategic objective like transplanting a heart or excising a lung tumor successfully. Keeping your desk clean and your inbox empty is simple, too. But like hand washing, it's an essential building block to your success. Especially with the major strategic issues you face.

Yesterday's NYTimes featured an article addressing the steps that some of the biggest technology firms, including Microsoft, Intel, Google, and I.B.M., are taking to stanch the overwhelming flood of email. Last week they formed a nonprofit group to study the problem, publicize it and devise ways to help workers — theirs and others — cope with the digital deluge.

And why are they taking this step?

Their effort comes as statistical and anecdotal evidence mounts that the same technology tools that have led to improvements in productivity can be counterproductive if overused.

The big chip maker Intel found in an eight-month internal study that some employees who were encouraged to limit digital interruptions said they were more productive and creative as a result.

Staggeringly, 28% of a person's day is consumed with "interruptions by things that aren't urgent or important, like unnecessary email messages -- and the time it takes to get back on track."

The article mentions a variety of approaches that the companies (and departments within the companies) have taken. An engineer at Google, for example, has created "E-Mail Addict," an experimental feature for the company’s e-mail service that lets people cut themselves off from their in-boxes for 15 minutes. And as I've mentioned before, there have been efforts at creating email-free Fridays and quiet (email- and interruption-free) working hours.

Intel ran an experiment in which a team of engineers had four hours on Tuesday mornings when they were encouraged to limit both digital and in-person contact.

In a survey, nearly three-quarters of participants said the quiet time routine should be extended to the rest of the company.

“It’s huge. We were expecting less,” said Nathan Zeldes, an Intel engineer who led the experiments and who for a decade has been studying the impact of technology on productivity. “When people are uninterrupted, they can sit back and design chips and really think.”

I'm quite sure there's no silver bullet solution. However, I'm equally certain that something has to change. The fact is that the deluge of email has created an untenable situation in which people aren't accomplishing what they -- and their organizations want.

Ultimately, people within companies must start a conversation -- with each other, and with their superiors -- about service level agreements. How should conversations be conducted? How quickly are people expected to respond? How should truly urgent issues be communicated?

We have an amazingly powerful tool called email. Yet we haven't yet figured out how to harness its capabilities. As a result, it slows down our ability to do the very work that it was supposed to expedite. We spend the majority of our time dealing with email, rather than dealing with our actual work. Until we have this conversation about how to utilize the technology, we run the risk of, to quote Thoreau, becoming the tool of our tools.

James Surowiecki of The New Yorker recently wrote about Toyota's astonishing success since the end of World War II. Central to his article is the Japanese concept of kaizen, or incremental improvement. As he describes it,

Instead of trying to throw long touchdown passes, as it were, Toyota moves down the field by means of short and steady gains. And so it rejects the idea that innovation is the province of an elect few; instead, it’s taken to be an everyday task for which everyone is responsible. According to Matthew E. May, the author of a book about the company called “The Elegant Solution,” Toyota implements a million new ideas a year, and most of them come from ordinary workers. <!--break-->(Japanese companies get a hundred times as many suggestions from their workers as U.S. companies do.) Most of these ideas are small—making parts on a shelf easier to reach, say—and not all of them work. But cumulatively, every day, Toyota knows a little more, and does things a little better, than it did the day before.
Nothing new there (if you know anything about kaizen, that is). But it got me thinking about the concept of self-efficacy, which is the belief that one has the power and ability to produce achieve certain goals. Perhaps not surprisingly, a high degree of self-efficacy is one of the most common -- and most notable -- traits of extremely successful people. (It's hard to imagine Napoleon, Martin Luther King, Margaret Thatcher, or Madonna accomplishing what they did while thinking, "Geez, I kind of suck. There's no way I could ever get where I want to go.) The truth is that whether you have grand goals like becoming the king of rock 'n roll, or more modest ones like getting your meetings to start on time, you probably won't make them happen unless you've got a fairly developed sense of self-efficacy.

I know this may sound a bit granola-y (bring on Tony Robbins! bring on Werner Erhard!), but I raise this issue because recently I worked with a group of people who despaired at their inability to make substantive improvements in their work culture. In their eyes, there was no way they could work without interruptions, there was no way they could push back when a boss requested something in an unreasonable timeframe, no way that they could implement basic rules around email and workflow that would enhance everyone's efficiency. Their low degree of self-efficacy created an environment in which there could be no kaizen -- after all, why bother trying to make improvements (or even make suggestions for improvements) when the organization as a whole would only squash those efforts?

But they were thinking about their changes wrong. Of course those 14 people wouldn't be able to change a 6500 person organization. However, they did (and do) have the ability to improve their own personal efficiency, and even the efficiency of their department of 45 people. It's a matter of kaizen -- incremental changes in the way they process paper and email, and they way they handle their calendar -- that will pay dividends in the long run.

Self-efficacy and kaizen go hand-in-hand. If you don't believe that you can make a change, you won't generate the ideas necessary for improvement.

What idea are you going to try?