Chapter 12
Free at Last
The second key question to becoming focus-wise in your use of technology is: Does your technology sap or save attention resources?
Freedom to focus thrives with the efficient capturing and sharing of information, elimination of errors, and ease of use. It ultimately increases both productivity and innovation.
Until now in this book, innovation has taken a backseat to understanding the causes and costs of distraction in the constantly connected workplace. It's time to remember the big picture. What is your goal?
The key initiatives that drive business, whether they be innovation, process improvement, project execution, or simple selling, all thrive when our teams are focused on the most important things. Consider Harry and Jack. On Monday afternoon, they both had a moment of insight about how to improve their businesses. This epiphany is like the beginning embers of a new fire. If it is nourished, it can expand into a raging inferno. If neglected, it will be snuffed out, as though it never happened.
In Harry's excitement, he vets his idea with his peers. They're excited. He's excited. Before long, though, Harry's routine catches up with him. His wife sends him a few texts about their weekend plans, and as he plans his weekend, his work-related e-mails back up. Worse, many of those e-mails don't require him to think. He simply has to perform the rote exercises.
Harry looks up a document to e-mail to Susie in accounting. He opens the spreadsheet he's been authoring to copy and paste today's business data into an e-mail for Tim's big meeting tomorrow. He has a couple of generic e-mails to respond to from his team. By the time Harry is caught up, Monday is over, and there are already a few things to do Tuesday morning. His moment of inspiration has been relegated to the “pipe dream” part of his brain, forgotten for now, only to be revisited when he's uniquely dissatisfied with the status quo. The world dictates Harry's priorities at any given moment—and those interruptions kill his innovative thinking.
Jack, on the other hand, immediately recognizes the value of his idea. Rather than interrupting his work to shop the idea, Jack does something he does with many of his thoughts: He uses technology to prioritize it for further consideration. He knows his inspirations need time and space to develop and that time and space isn't available right now.
Before Jack begins his commute home Monday, he opens the Evernote list he uses to track his work thoughts. Jack reads his description of the idea and begins to focus. By the time he's arrived home, Jack understands the problem he's solving and how to document it. Jack knows the value of his solution and how it will improve the business. Jack knows which coworkers need to be involved to initiate the change. Lastly, Jack knows where this fits on the list of important tasks demanding his time and whether it is an immediate priority. Tomorrow, Jack will bring his idea to life. And that's why he's a high-impact contributor.
Your people can be too. Let's examine what our tools must do to help free up focus.
Capture and Share
An e-mail contains data that will seal a presentation, potentially securing millions in new business. If only you could find it.
A search (was the metric page views, clicks, or conversion?) highlights hundreds of e-mails but not the one you need. Wait! You're in the wrong folder. Has to be this one…nope, still nothing.
Maybe if you could remember when it was sent and who sent it. You narrow down dates and possible senders. You even poke your head into the hall and ask out loud.
You can retrieve troves of data you need from one system, but it isn't formatted for what you need.
You sent a request for feedback on a report to 15 peers a week ago. Naturally, it wasn't urgent then, so today you're getting flooded with 15 edited versions of a document with week-old data.
Over and over again, my clients complain that the very technology designed to make them more efficient actually stymies them. I've seen companies deploy systems that made employees feel like they were spending the day reporting about work instead of actually doing it. It doesn't help when “solutions” commonly include 20-year-old database technology while MS Office (Word released in 1983, Excel in 1985) serves as the bridge for the inevitable process gaps.
As a leader, you need to determine whether your technology for creating, storing, retrieving, and consuming information preserves or squanders employees' attention. A focused work environment has tools to manage both enterprise and personal information. To better navigate this complexity, ask yourself the following questions.
What Type of Information Will It Manage?
Attention isn't purely a technology problem. Remember Jack? He used Evernote to bookmark an idea for later consideration. The simple utility of a tool at his fingertips to capture and organize his ideas allowed Jack to focus where he was needed. It enabled him to reflect deeply on his idea when he was free to focus without distraction. Evernote is a private, always-on utility with the flexibility to capture any type of thought, idea, or inspiration.
Conversely, most business tools need to be collaborative. It's rarely enough to have the idea or the information; you have to be able to communicate it, support it with data, include others in your thought process, and easily make adjustments.
Keep in mind attention is a problem that happens at the intersection of man and machine; if your tools require a lot of manual management to accomplish simple collaboration, you're inviting distraction into your office.
Is Information Easy to Capture?
Today's worker doesn't know where to put her ideas. A yellow pad sits on her desk for note-taking, but how can she share an idea without having to reproduce it in a different format? What if she loses the pad or spills her latté on it?
Your people can do way better than yellow-lined paper. Smartphone software, for example, can capture, store, and back up notes for easy access.
Choosing the right tool can feel daunting; every day seems to bring a new app promising to solve your productivity challenges. Ironically, the focus needed to learn and use these tools can sap our attention—the very resource they were meant to save.
That's why I limit my suggestions to just a few organizational products, including Evernote and Asana (also Bear if you have an Apple device). Whatever program you use, each makes the information you store more useful.
Evernote, my go-to, is all about “notebooks,” and how you use them makes all the difference. My two basic notebook types are “capture” and “recall.” For the first type, I have three categories:
- Active. My first “main” notebook contains anything I'm working on. Whenever I have an idea but don't want to think about filing, it goes here.
- A-Thoughts. A repository of random thoughts and ideas in a given month. Cool quotes, process improvements, diet suggestions to explore later—they all go in this notebook. (I call it “A-Thoughts” because Evernote organizes notebooks in alphabetical order.)
- Articles not yet read. I want to read them but not just yet.
Is Information Easy to Organize and Recall?
Captured information isn't of much use if you can't access it easily. That brings me to the “recall” notebook mentioned above.
Eventually, ideas and thoughts from my capture notebooks are organized into their own recall subcategories, such as motivations and quotes, product improvement, business units, life hacks, and family and parenting. The simpler, the better.
Some material gets filed immediately if the category is obvious. But often I'll just put thoughts and ideas in my recall folders for later review. (The bottom line for any organizational system: You and your people won't use it if it demands that ideas be stored right away.)
The key to my success with this method has been scheduling thought review times every two months (once a month proved too unrealistic). This way, I read my thoughts at least once more than I otherwise would have. You may find it helpful to actually schedule these sessions on your calendar. Ideas go to their best corresponding category; the best are then copied into next month's notes for even further review.
Another crucial feature saves both time and attention: content preview. Instead of physically opening and closing files, you can often get what you need at a glance. We may be talking an extra minute or so. But that can mean the difference between frustration and functionality.
Just the sort of low barrier the Harrys of the world need for capturing and nurturing ideas.
Automate, Automate, Automate
There's a great debate in business around automation right now. There are some who believe it is the single greatest threat to the American worker and others who believe it's the dawn of a new age of opportunity.
Chad Sparber is the chair of economics at Colgate University, and he says it like this: “Technological developments have increasingly replaced low- and mid-skilled jobs while complementing higher-skilled jobs.”1
Focus on the implications of that statement for a moment. It implies the automation you're looking for isn't the tool that will eliminate your workforce but rather the tool that will eliminate the lowest value work for your workforce. The good news is there are businesses already built on their ability to do just this.
There's a technology company named Workiva, based in the sleepy college town of Ames, Iowa. If you've never heard of them, I'm not surprised. They had zero customers in 2009. Yet by 2016, Workiva's Enterprise platform had become the industry standard in financial reporting and was being used by more than 70 percent of Fortune 500 businesses.
Their perspective was simple: The biggest hurdle to productivity in business was not the people in the process but instead the tools they had at their disposal.
Entire processes had been built around Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook, and the distraction cost of jumping from e-mail to spreadsheet to document and back was profoundly expensive.
Workiva built a customer base by empowering workers with a force multiplier. In their platform, a single data change can be applied to every relevant document, spreadsheet, calculation, graph, and presentation. Workiva built a cloud-based infrastructure that virtually eliminates copy-paste and repeat reporting siloes, driving real-time collaboration.
Bel Fuse Inc., a manufacturer of electronic-circuit products, used to send a team of four to each office for internal audits and review. The company added locations after two large acquisitions, nearly doubling sales and tripling the workload. Clearly the old way of working would no longer work.
Bel Fuse responded by buying Workiva Wdesk, a cloud-based productivity platform that centralizes sharing, reporting, and analysis. Teams anywhere in the world could collaborate simultaneously on a document (word processing, spreadsheet, or presentation) with a full audit trail of changes.
Platforms like Wdesk do much of the tedious and heavy work (such as data crunching), reducing workload and freeing employees to focus on what they do best.
The idea of automation is at once revered and reviled. It certainly costs jobs and will continue to do so. But in the twenty-first century, we simply can't deny our people the tools that free them from exasperating work.
Why did Charlene, our expense-report maven from Section 2, want to quit? Because her job asked her to be a robot instead of letting her do what robots can't: apply creativity and problem-solving to a task.
Focus-wise technology reduces errors while increasing efficiency. It empowers employees to do what they truly care about and think big. Ultimately, that means less stress and more happiness.
Be Easy to Use
Companies often fall in love with the most expensive technology available only to find that employees ignore it. “Too tough to use,” they might say, or “I like the old platform.”
The problem with most technology that fails to get adopted is that it requires user expertise. If the user must be an expert, adoption is a challenge.
People want to feel comfortable with their tools. New tech that mimics tech they're used to is adopted more readily. When an inefficient system is what they're used to (probably why it's being replaced), good training fills the gap (which we discuss in Chapter 22). A low learning curve combined with high user-friendliness is the ticket.
Take, for instance, Hackensack Meridian Health Pascack Valley Medical Center in New Jersey. They aim to provide patients with both the most comfortable experience possible and top-notch clinical care. However, they faced a challenge in balancing nursing time to accommodate both of these patient needs. The nurses were spending more than half their time providing nonclinical “comfort care” to patients rather than the clinical care they've been expertly trained to deliver.
Patients regularly turned to the nurse call button for all of their needs—from help with their in-room TV and phone to meal ordering, clergy requests, and housekeeping needs. Nurses became the middlemen, processing requests for other departments to work on the issue. The end result was a costly, inefficient game of telephone tag that delayed service delivery to patients and unnecessarily tied up clinically trained, skilled nurses and reduced their job satisfaction.
Knowing that employees will forsake time savings and even career advancement when technology confounds them or doesn't serve them well, the administrators at Pascack Valley made identifying a solution that worked for everyone a priority, and they found it with GoMo Health Bedside Concierge.
This solution allowed patients to submit their “in-the-moment” requests directly to the appropriate department for fulfillment via mobile. The simple-to-use, no-app-to-download, cloud-based program is available 24/7, enhancing the patient experience and simplifying the overall service delivery. By focusing on painting the picture of how this technology could impact the quality of time spent on direct patient care, Pascack Valley saw swift adoption of the technology and an eagerness from the nursing team to introduce it to patients.
And, importantly, it was simple for the patients to use. The nurses stopped being the middlemen, requests were filled faster, patients were happier, and nurses' joy in practice increased.
In the process, Pascack estimated they recaptured nearly 59 hours per month in nursing time, an annual savings of more than $28,000—all from one small but important, easy-to-use, and affordable technology solution.
By putting these focus-wise principles around technology into action, you and your organization can move from being a tool of your tool to leveraging it for greater productivity and profitability. All it takes is a simple mindset shift. Next, we'll look at how technology can give you just the right level of visibility into your employees' work.