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Freedom From Urgency

Jul 2 By | 2 Comments

It would probably be best if managers went to the IT department and asked that e-mail not be distributed between eight and eleven every morning. The idea that the best way to communicate with people is 24/ 7 is not really an idea about maximizing productivity.

Glei, Jocelyn K. (2013-05-21). Manage Your Day-to-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus, and Sharpen Your Creative Mind (The 99U Book Series) (p. 92). Amazon Publishing. Kindle Edition.

What do you think of the above suggestion from Dan Ariely in the book I’m reading now? Are you ready to go down the hall to your IT department and tell them to cut you off between 8 and 11? And what if, at the same time, you turned off your cell and put your office phone on DND?

What if you excused yourself from the merely urgent? In the same section, Ariely says:

If you think about it, the world around us, including the world in our computers, is all about trying to tempt us to do things right now. Take Facebook, for example. Do they want you to be more productive twenty years from now? Or do they want to take your time, attention, and money right now? The same thing goes for YouTube, online newspapers, and so on.

What if - just for tomorrow, July 3rd - you tried it? What if you declared your indpendence from others’ urgent tempations and focused on doing something that mattered?

Tomorrow, for three hours, you’re going to do something awesome. You’re going to shut out the world around you - consciously - and you’re going to get after doing one thing that matters.

To make ready, today you must do two things:

1) Pick one thing that matters to accomplish tomorrow during your three-hour tour of freedom.

2) Commit to doing it.

Share this notion with the rest of your office. No urgent, just important tomorrow from eight to eleven. Then, have lunch together and celebrate how much better you just made your company.

Over the weekend, I shared more thoughts about the value of your time at the awesomely (and, in this case, aptly) titled blog, Dumb Little Man.

photo credit: jasonEscapist via photopin cc

Tim Miles helps owner-operated companies do more with less. He's the author of Good Company: Making It, Keeping It & Being It.

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  • Jburn8978

    Great suggestion, in theory… The flaw lies in the fact that simply shutting off email traffic would not stop people from creating emails, and thus creating a large backlog of emails in queue to send. Similar to an email storm, in which you get a large amount of people hitting reply all, while telling people to not hit reply all. The system would not be able to handle the large amount of traffic, and shut down. This action would create a lager issue of the day, essentially erasing the goal of peace and harmony.

    The bigger solution in my opinion is to change the culture of most corporations. Show them that personal verbal communication is far more valuable from a relational aspect. Verbal communication provides an understanding of each other that is lost in email.

    I do believe your on the right track though!

  • Snappy

    Yes, it is actually a GREAT suggestion. I have on occassion self regulated my own email viewing. First, I turned off the “Desktop Alert” (that little box that pops up to let you know a new email just arrived. That thing just SUCKS you in to the IMMEDIATE mode. TURN IT OFF!!). Anyway, I don’t think we need to ask IT to fix this, I think we need to help people understand the value of setting specific times to NOT do somethings (as in read your email once an hour rather than every two minutes). One issue many will have specificly with email, is that everyone has gotten conditioned to expecting their email to get to you RIGHT NOW and to have you respond within minutes. You will have to reset the expectations of our clients, for example, to let them know that email is not the way to get you if they need an answer in the next 30 minutes. However, this means you must create a process fo the truly urgent things to get through.

    The immediate mode also has another sinister impact, it is a huge consumer of your time. You probably don’t think so, but everytime you get interuppted there is a “retooling” time for you to get back to what you were doing - you waste a lot of time getting back on track. I once spent about a week logging how many times I get interupped and change focus. I learned I live in 11minute increments. The average amount to time I can ever spend on one single task is 11 minutes.. then i’m pulled away. You should try keeping a log, just for a few days. You may be shocked.