6 common work habits that sabotage your productivity
Glad to see status meetings on this list.
Overall, compulsive activities and “keeping up appearances” activities are not very productive, and Lifehacker points the common ones out in the above article.
Say you’re sitting in a meeting, and a ridiculously stupid question pops into your head. You should ask the question.
I’m not talking about a stupid question that would demonstrate your complete ignorance about some key concept that’s being discussed; however, you better ask that question, too–the consequences will be less painful if you ask the question before you completely crash and burn.
Let’s get back to the stupid question in the back of your mind, though. There is probably a reason it popped up. Your subconscious probably heard two people trying to make 2+2=5.75 or something.
This nagging thought in the back of your mind is like hearing what sounds vaguely like a choking sound coming from another room. It may be nothing, but it’s now your responsibility to check it out. It will be on your conscience if something goes horribly wrong.
Many of us phone novices are guilty of this…Â Do not leave your phone message like this:
My name is [x] with [y]
Paragraph 1
Paragraph 2
Paragraph 3
Paragraph 4
Paragraph 5
… two minutes later …
My number is [blur]
My cell number is [blur]
My name is [x]
I have to replay/navigate to the end of the message to get the phone number. With cell phone message functionality this works okay, however, I don’t have my voicemail shortcuts memorized, so I’m stuck re-listening to the whole message.
Also, the only thing you repeated was your name. That’s moderately useful, but your contact info is far more important. If I don’t have that, remembering what your name is is useless.
I would personally prefer a script like this:
Hi, my name is [x] with [y].
My number is [spoken while you write it down].
My cell number is [spoken while you write it down].
I’m calling about [n]. [Maybe a second sentence goes here].
Again, my name is [x] with [y].
My number is [spoken while you write it down].
My cell number is [spoken while you write it down].
Please don’t try to solve the issues you’re calling about on the message. There’d be no reason to call in that case.
@ChrisFerdinandi‘s post “When Wellness Sucks” on Renegade HR got me inspired to play around with making a video at Xtranormal…
The following video, “The Steps to Wellness Program,” is about all those wellness competitions that people take so seriously, at least until they decide that “winning” the competition is really all they really care about, and not making realistic changes to their lifestyle.
A wellness provider, Recess, put together a website and video, When Wellness Sucks, with quite a bit more production value–it’s also eerily reminiscent of The Office (US).
The invention of flex-time brought with it the dawn of a new era in the workplace. An age of freedom and flexibility, resulting in unprecedented happiness and fulfillment. Certainly flex-time went a long way in eliminating grumpiness in our coworkers. Â Right?
For those of you still working in the Dark Ages of precisely prescribed starting and quitting times, here is a brief description of the golden age of “flex-time”. Â (Try not to weep over what you are missing.)
Flex-time is when my boss flexibly leaves at 3:30pm for a round of golf with her fellow bosses, on the day when I need her final approval of presentation materials I just finished at 4:00pm for tomorrow’s meeting.
Not to worry, I determine to make use of flex-time myself. I arrive the next day at 7:00am to finish preparing and printing the handouts for the 9:30am presentation, only to discover the person with access to the printer supplies for the out-of-ink printer won’t flexibly arrive until 9:00am.
When Mr. Printer Supply Person finally arrives at 9:15am (darn that traffic!), I don’t see any dark circles under his eyes, and he seems very well rested and cheery. Â But regretfully (so he says) he cannot help me because he’s already 15 minutes late for the Printer Supplies Department’s weekly staff meeting.
Though my meeting presentation was a bust, behold! All is not lost! Because I arrived at 7:00am, flex-time allows me to leave at 3:30pm today. I think I will get in a round of golf myself before dinner.
That is, until my boss trumps flexibility, and schedules a meeting at 4:00pm to discuss why my presentation didn’t have handouts. Gotta love this flex-time invention!
Can a large organization really encourage the risk taking and game changing thinking that a small business or startup does?
What if large team performance is very much like a well-diversified portfolio, but in the sense that the high performing ideas get offset by the stable performing ideas and horribly performing ideas. The consensus ideas tend toward the mean of the group. The larger the organization, the closer the sample is to the general population, and the more likely that the results will tend toward the mean, i.e., mediocrity.
By contrast, a small business or team is going to be a less diversified sample of the population. With less diversification of ideas, performance becomes concentrated. This increases the possibilities of a spectacular failure as well as of a spectacular success.
The advantage of this quick success or death is that failure becomes obvious. In a large organization, the slow death may be enough for the organization to continue on its path for decades, until their business is completely gone.
Think of this as the difference between investing your 401(k) in CDs, bond index funds, or maybe even index funds [large organization] vs. picking a single company to throw money into each year [small team/business]. In the former choices, you will get higher performance only by sheer volume, and yet, even the CDs seem like they’re gaining in value all the time. 30 years later, you will have anywhere from the low end of mediocre performance to the high end.
In investing in a single company each year, you may end up with a boom or bust scenario, but you’ll have opened up the possibility of performance outside of the “mediocre” or “average” range.
The bottom line is, the smaller the sample size, the larger the performance swings can be. Would a large team really even want those performance swings if they were possible?
I understand that small organizations, especially non-profit organizations, have a need to tightly control their flow of funds. If you’re dealing with a new “contractor” for the first time, I can understand wanting to make sure that you don’t get burned by some con artist trying to squeeze more than was agreed upon out of your organization.
However, once your organization has a working and ongoing relationship with someone, especially over more than a year, it’s time to assume a certain level of trust.
This is particularly true if your organization paid the wrong amount–say $420 instead of $240. I would expect the at fault party to assume the risk in correcting the mistake as soon as possible.
This is especially true if your contractor was the one who called you to let you know that you wrote a check for too much.  That’s pretty insulting to someone’s intelligence and integrity to make them mail back or drop off a check for the wrong amount before writing a check for the right amount. If theft was the motive, it be easier for the contractor to play dumb and just deposit the check for the wrong amount.
Some other, less offensive ways of dealing with accidentally paying too much to a repeat contractor:
Bottom line, if you’ve hired someone for thousands of dollars worth of services over the years, and have more services scheduled for that person, is it worth creating a breakdown in trust because you made an error? If you don’t trust the contractor, why is this person doing any work for your organization after all of this time?
If you didn’t realize it already, is there any doubt left that a company does not possess such noble qualities as loyalty, kindness, and honor? Â A few years ago we were made to feel that The Company cared about us. Â The Company wanted us to be happy at work, and in all of life. Â A fulfilling career path along with work-life-balance was The Company’s goal for us. It would reward our hard work and loyalty. The Company understood us. The Company was our friend. The Company was good.
Enter the recession to teach us a lesson.
How did The Company react when staring financial hard times in the face? With a sudden cruelty that shocked many. Droves of loyal employees were treated with the utmost disloyalty and sent packing. Those who remained found themselves with more work on their plate; the noble goal of work-life-balance had left the building. Quite simply, The Company turned on us with a vengeance.
Not everyone experienced shock at this turn of events. Some had been around this block before. What is the recession lesson to be learned here? Â That The Company is bad? Â No. The lesson is this: Â Companies are not people. That’s it. You may have been told that they are, but they aren’t. They are not living beings with a conscience that governs them. Â Companies are not good, and they are not bad. Companies are a legal entity, established as a vehicle to make money. If companies make money, they continue. Â If they don’t, they dissolve.
Does it make sense to be loyal to a legal entity? People deserve loyalty, not legal entities. Be loyal to people around you, people that deserve your loyalty. Build career relationships that you can trust, and put stock in those relationships. Good people will treat you right even in bad times. It’s a recession lesson worth learning.
This goes into the “Leave Stuff That’s Not Yours Alone” department.
While I can actually understand someone moving my cheese, or other food item, for the sake of the office environment, it’s really disturbing when very specific items are clearly removed from the walls or desk.
I can understand removal of clearly offensive materials that violates company policy, although removal of such materials should be accompanied by either HR involvement or at least a lengthy manager discussion.
However, the stealthy removal of items that do not conform to your preferred aesthetic or that may happen to depict or be from someone who has left the company is creepy.
Is this Ancient Egypt? Did I mention a prior and heretical Pharoah?
Are you the secret police or an overzealous youth movement member?
If the item is offensive in a not-so-obvious way, and you have the experience or authority to recognize it as such, it would be far less creepy to have a personal explanation of what happened as opposed to items being stealthily relocated to desk drawers or the trash can.
I want to be clear: I love Microsoft Project just as much as the next person that has to throw together random guesses on “duration” and “effort” for tasks that cannot be started for 1-2 months. Even better is the ability with my timesheet to judge how accurate the time estimates are with completely arbitrary estimates of how much time has been spent on a “task”.
If we all put in our arbitrary estimates of completeness on a daily basis, we will have more clarity with which to refine our estimates. Of course, what happens when your programmers are stuck on 80% complete for 4 weeks? Darn that 80/20 rule stuff.
Back to the main point: We have Microsoft Project for tracking project costs and possibly support costs. We supposedly get better clarity if the estimates of work are input on a daily basis. What is the reward? For the worker bee, compliance is rewarded. For the larger team, what is the gain in accuracy from filling out project updates in the timesheet application on a daily vs weekly or monthly basis? I would challenge that the accuracy improvement is minimal, and the decision-making improvement [if any] is unquantifiable.
Meanwhile, the time cost for entering in things in this dog slow application is about 15 minutes–mental distraction plus sitting and waiting plus actual time trying to “accurately” record time. On a daily basis, that’s about 1.25 hours per week. Granted, the weekly time sheet may take 20 minutes to fill out. Catching up for a month might take 25 minutes.
Hmm… 5 hours of cost over a month for daily vs. 80 minutes for weekly vs. 25 minutes for monthly. Granted, the 5 hours per month is about 2.5% of the worker’s time, but is it with to reward compliance [or punish non-compliance] for a 2% decrease in efficiency?
Okay, so that’s splitting hairs? Fine. Let’s take a less time-consuming example: Say you run around on a daily basis and blow an air-horn in every employee’s face in the last hour of the day. How much productivity is lost during the day due to that?
