Grumpy Coworker

Author: Grumpy107

  • The “Quick Call” Lie: A Field Guide to Time Theft

    Look, I need to talk about something that’s been grinding my gears since the invention of the telephone, but has reached absolutely apocalyptic levels in the Slack/Teams/Zoom era: the “quick call.”

    You know the one. It starts innocently enough:

    “Hey, got a minute for a quick call?”

    NO. No, I don’t. Because we both know it’s not going to be quick. It’s NEVER quick. It’s a lie we tell ourselves and each other, like “I’ll just have one drink” or “I’ll start going to the gym next Monday.”

    The Anatomy of the “Quick” Call

    Let’s break down what actually happens when someone suggests a “quick call”:

    Minute 0-3: You’re scrambling to find your headphones because they’ve mysteriously teleported to another dimension since you last used them. You finally locate them tangled with your phone charger in a knot that would impress a Boy Scout.

    Minute 3-5: The actual dialing/joining process. Because someone—and let’s be honest, it’s always Greg from Marketing—can’t figure out how to unmute, can’t find the link, or is “having audio issues.” We can land rovers on Mars but Greg can’t click the microphone icon.

    Minute 5-7: The small talk. “How was your weekend?” “Did you see the game?” “Crazy weather we’re having!” Nobody cares. We’re all pretending to care, but we’re actually screaming internally because we KNOW this was supposed to be quick and we’re already seven minutes in WITHOUT DISCUSSING THE ACTUAL TOPIC.

    Minute 7-12: Finally getting to the point, except the point could have been an email. It’s always something that could have been an email. “I just wanted to get your thoughts on this thing that’s not time-sensitive and has seventeen moving parts that I’m now explaining verbally while you frantically try to take notes instead of just READING THE DOCUMENT I COULD HAVE SENT.”

    Minute 12-20: The scope creep. “Oh, and while I have you…” NO. No, you don’t “have me.” You HAD me for a quick call. This is now a medium call approaching long-call territory, and I had things planned. Important things. Like staring blankly at my actual work while contemplating the heat death of the universe.

    Minute 20-25: The ending that won’t end. You’ve said goodbye three times. You’ve wrapped up twice. But someone keeps thinking of “one more thing.” It’s like trying to leave a party at your aunt’s house. The door is RIGHT THERE but somehow you’re still talking about her neighbor’s cat’s surgery.

    Minute 25-30: The post-call recovery period where you try to remember what you were doing before this “quick” call obliterated your flow state like a meteor hitting a sandcastle.

    The Real Problem

    Here’s the thing that really gets me: people who ask for “quick calls” have a fundamental misunderstanding of how human beings work. We’re not CPUs that can context-switch instantaneously. When you pull me out of deep work for your “quick call,” you’re not borrowing 5 minutes—you’re stealing 30-45 minutes of productivity because it takes that long to get back into the zone.

    And don’t even get me started on the “got a sec?” variation. A “sec” is ONE SECOND. If you need one second, send me a YES/NO question in chat. If you need more than that, you need to schedule time like a civilized human being who respects the space-time continuum.

    The Solution

    Schedule. The. Call. Put it on my calendar. Give me context about what we’re discussing. Let me prepare. Let me block the appropriate amount of time. Revolutionary concept, I know.

    And if you MUST have a synchronous conversation RIGHT NOW, at least have the decency to say “Hey, I need 30 minutes to discuss X, Y, and Z—do you have time now or should we schedule it?” Honesty! What a concept!

    The Book You Need

    If you’re the person who keeps asking for “quick calls,” you need to read Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life by Nir Eyal (Amazon affiliate link). It’s about managing distraction and respecting both your time and others’. Maybe it’ll help you realize that every interruption has a cost, and that cost is compounding faster than credit card debt.

    And if you’re the victim of constant “quick calls,” read it anyway. It might give you the tools—and the courage—to push back against this tyranny of stolen time.

    Now if you’ll excuse me, someone just Slacked me “got a minute?” and I need to go update my résumé.

    This rant brought to you by someone who just lost 47 minutes to a “quick sync” about something that was already explained perfectly well in a three-paragraph email.

  • An Instagram Link

    https://instagram.com/elonmusksjet

  • Workers Want Recognition!

    I spent a long part of my career working for a company whose CEO was huge on the power of recognition. (He even has a new book out about it. And it’s true; you can’t get very far if you don’t give your workers the recognition for doing a good job. Unfortunately, for knowledge workers, being recognized for stepping up to the plate to hit a home run is the tip of the iceberg. Recognizing someone for doing a good job is nice, but isn’t the expectation that workers will do a good job? For example if you’re renovating a home and want to change floors, getting a Resin Flooring Company is a good option to get good workers.

    Ok, maybe you are recognizing people for doing a “good job” but a great job. You’re still on a hedonic treadmill here. If a “great job” is truly exceptional, then you aren’t rewarding your employees that often. When a “great job” is routine, then why aren’t you shifting your expectations and paying accordingly?

    Spot rewards are nice, but can be demotivating

    There is nothing like found money (or praise), but it generally is spent quickly. (Unless your spot rewards are allowing the employee to take a year off or retire, but that would seem to defeat the purpose.)

    If you’re leaning on spot rewards, then you may be training your employees to set gradually lower expectations, then beat them for rewards. Oh, no raises this year? Well, I can always game the rewards system!

    Invest in people

    Make permanent commitments to the reward you’re giving by delivering a raise and higher expectations. This is excellent, and I would like to see this continue… in expectation of this continued performance, here’s a larger financial commitment from us.

    Give your people whatever tools they need to perform at a higher level. Offer the training. Provide educational resources. Send them to conferences. Allocate time for them to develop themselves. If you can’t afford a 2-5% contribution to potentially improve an employee by 10%, then you may not have any idea what you’re doing with that employee. Maybe you shouldn’t be in the business of employing those people and should find someone else to hire them and pay that company for effective use of those resources.

    Invest in capacity

    Stop skirting by just barely making your commitments. If you don’t have excess capacity, the minute something goes wrong, you’re in trouble. The alternative is depending on heroics from your employees. Heroics are like firefighting: Yes, they put the fire out, but now everything is water-damaged, and your firefighters will get sloppy and exhausted if used too often.

    Invest in figuring out what is reasonable to do

    Yes, you are in competition with everyone else who wants to please your customers, but all those customers you’re gaining are going to bail if your people break down and can’t perform.

    Trust

    You cannot put a price tag on trust.

    Trust your employees to:

    • appreciate the capability you’ve given them.
    • be capable of working wherever.
    • work whenever they need to.

    If you don’t know what results you want or the value of those results, keeping employees in the office from 8 to 5 is an expensive way to hide that fact. If you can’t trust an employee to get things done, then it doesn’t matter where they’re working, they’re going to make a fool of you at some point, and it will probably take you longer to figure it out if your measure of productivity is whether they’re in the seat or not.

    Risk vs Volatility

    As Taleb mentions in Black Swan, there’s a difference between risk and volatility. Trusting your employees seems like a risk, but you’re really lowering volatility of bad experiences near term in exchange for systemic risk of trust issues. So are all these other investments in your employees. Not making the investments may be penny-wise, but they’re pound foolish.

  • Project Math, or How to Double Project Timeline

    Project math really follows its own rules. You don’t get linear benefits from adding to the number of people on a project. Sometimes it seems like throwing four people at a project makes the project span 4 months, when a single person could have completed the work in a couple of weeks.

    Yes, if you have one thousand letters to write, and each worker can write their own letters, this works. That sort of thing might linearly scale.

    But on most projects, your communication lines are O(n^2) (actually, (n^2-n)/2)… 2 -> 1, 3 -> 3, 4 -> 6. If you’re not doing mostly independent pieces, you’re creating an unofficial management position for every 2-3 people you sign up. Realistically, 6 would be 15 units and 12 would be 66 units, so a mere doubling in time is really optimistic unless the 6 extra workers are making sure that project managers and customers don’t bug the workers actually building the car.

    Worse still, usually, the extra 6 workers will need to be brought up to speed mid-project by the other 6 workers on top of introducing the extra ongoing communication complexity.

    In other words, (ノಠ益ಠ)ノ彡┻━┻

  • Time Bullshitting, Estimates Edition

    What happens when people are given a new baseline for the amount of work expected on tasks for a given week:

  • Time Bullshitting

    Are you in charge of budgeting and/or balance sheet management?

    Has the thought ever occurred to you, that if your knowledge workers just tracked the time they spent on projects, you could capitalize projects and get a better feel for return on investment?

    Well, stop.

    The primary things that disrupt my “working” activities are anything related to entering my time on a timesheet.

    I bitch about the time spent entering my time.

    I bitch about the 100 project codes I have to choose from. I doubt you have any clue how any of these projects remotely affect the bottom line.

    I bitch about the fact that I have to find a 5 year old Windows machine with only IE 6/Flash/etc. installed on it because Gates forbid you ever purchase a solution that runs on a modern machine, doesn’t look like malware, and wasn’t written by the dropout nephews of a bunch of CEOs.

    I bitch about the subclassification of every one of these project codes. How can you figure out what the “work type” means when we’ve established that you don’t know how the project itself hurt…  I mean helps the company’s bottom line. What’s the “work type” for “that website that I need for my work is blocked because our web filtering software classifies it as a ‘personal blog’”?

    Ultimately, I bitch about the fact that there’s no relation between what I actually do for a job, how much time I spent doing it and what I enter on the timesheet.

  • If Not Talking on the Phone While Using the Restroom Impacts Your Performance

    …you need either considerably more or considerably less fiber in your diet.

    I can only imagine the horror of the person on the other end of the line as you’re working through a problem and an automatic power flusher goes off.

    Worse yet, imagine this being a conference call that someone has on speakerphone. Half of the office will experience the joy of every restroom sound.

    I may just have to intentionally set off the power flusher a few times while I’m the stall next time.

  • The “I don’t want to risk taking action” Blockade

    Iceberg floating in Lago Argentina broken off ...
    Image via Wikipedia

    Apparently, conventional wisdom has decided that if you don’t take action, you can’t be blamed for anything:

    Sure, you’re about to hit an iceberg. However, if you try to steer the ship, and it ruptures, you’ll be at fault. If you hit the iceberg head on and your ship withstands the hit, you’ll have warded off disaster. If your ship starts going down, well, you can possibly pretend you were unaware of the problem. If you take action, you have to acknowledge the problem.

    Why must departmental silos treat problems like toothaches: Because there’s a fear of going to the dentist, everyone waits until the tooth abscesses and a trip to the emergency room and an emergency extraction is needed. A little infection or cavity turned into a week-long course of top-tier antibiotics and a missing tooth.

    Maybe everyone’s hoping they’ll be laid off before having to take responsibility for a problem.  After all, being laid off assumes far less personal responsibility than possibly failing when attempting a fix.

    Let’s all be powerless.

    Enhanced by Zemanta

  • How to Make Coffee

    Obviously, automatic coffee makers with hot water supply are too challenging, so here is a step-by-step guide:

    1) Pull filter basket out
    2) Put a new coffee filter in the basket.
    3) Open coffee packet.
    4) Pour coffee in basket.
    5) Put filter basket back in place.
    6) Rinse out near empty carafe.
    7) Put carafe back.
    8) Hit green/start/brew/on button.

  • Creative Writing for Business

    banner Shakespeare
    Image via Wikipedia

    It seems like the greatest skill that many rely on to get through their careers is creative writing.

    Most jobs start with a resume, in which you may have to creatively explain how your dark periods, lack of qualifications, and employment gaps don’t make you a less desirable candidate that all the people with creative resumes.

    If you’re in a place which provides a peer feedback mechanism, you may need creative writing skills to critique a coworker without completely demolishing that person.

    If you’re required to write your own performance appraisal, you will need to strike the balance between accuracy and best story possible. I believe this genre is called “historical fiction”.

    Finally, every day you have to respond to an email from a customer or coworker who’s out-of-line, you have to respond creatively.

    Forget all the business and formal writing classes. You need well-developed creative writing skills to succeed.

    Enhanced by Zemanta