Removing Distractions Series: Set Your Intention

Actions to take: Quit mixing little breaks into your work time. Instead, set ambitious-but-realistic goals for getting tasks done quickly. Use the time you save for real breaks that allow you to genuinely rest your brain. Take 10 minutes in the morning thoroughly planning your day. If that plan is disrupted, spend a few minutes rewriting the plan rather than just trying to play catch-up.

This is one entry in a short series about removing distractions from your work, inspired by the Cost of Distractions post from early September. There are both productivity and mental health benefits to removing distractions while working on anything that requires focus.

No matter the amount of work we have to get done in a day, we manage to sabotage ourselves. When our load is heavy, we feel overwhelmed and find ways to avoid getting started. When our load is light, we stretch things out to fill our day.

It might not be obvious, but both of these techniques contribute to mental exhaustion. On days where we are overburdened, we not only have a lot to do, but we add stress by putting it off. We do fun* things to put off work, like checking social media or playing a quick game of solitaire. These activities add task-switching costs to our time and mental energy. Light load days can be even more draining. Because we need to stretch, say, 3 hours of work into an 8 hour day, we take lots of little breaks. We are constantly switching between our actual work and fun* stuff. We might check the same Slack channel or news site a dozen times while working on a single task. 

*Note: These activities are not actually any fun. They are just ways to kill time because we are bored or because we are dreading how much work we need to do. 

Stop this nonsense. 

Set your intention for each hour of the day. Decide that you will spend a certain amount of time really working and a certain amount of time really relaxing, rather than constantly muddling the two. Here is a quick how-to:

1. Plan your tasks at the start of the day. 10 minutes in the morning can save you hours of procrastination throughout the day. Go beyond making a list of tasks to do—decide how long each task will take and when to do it. People generally have the most mental energy available at the beginning of the day and lose steam as the hours go by. Whatever you are least interested in doing, schedule it as early as possible. You will be much more likely to get it done that way.
2. Work ambitiously, take breaks ambitiously. Work well for 45 minutes, really step on the gas. Do 2 hours' worth of work in that 45 minutes. Then take a real break, something that relaxes and calms your brain. My default is music and a walk. You won't need the break every hour, but you are welcome to take it as often as you like. As long as you commit yourself to hard work during those 45 minutes, you'll still get more done than you used to. If your office policy doesn't allow this, it is a bad policy. (Frankly, if you are managing people, you are probably exempt. That means you are not paid by the hour—you are paid for results.)
3. Rewrite your plan for the day when necessary. Some days, the curveballs keep coming. You made a plan to do x, y, and z by noon. 12:00 rolls around and urgent issues have kept you from even getting started. When you have a minute to breathe, step back and reconsider your plan. Simply trying to catch up is the wrong strategy. When you feel behind, it adds stress and pulls focus from your work. Instead, rewrite your plan. Decide what should be moved to another day. Get deadline extensions if necessary. Just like the 10 minutes in the morning, you will save time and mental energy by spending these few minutes reconsidering your day.

People are willing to put off work and take little breaks all the time, as long as it is not a "real" break. They will take several 5-minute breaks over the course of an hour to chat with someone, poke around on the internet, or play a quick game of solitaire. But the idea of taking a single 15-minute break each hour is clearly over the line for them. This is the opposite of effective behavior. They are constantly switching tasks and engaging in "always on" brain activity. That is how you burn yourself out. 

Instead, set your intention. Do your best, most efficient work. When you gain extra time because of it, use that time for genuine breaks, not time killers. You will be more productive, more effective, and you will feel better at the end of the day. 

One-on-ones: Five Minutes Before and After

Actions to take: During the one-on-one, take notes. Most importantly, take notes on 1) action items either of you must take, 2) feedback you've given, 3) problems that need to be solved. In the 5 minutes after the one-on-one, transfer those notes. Put any of your action items in your relevant to-do bucket; put a note to follow up on their action items in future one-on-ones; make notes to follow up with other employees if they might benefit from having a similar discussion. In the 5 minutes before your next one-on-one, review the planning notes you've made. Think about the best way to tackle each topic.

To be a truly effective boss, the most important thing you can do is build a trusting relationship with each employee. By far the easiest way to do that is through routine one-on-one meetings. Better-boss.com recommends that those meetings are scheduled, 30 minutes, weekly, and rarely missed, with the first half of the meeting spent on whatever they want to discuss and the second half for whatever you want to discuss. All posts about one-on-ones assume this strategy.

If you have been following this blog since it started, maybe you have taken my advice and started doing weekly one-on-ones. Maybe you were already doing them. You've seen me write about how one-on-ones become the most efficient way to get "management work" done and how they become smooth, natural, almost reflexive over time. Perhaps your experience doesn't quite match up. Your one-on-ones still feel a little disjointed from one week to the next. They are going fine, but you want to take them to the next level. Here's how.

The very short version is: 1) take notes during the meeting, 2) transfer those notes to relevant places after the meeting, 3) prep each topic just before the next meeting. We will discuss the details of each in a moment.

If you spend this little bit of time before and after each meeting, you are going to see several improvements. First, the meeting itself will flow more naturally. Without this little bit of prep, there tend to be awkward pauses when you shift from one topic to the next. Second, there will be a sense of continuity between meetings. It can be very easy to discuss, say, a professional development opportunity one week, only to have that idea drop from your radar for three months. Third, you will appear more competent. This is a bigger deal than it sounds. When it is clear that the boss is ready for the one-on-one, most employees understand that as a signal that these meetings matter. If the boss isn't ready, it communicates the opposite message.

Fourth, and most importantly, you and your employee will both become accountable to the things you discuss in your one-on-ones. You will keep yourself accountable for the things you say you'll do. If you promise to look into an issue in a one-on-one, you'd better do it. These few minutes before and after are the easiest way to guarantee you will. You will keep yourself accountable for following up on status. You'll stop letting that useful-but-not-urgent topic slip through the cracks. You will keep your employee accountable for the things they promise to do. Again, without these few minutes, it is easy to let their missed action items slide.

Let's walk through an example to show you specifically how to do this. Imagine you are in a one-on-one meeting. Your employee spends some time talking about how they would like to get better about time management. They always seem to take twice as long as they intend to on every task. They mention how much respect they have for their coworker Wendy, who always gets things done right in line with her estimates about how long it will take. 

Step 1: Take notes during the meeting. Specifically, take notes on three things: 

1. Action items that either of you agree to take as a result of the conversation. In this example, you might say that you'll both look for training opportunities over the course of the week. In that case, both of you have an action item to fulfill before next week's one-on-one.
2. Feedback that you gave during the meeting. Here, you might give positive feedback that the employee is being frank about areas of improvement, that they are taking professional development seriously, etc. 
3. Any unsolved problems. At this point, the employee's time management is an unsolved problem. The goal, of course, is to note it now so that you can successfully close the problem in the future. 

Step 2: Transfer those notes in the 5 minutes immediately after the meeting. 

1. Start with your prompts for future one-on-ones with this employee. Obviously, you'll need to follow up in next week's meeting, since you both agreed to look for training this week. Also think about meetings further down the road. Make a note 4 weeks out and 8 weeks out. Has the employee taken any training? Have their skills improved? Are they satisfied with their progress (i.e. is the problem now closed)? 
2. Transfer your action items to your appropriate to-do pile. For instance, perhaps you've marked out 10-11 am every Friday as your time to brainstorm employee development ideas. You would put this example into that timeslot's task list. Maybe you don't have anything quite so structured. Even so, figure out when you are going to work on it and transfer that action item. Don't rely on your memory, and don't let it get lost in the obscurity of past one-on-one notes.
3. Consider other employee's future one-on-one prompts. In this example, it would be a slam dunk to touch base with Wendy. Assuming the initial employee is fine with it, you could even delegate some training to Wendy—have her come up with a 30-minute overview of her time management techniques to share with the employee.

Step 3: take 5 minutes before each meeting reviewing what you've planned for that meeting. 

• The week following our example, you'll see your note to follow up on time management. Spend a minute thinking about how you'll present the training you found. Spend a minute thinking about how you will ask what they employee is worked on. (It is especially important to take this little bit of time if you suspect that the employee hasn't done anything.)
• This step is even more valuable in the 4-week and 8-week portion of our example. You'll see that note from 4 weeks ago and say "Oh yea. How do I need to follow that up?" If you know they've worked on it, maybe your follow up is to give some positive feedback and ask how it is going. If you don't know what they've done, it's an exploratory question about what they've done. If you know they haven't worked on it, maybe some light corrective feedback about staying on top of their own development.

This all sounds basic enough that it may seem like you don't need to have some official plan to do it before and after each one-on-one. Keep in mind, though, we are using a single example here. If you are doing one-on-ones correctly, you have a minimum of 5 things to talk about, and that's just your half of the meeting. Multiply that by your number of employees...well, it gets very easy to lose track of things. 

If you are doing weekly one-on-ones, you are already head and shoulders above most bosses. This extra bit of work is going to send you even further to the front of the pack. Your employees may not comment on the change. They may not even consciously notice. But your one-on-ones will feel more natural and be more productive. You will be perceived as a manager who is always on the ball and never lets anything slip through the cracks.

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Removing Distractions Series: Turn Down Interruptions

Actions to take: When you are involved in a task and an employee interrupts, ask if it can wait. Don't make excuses about being busy. Simply pick a better time and ask if you can talk about it then. In any healthy working relationship, they will answer honestly. If you say you will follow up later, make certain that you do. 

This is one entry in a short series about removing distractions from your work, inspired by the Cost of Distractions post from early September. There are both productivity and mental health benefits to removing distractions while working on anything that requires focus.

Note: This post is written with the manager-employee relationship in mind. It works equally well with your coworkers. This advice is less applicable when the person interrupting you is above you in the chain of command.

When you manage people, there is enormous pressure to be available to your employees any time, all the time. "My door is always open" has become a cliché phrase in TV and film. The show will have a character say it genuinely to let the viewer know that this is a kind-hearted, supportive boss. If the character is a Michael Scott type, they might say this just before their door swings shut. Bosses who mean it when they say it are good bosses. Bosses who don't mean it are bad bosses.

Let's face reality. Your door is not always open. Literally, you have closed-door meetings all the time. When you see that your boss is calling, you close your door. When you have performance appraisal meetings, you close your door. When you talk to HR, you close your door. If you have ever said anything that resembles "My door is always open" then you are being naïve or hypocritical or both.

With that myth dispelled, let's face another reality: sometimes your solo work is more important than the thing your employee wants to ask about. Occasionally, it makes sense to ask your employee to come back in a few hours, or say that you'll follow up with them later that day, so you can continue with the train of thought you were already on. Here's the catch 22. You don't know which is more important until you've asked the employee what they want to talk about. And by the time they explain it, you're already in the conversation, so you might as well have it. Right? 

Well, no. 

We are, in fact, conflating two concepts. Important and urgent are separate ideas that should be treated separately. The question of which is more important, the employee's question or your solo work, is irrelevant. The employee's question could be of fantastic importance. That is all the more reason to wait until you are not distracted by other work. If you pause whatever you're doing, you will be in a state of mind to clear away the employee's question as quickly as possible to return to your task. That's a terrible strategy for dealing with important questions. 

If the employee's question is urgent, that's another story. So how do we judge urgency without getting sucked into the details? We simply ask if it can wait.

Employee: "Hey boss, can I bother you for a minute?"
You: "I'm right in the middle of something. Can it wait until the afternoon?" 

If you have a relationship that is built on frequent communication and trust, this exchange is no problem. You don't need to explain to them that you are so backed up and need to finish this and etc. etc. etc. Make the question perfunctory, make it unexceptional. We aren't pleading with our employees. It should be normal for you to deflect distractions when you are involved in a task that requires focus. Frankly, it sets a good example. We get better work out of people who become absorbed in a task and can work through it start to finish. Lead by example. 

As is my occasional habit with these posts, I'll finish with one caveat. If you don't do routine one-on-ones, you can't take the advice from this post. When you have a real working relationship with your employees, turning down their interruption is nothing. It's one interaction out of dozens they will have with you over the course of the month, and they know they have that time reserved each week for whatever is on their mind. However, if you are in the habit of only exchanging mundane pleasantries with your people, this interruption may be the only real interaction they have with you. In that case, it will be a big deal for you to say no. Your employee will leave with the message, "The one time I tried to bring an issue to the boss, they turned me down." Yet another example of how routine one-on-ones make all other work go more smoothly. 

When you're in the middle of something, turn down interruptions. Practice this over the next several weeks. Even if it is not strictly necessary, try it two or thee times each week to get into the habit. You'll find that the more you do it, the more natural it seems. If you say you'll be the one to get back to them, make good on that promise. If you ask them to follow up and they don't, double check. Most of the time, they'll say they figured it out on their own. Even better! You'll work better. You'll set an example of how to work better for your employees. And occasionally, you'll make less work for yourself. There is no downside to turning down interruptions.