A Second Type of Interruption: Time Consumers
Posted by 4 Hour Workweek Project on March 12, 2010
Review of the Types of Interruptions
3 Types
1. Time Wasters: These are the things that interrupt our work day and when they are ignored there is very little or no consequence such as meetings, chats, phone calls, web-surfing and of course Email. The common characteristics is that they are often unimportant http://4hrwwproject.wordpress.com/2010/03/09/more-on-interruptions-the-type-and-what-to-do-about-time-wasters/
2. Time Consumers: Think of these as the repetitive tasks and/or requests that must be completed but really do interrupt high-level work. Things like reading, responding and following-up to Email, making and follow-up on telephone calls, customer service tasks, financial to-do’s such as sales tasks, personal errands and all the bits that requires our attention over and over again but is a real red flag in terns of interruptions.
3. Empowerment Failures: Ferris clearly explains this category of interruptions as “instances where someone needs approval to make something small happen” and uses the examples primarily from customer services situations to illustrate the point such as dealing with a lost or damaged shipment and importantly cash expenditure approvals. For Ferris, he quickly eliminated a lot of the very small issues in this area by making every decision for $300 or less at the discretion of his staff; therefore, he did not need interrupted for the smallest amounts.
The first type of interruption, Time Wasters was discussed in the last posting http://4hrwwproject.wordpress.com/2010/03/04/interruptions/ We will carry on from there and look at interruptions known as Time Consumers.
Time Consumers
According to Ferris, “batching” is the strategy to apply to interruptions known as time consumers. Remember, time consumers are repetitive tasks that cause interruption over and over again when we are working on more important and often critical tasks. Regardless of what type of repetitive interruption we have, whether they are administrative tasks at the office or paying our household bills at home, all time consumers have a preparation time or as Ferris calls it “setup” time. The goal is to wait until you have a larger ‘order’ or batch of recurring tasks and do them all at once. For example, if you pay your bills using online banking, to pay one bill you must gather your paperwork, log-in online, select your payments and complete the transaction. If you have 5 bills to pay you must do all the same steps for each bill unless you ‘batch’. This may appear over simplified but I strongly encourage you to think about this in the course of your day. By eliminating the setup time to do this over and over again, you not only saved additional time in the week, you also changed from having to actually go through the whole process more than once. I feel that the relief from the monotony of doing the same things over and over is just as valuable as freeing up time. Reducing repeating tasks from our schedules we are able to add to the quality of our lives.
Concerning time consumers, there is also a psychological aspect. Each time we are interrupted, it can take up to 45 minutes to re-focus on a priority task and ‘get back to work’ (Basex, 2005). Given estimates are that the average person has 28% of their time interrupted during the course of a typical 9-5 work-day in conjunction with it taking up to 45 minutes each time to get back on track, it is no wonder we are often stressed, frazzled and feeling unproductive!
Start by first trying to identify the types of interruptions you experience and figure out if they are time wasters or time consumers. If they are time wasters great, eliminate them. Next, look at your time consumers and watch for the repeating nature of these types of interruptions and batch as many of them together as you can. I have used my Toodledo software to tag tasks that are Time Consumers, when I sort by just this tag I get a list of tasks and can easily see groupings where I can batch certain things. For example, when I enter ‘status update’ as a task in my to-do list for my clients or research team , I also tag them as a ‘Time Consumer’. Then I am able to see the list of all status updates, I put them together and complete them as a bigger task. Therefore, I get them all completed at once thus creating a period of time I have no status updates due to any one for the immediate future. Since I need the same templates and other information and must be in my email to send all the updates, it’s productive to complete all updates at the same time. Also, they are concise, factual statements and items noteworthy about projects to communicate in an update, which is very different from the type of writing I do when creating a formal report or even this blog. I spend a ‘batch’ of time in the same writing ‘head’ space and this reduces the number of times I have to switch gears in a day because I spend a few hours working on like tasks rather than jumping around on different tasks.
Finally, an excellent outcome of this aspect of the project for me is the amount of block time I am finally beginning to create to work on larger project pieces. I am really hoping this will add to the results I am already able to see in working more effectively. I will try and remember to provide an update in a future blog of whether or not I am successful. As I said in the last post, be patient with this process, it can take time to turn the tides on long-standing processes and change they way you’ve done things over time but it is worth the effort, I can see that already.
Next blog, we’ll wrap up the 3 types of interruptions by discussing empowerment failures, this one may require a leap of faith and seriously letting go of some issues!
Have a great weekend everybody…..
