How to make your work less draining.
“A World Without Email” by Cal Newport - a Market Force book review (part II)
If you don’t have “production process” thinking, you have one option for increasing productivity: figuring out how to make people “work faster”.
In August of 2021, we wrote part I of our review of “A World Without Email”. This is part II.
In the late 2000’s, Josh’s Fortune 100 company bought one of the first-available smart phones for their entire sales team.
Then this same company put WiFi on their corporate buses so their team could work during their commute to and from the office.
Eventually this Fortune 100 company debuted Slack for instant communication between their team members and customers.
And then…well, you get the idea. The more technology this Fortune 100 company threw at their team, the more overwhelming became the communication and, hence, their workload.
There is a better method.
“The Process Principle”
The Process Principle: introducing smart production processes to knowledge work can dramatically increase performance and make the work less draining.
So what is an effective productive process? It encompasses three qualities:
It’s easy to review who is working on what and how it’s going.
Work can unfold without significant amounts of unscheduled communication.
There’s a known procedure for updating work assignments as the process begins.
We tried it. I loved it. They didn’t.
To prepare for our annual Market Force team meeting, our Word planning document has over 30 steps and planning spans six months.
In order to reduce our internal communication (i.e. emails) about the planning for the meeting, we applied principles outlined in the “A World Without Email” book.
By switching to the tactics in the book, our other goal was to track who was doing what and when.
I loved the new method.
My team did not.
Here’s what happened. Maybe you can learn from us:
Post-It style Kanban and Trello.com’s online version Kanban
We uploaded our planning document’s thirty-steps to Trello.com. Trello is an online Kanban board that allows your team to see the status of task.
At a glance, anyone can see how the project is moving along.
Each week, all of our responsible parties log into Trello.com, review our meeting planner Trello board, and discuss the project.
As we neared the annual meeting date, we talk more often.
During the entire process, we never sent an email to each other or discussed the project, outside of our weekly conference call.
It sounds perfect. What went wrong?
We have enough web-based and hard-drive programs, perhaps too many: Salesforce.com, Microsoft’s Sharepoint, Google Drive, Office.com, Trello.com, Evernote, and on and on.
So, while Trello is a terrific solution for many companies, we did not want another web-based depository for important projects.
We are using the principles in the book.
Although Trello wasn’t for us, here’s one example of what is reducing our emails significantly.
Each Monday, our sales director schedules one-on-one calls with our inside and outside sales team.
Each Friday morning, our entire sales team has a team conference call to discuss projects, new products from our principals, goals, etc.
Before we send or forward an email to a work colleague, we ask ourselves, “Can this email wait for our weekly scheduled conference calls?”.
If the answer is “yes”, we place the topic into a Evernote file labeled for each of our sales team members.
As topics relevant to our team come up during the week, we also add it to the respective sales team member’s file in Evernote.
When our weekly one-on-one call or team conference call comes up, we access the relevant Evernote file and discuss the topics.
The benefit is that there’s no back-and-forth email thread. We address our team member’s questions about the topic while on our scheduled weekly call.