The time is now
Future Work/Life is a weekly newsletter that casts a positive eye to the future. I bring you interesting stories and articles, analyse industry trends and offer tips on designing a better work/life. If you enjoy reading it, please SUBSCRIBE HERE, and share it!
“Many now consider data to be the most valuable commodity in the world, yet as technological advances continue apace and automation increasingly replaces people in routine and repetitive tasks, human interaction and communications remain crucial to innovation. Crucially, how we optimise time in our personal and work lives to allow for creativity will be the determinant factor in both producing value for organisations and society, and being happy as individuals.”
That’s a quote from an article I first wrote a few months ago when I’d barely heard of Covid-19. It resonates for me at the moment because lockdown has, of course, forced us to reassess our relationship with time.
In FWL#2, I referenced two wholly different experiences of people in lockdown – suddenly many people have more time than they know what to do with, while others can’t find enough hours in the day.
Lynda Gratton wrote this week about the need for businesses to understand…
“...the particular situation of each employee and enabling those with caring responsibilities to establish blocks of time in which they are ‘on and off’. We all need to become more sophisticated in how we use our new-found digital tools and skills so as not to be overwhelmed.”
I agree but, it's also true that even before we entered into this high stress, working experiment, we were long overdue a reassessment on the importance of timing at work.
Daniel Pink, the author of When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing, writes that the effect of time-of-day accounts for a 20% variance in performance on workplace tasks. To put it another way, if you structure your day in a way that doesn’t align with your chronotype – your internal biological rhythms – then you can never realise the full potential of your productivity.
In FWL#2, I also talked about the three motivational factors that Pink identified in one of his previous books, Drive – Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose.
Motivation day-to-day manifests through making progress in meaningful work hence why optimally managing our time contributes to improved performance and, more significantly, our happiness.
I’m writing this sentence at 5.12 am. Some of you will be wondering whether lockdown has finally tipped me over the edge and I’ll admit, the idea of working at this time of the morning would, once upon a time, have seemed ridiculous. I was once more likely to be rolling into bed as the sun was coming up than writing about chronobiology. Sadly/Gladly (depending which way you look at it), circumstances have changed, and I’ve identified that I can achieve a disproportionate amount when I start my day very early.
There are two main reasons in my case.
Firstly, I have no distractions - this was true even before a global pandemic meant that there are five of us at home all day, every day.
Secondly, I am what colloquially is known as a ‘lark’. In other words, in contrast to an ‘owl’, my body is designed to function effectively when starting early in the day.
I've tested how I perform on various cognitive tasks throughout the day and now segment my days and weeks into four categories of work –collaborative, spontaneous, focused and downtime. You can read more about the characteristics and benefits of each in my article, Flow Motion.
I’ll preface what I’m about to write next with a significant caveat.
Like many, my wife and I are no longer in complete control of our working days. We’re both adapting as well as can be expected, but with the best will in the world, it’s not always possible to get it right. Since I decided to cover this topic last Sunday, I’ve had what I’d consider my least productive week in months!
Nevertheless, given the restrictions on my time right now, aligning my week with my chronobiology is more critical than ever. And if I get the system right now when we're catapulted back to any degree of normality, I’ll be more creative and productive than ever.
Critically, I accept that not every day goes to plan. Some mornings I’m just too tired to get up at 4.30 am. On other days, the kids may not play ball. They still don't quite understand why when after I've gone upstairs to work, they walk in to see me on a Zoom call. "Daddy, you're supposed to be working. Why are you talking to your friends on Zoom?"
I've touched on the benefits of asynchronous working previously, particularly for companies like Automattic (Wordpress) and Basecamp that have teams distributed around the world. Why should this flexible approach to 'office hours' be limited to companies with employees in different time zones?
Yes, we need to synchronise our diaries with key team and client meetings but, as far as possible, these should take account of everyone’s rhythms (read more about that, here) and the demands of our home life. In my experience, a weekly horizon for time planning allows sufficient ‘slack’ for the inevitable changes in short-term priorities.
If you’re interested in learning more, please read my article, Same, same but different, or get in touch.
Now is the perfect opportunity to optimise our work-life design - this means not just reconsidering where work takes places but also recalibrating when we do it.
I’ll finish as narcissistically as I started, with a quote from myself.
“The category of Work-Life Design addresses the need for organisations to create an environment that acknowledges a future in which their employees’ personal and work lives are closely aligned. Getting this right will give everyone — but, in particular, those like me who have young children — the opportunity to become both more effective at work and more present at home. And perhaps even a little happier.”
Have a nice weekend, everyone.
Ollie
Any Other Business:
I wrote last week, in FWL#3, about the future of cities. Airbnb’s CEO Brian Chesky was interviewed by Kara Swisher on Recode the other day and offered a fascinating take on various subjects including how we’d see a shift towards people visiting smaller cities over ‘mega-cities; what he calls travel redistribution.
I also wrote last week about the potential long-term economic impact of the global crisis on young people. In When, Daniel Pink discusses how beginning your career during a recession can depress your wages for decades, something backed up by a study released by The Resolution Foundation.
Still, they’ll have plenty of time to catch up as this illuminating illustration of global life expectancy shows.
And this podcast with Sebastian Thrun is a fascinating glimpse into the future of education and how that could impact people's work and life in general. Thrun launched Google X, is the father of the self-driving car industry (having launched what is now Waymo) is now the co-founder and Chairman of Udacity, an online education platform.
This Wired article summarises how some of Silicon Valley biggest companies are approaching revote working.
Finally, I liked the sentiment of the Canadian Government’s work-from-home guidelines.
