Dave Kelly 5:14
You know, Rolando, when I think of multitasking, I think of, I think of some of the products that we sell, allowing for multitasking, for example, so wireless headsets, high adoption rate, these past few years, a lot of people are now working in home environments. So there’s the cognitive task on a wireless headset would be participating on a call with a client. So you’re trying to understand your client’s needs questions, whatever it might be. So all of your brainpower is right doing that particular task. But perhaps you need to just quickly get up and close a window, or turn the light off, or maybe even just quickly throw some laundry, from the washer into the dryer, there’s not a lot of cognitive thought being placed into that part of that task, you know, it’s real, it’s rudimentary, it’s very simple. So with a wireless headset, you can multitask, you know, you could not really, you don’t have to skip a beat with that small thing that you need to do in the house while being able to focus on a conversation with your with your client, or a teammate. Right. So multitasking, in that in that form, that seems very straightforward. And something that even a simple guy like myself could manage.
Rolando Rosas 6:37
I wouldn’t ever call you simple, Dave, thank you, you’re very complex man with many layers like an onion. So now that we have the ground rules in place, Dave, well, we’ve talked about contextual switching, and multitasking, and we’ve got those definitions out of the way, we should just jump into the research that we found. We scoured the internet and found things that are relevant to work. One of the things that really jumped out from a metrics and study as well as the number of people involved was a study done by Asana. They are project management type of collaboration software, and they found a several interesting things that I think are very relevant to today. One, I’m just going to give you some of the highlights here. When it comes to contextual switching, they found that we are spending more time today on certain tasks that we do on a daily basis at work. So in this sample of nearly 10,000, knowledge workers, here’s what they found. 42% are spending more time on email than a year ago. 40%, spending more time on video calls than a year ago as well. 52% day 52% are multitasking during virtual meetings more than a year ago. That’s interesting. So people are not really paying as much attention to the online meetings. And that could have some implications to people absorbing the information or the or the quality of collaboration. Or that people feel that they may need to do more. And this gets to the essence of multitasking, which we’ll jump into in a moment. And lastly, 56% feel they need to respond immediately to notifications. So that gets to what we were talking about earlier about trying to do several things simultaneously. And the role of remote have really, we’ve been talking about future working remote working for a long time. And I could see why some of these numbers, especially if people are working more at home, they don’t have that face to face contact, they don’t have the end on insight or on site. Seeing the colleague as you’re walking through the hallways or whatever. And so the need to be able to connect, I could see how these numbers would go up dramatically from even a year ago. The other thing is that there are more people that are in the office versus a year ago. And so the the ability to collaborate will take a premium and so you’re collaborating and communicating. When everybody was remote, maybe everybody got together. I know this is for us. You know we’re 100% virtual, we have set times to have our meetings. And if you don’t even know people are not no longer in that kind of mode where everybody’s got a set meeting at a set time. I see the need where email goes up, I see where virtual meetings go up, I can see where people are multitasking more. And according to this search, the ones that tend to get infected, the ones that tend to get affected the most, in the negative way, is the younger generations. So Gen Z, and millennials tend to feel this pressure, the stress this that comes from having to be in all places at the same time and try to multitask to also do contextual switching and have all the apps open on their phone or, or on their PC, and then go back and forth and have that immediate need to respond. And I think that gets to a little bit of the experience factor when you’re talking about Gen Z’s and millennials being in the workforce versus somebody like ourselves, David, we may be old farts and we can kind of know, yeah, I’m gonna, that that that email could wait, that’s not important. Or, you know, really, I don’t need to take that meeting today. Because it’s totally not important. All right. And so when you’re newer and greener into the workforce, everything seems important, right? You want to do your best, you want to impress everybody. And so you may know me feel the pressure. And that’s what this study by Asana said that younger generation just tends to feel more pressure when it comes to all of the all of the contextual switching and multitasking.
Dave Kelly 11:28
And you know, I think what you said is true. With experience, you come to understand that other people are dedicating time to answering emails, and they’re not doing at the same schedule as you. If If I receive a question from someone via email, when I’m in the middle of participating in a webinar, if it’s not on fire, you can rest, you can just put that aside, you don’t have to think about that. In my opinion, I think the best thing to do is when you’re jumping on a webinar, shut down your email, you don’t need to get those notifications, because it will distract you. In ultimately, it could add, it could add time to the task at hand. When you’re in a group setting. And you’re brainstorming, and you’re bouncing ideas off of one another. When something comes your way during that call, even if you’re just thinking about something else, because you saw you saw an email come in. It’s that distraction. And really, what you’re doing is you’re doing your team a disservice.
Rolando Rosas 12:32
So Dave, what you’re saying is experience matters. And often, a lot of organizations talk about mentoring, and how mentoring can help our younger folks. And I believe that and I believe that wholeheartedly. But I think that can also happen remotely. You know, we, we pride ourselves on being virtual and working in a virtual environment. And I think you can mentor folks, even in a virtual environment, you don’t need to 100% of the time be on site. Now you can also and some organizations may not be fully virtual, they can do hybrid so they can have mentoring, being on site and doing the other tasks remotely. But speaking of the younger generation, and the frustrations that they feel, there was a really good study that we looked at Dave, from UC Irvine. And this was the name of the study is titled The cost of interrupted work more speed, and stress. And then in they investigated the impact of interruptions on work productivity, speed, and stress levels. Now, that’s a mouthful, but in that study, there was some really good nuggets that can allow us to practically take some of the findings and implement them in a work environment, whether you’re remote, or hybrid or on site. Let’s jump into some of those. Dave, you want me to take a few of these and we can bounce some ideas off of this? Right?
Dave Kelly 14:04
Yeah, I mean, you know, what I thought was in what I thought was very interesting at the top of this study was, you know, we’re looking for productive employees, right. And they were talking about how with interruptions in productivity that sometimes within the study, the study found that interruptions can lead to higher productivity rates, which, you know, when I first read this, it was kind of looking like an oxymoron, but it’s an overcompensation. If someone took 10 minutes of your time, you have a project that you need to get done. You have a deadline. You know what that might be the that might be the whip that need in order to get get back on task and you know, speed up for delivery.
Rolando Rosas 14:49
Yeah, but it has a downside as a dark side and it has a Kryptonite when you are continuously interrupted and That was that they found, on average 23 minutes and 15 seconds was required to get back on task once you were interrupted, let me repeat that 23 minutes and 15 seconds to return to the original task and get going. So imagine how many interruptions you have in a day. And how that will take you off there is and this happens to all of us, right, you get, you’re starting down one road, and all of a sudden, you get an email notification on Oh, my goodness, I gotta look at that. And then something else somebody calls you on your cell phone, and then you know, you Oh, my goodness, I gotta respond to this person I forgot to I got forgot to order to do I forgot to do the whole foods order or something, right, or whatever. All of those things take you off every time. On average, it takes about 23 minutes, to get back to the first thing, the first thing that you’re working on in the morning or something else that was on your plate. So finding a way to negate some of these interruptions. And there’s some practical advice that we’re going to talk about here later on, on things that can help mitigate some of the interruptions that anybody could do at home or at work. You know, Dave, they also found in this study by UC Irvine, that stress levels and I’m going to read as stress levels were found to have a direct correlation between the frequency of interruptions, as well as the stress levels experienced more interruptions lead to higher stress. That’s, that’s it, you know, you don’t even think about it, right? You’re kind of on autopilot. A lot of times, Dave, when you know, work the work the way it is, you know, you get a notification for you know, hey, this customer needs that, or, Hey, this important project just got or, Hey, we won this, this other project. And now you know, we’re celebrating or whatever, and then something else comes up. So ultimately, all of these, these interruptions produce higher levels of stress. And people don’t tend to work well with high levels of stress. It just, over time build. So having stressful situations in one day, and then another day, and then another day tends to build and build and build and build. And then when you look back, you’re like I’m fatigued. I’m burnt out. And it’s two o’clock, right, two o’clock, and your brain can’t handle one more. One more email, you can’t process one more email, you can’t handle one more phone call. And it just creeps up on you. Sometimes all of a sudden, like boom, because of that accumulation of all the stressors and sometimes it takes a little bit more time. But in the fact is that all of these interruptions will cause more stress
Dave Kelly 17:55
dinner. What’s funny is sometimes it’s it’s nothing serious. that’s causing stress. So I can I picture. This happened to me last Thursday. So Wednesday, Wednesday evening, I had planned out the tasks that I needed to get done before noon, on Thursday, because we had big plans afternoon. So my the afternoon was booked solid. So I had some free time. So on Wednesday night, I was playing, I laid everything out. When I woke up Thursday morning, I was ready to go, I came into my office and I sat down and I started, I started task number one. And in the middle of that task, I got a phone call from a customer customers always come first. I work with the customer, the customer needs some information from me. So I had to do a little bit of research, I got back to the client. I had now go back to that task at hand. And then the middle of that task, I was interrupted two more times by customers, customers come first. The next thing I knew I was 90 minutes into my day, I was planning on finishing these three tasks, and I hadn’t even completed task number one, was the world on fire. No. Was it serious issues? You know, was it costing, you know, millions of dollars? No. But it was it was just adding to the stress of not being able to complete the tasks that I needed to do. And then what’s interesting is just like this study was saying the distractions then caused me to hyper locked down so that I could get these things done super fast. So I think I did it with efficiency. But it was still it was it was causing stress because customers come first. So sometimes there’s things that happen within our day that you can’t control. But other times, you know, other times there’s been things that have come onto my plate that I could have easily just put to the side and just put that my to do pile for, you know, later on that day, whatever it might be. But yeah, it was Just undo undue stress. And then I felt like I was distracted and not accomplishing what I needed to do and running out of time. So I think when people are running out of time, it’s definitely where a lot of stress is coming from.
Rolando Rosas 20:12
So yes, that’s right. Dave, when it comes to to do tasks, you know, one of the things I’m gonna do, I’m gonna jump around a little bit here, but the to do task, keeping those straight, which is what some of the recommendations are in when it comes to using multiple software, you may have a to do task somewhere in a project management thing, like click up, you may have to do tasks in your Google, somebody puts it in trying to consolidate these things can make life easier. And we’ll get into consolidation as well, because I think a lot of organizations and a lot of people, when they tried to when they’re trying to do their work on a daily basis, find that they’ve got, you know, 100, tabs open. And they may have apps that are on their phone, that are not on their PC, and vice versa. To get work done, right. There are folks that use their cell phone for business, but they don’t use the business app for the phone communication on their on their mobile phone. Whereas on the computer they do. And so those kinds of things where you cannot, I can’t take business calls on my computer, although I’m in teams all day long. Or I’m in zoom, which by the way now comes with the ability to make phone calls from zoom, those things that make life a whole lot easier. And consolidating that in unifying the experience between mobile and zoom, mobile and computer, as well as how customers can touch with you. So all of these things. All of these things play a role in taking you from one context to another, especially if you’ve got to switch back and forth between the computer and your mobile device. One other thing that we were talking about interruptions, something that came to my mind was we’re talking about interruptions. Nowadays, with so many people working from home, as well as people working in offices that are open office, Open Office concept where you don’t have any walls, those interruptions bleed in whether you want to or not, especially in an open office environment, sometimes working from home, you have the kids, those things interrupt, you may have other things that we were just talking about now, just the noise of the air conditioning, or the noise of the lawnmower guy, right? If you’ve got somebody mowing your lawn or coming by, you know, on Tuesday, they’re gonna come by and boy that when they come through that just makes a day, your morning or your day or afternoon. So one of the ways there’s, there’s a way to mitigate that. And from a device perspective, a user could use noise cancelling headphones that kind of block out the outside world. So that normal interruption, let’s just call it a normal interruption is no longer interruption because you don’t even hear it, it doesn’t register, your brain is not aware of that. So that’s one way to tackle the problem of interruptions, this specially external types, like if you’re in an open office environment, and you have a bunch of colleagues near you, and they’re just going on and on and on and on, or the work that they do just interrupts your flow. That’s one way to reduce it. Obviously, if we reverse the clock to 20 years ago, where everybody had cubicles that were about six or seven feet tall, those interruptions were lower, but I don’t think that’s the case for more work most workers today.
Dave Kelly 23:44
And I think sometimes co workers don’t realize that they’re being disruptive. You know what, I have been guilty of having a co worker stand up over their cube, while I’m mid conversation with another co worker, and have that person pointing to their headset, like come on, I’m gonna phone calls really important. And as sales people that are trying to do just, you’re not salespeople, we’re working so hard just to get people on the telephone to have a conversation, to be a co worker that is just talking about the fishing trip on Saturday, you know, you feel pretty bad when you’re when you’re doing that to a teammate. But like you said, if you if you’re wearing a headset that is that has active noise cancellation that’s designed to kind of isolate you, products like that can help. Something that I’ve actually found very helpful with some of these solutions that we sell at Global Teck Worldwide are also online indicators that are built in to the headsets. So if I were, you know, I’m in sales, I’m walking over to my to my marketing team, and I’m just trying to get someone’s attention. You know what if I’m paying attention if I See this person wearing a headset? And I see it’s kind of lit up. That’s an indication that hey, always on a phone call, don’t interrupt her at this time, send her an email, try to book something with somebody. You know, just hijacking people’s time is something that I think everyone in the office needs to be more cognizant of, because I’ve seen it, I’ve I’ve been a culprit, I’ve been a victim. And it’s just an awareness that could, you know, maybe, maybe do some, I don’t like how I said that. So um, you know, creating some office wareness might help bees will help from you being your office distraction,
Rolando Rosas 25:38
no doubt. And that’s probably why the on our last podcast, Dave, we found a study that Fujitsu the big Japanese company did with its 80,000 employees in Japan. And they found that 74% This is before the pandemic 74% had raided the office as the place to be to get work done. And if you’re not, if you don’t have too many distractions, you’re like, Yeah, I can get it done. But if you’re saying like what you’re saying, Dave, and now you send everybody home, which they did, they found three months later, once everybody was sent home, that people love the remote working so much that the place, the office went from 74% as being the place to get work done to 15% favourability. So more people found the remote working situation because they could get more work done. And a more favorable environment, then probably in the office, and they probably never realized that they could do so much from home. But it’s interesting disruptions in on site, you know, you think about it, they’ve people come up to your desk all the time, you get pulled into meetings that are not even on your schedule. So I could see how disruptions on site, still today, continue in a way that was already there, you know, prior to everybody being sent remote, whereas in remote, you got to really map out your day and schedule in order to get all the different tasks done.
Dave Kelly 27:19
Right. So now working, working in a hybrid work environment, we have an opportunity to limit these distractions, you’ll still have a co workers trying to get your attention. But it’ll be in the form of a text or an email, not necessarily behind you tapping on your shoulder. So we need to be cognizant of not letting ourselves be distracted that answer. Sorry, that question can wait until later.
Rolando Rosas 27:44
So Dave, we stumbled upon this study done by Asana with 10,000 knowledge workers. And here’s some of the highlights from it. One, there’s a work management paradox that despite the adoption of new technologies, workers are spending more time on work about work, rather than the things that they should be doing. So the work of work like managing emails, the process related in meetings, trying to go between those type of administrative tasks rather than the actual work that needs to be accomplished.
Dave Kelly 28:28
It’s the communication and collaboration, you know, of your teams to finish the projects, it takes multiple platforms in order to be a like, we’ve talked about this being a a project manager, understanding how to how to delegate and the process in which you’re handing off the project to the next group, or to the next person that takes that takes some extra time in order to achieve. So with remote work, and with the adoption of new technologies, I see where people are spending more time working on how to work and accomplish those tasks. I get what they’re saying we do this internally. But when you when you figure out how you’re working together to get that common goal. It does take it does take some time. It does.
Rolando Rosas 29:26
And the amount of time speaking of time, the amount of time they found with these 10,000 that’s spent on context-switching, which getting back to our earlier conversation context-switching is when you got to go from one thing to another to another that workers switch between those tasks every 10 and a half minutes on average, and that the constant context-switching is costly in terms of productivity. So being exact having that as your baseline, if you’re every roughly every 10 minutes, you’re having to, you know, juggle between a new email that came in a text message that that now it’s got your attention. And then on and on and on, just lowers overall productivity. So that’s, that’s what they’re seeing. We talked about the work about work, but let’s dive into the work about work. They said 60% of workers spend their time on work about work, like emails and meetings, leaving only 40% of that time for the skill were they were hired for so trying to get tasks done and manage the project itself, rather than the email around the project. All of that lowers productivity. Here’s one of the more interesting things that they found that there’s a big impact of all of this on burnout, they found that seven out of 10, workers experienced burned out, burnt out in 2022. And with with 82%, saying that they consistently work more than 40 hours a week. So if you’re a salaried worker, and you’re a knowledge worker, you’re you’re probably set on a pay schedule or pay grade. And it’s usually based around the 40 hours. So people are putting in more than their 40 hours to get the work done. And that’s kind of the way I read it. Do you see it any other way? Dave?
Dave Kelly 31:29
No, I think just like we’re talking about with, with the distractions, you know, what if it takes if you’re bouncing around as much as this study is saying, this study is saying over, what is it 10 minutes. So they’ll they’ll do a task for an average of 10 minutes, before switching to a different task. And it’s not necessarily going in between different applications. You can work on one task, cognitively, you, you have problem solving, you know how you’re trying to lay it out, you have different places to get the information so that you compile it and send it. But changing those tasks every 10 minutes, if you don’t, if you don’t finish that task during that period of time, you’ve, you’ve now moved into something else, and then you’ve left this other tasks still open. So I can certainly see how that would create stress, certainly some burnout, you know, with that type of a, but that type of role, but knowing that you have these goals to finish, yeah, you’re working extra time, because you’re compensating for that you know, what was stolen from you?
Rolando Rosas 32:36
Oh, no doubt. And to go along with that. One of the things that they found, which is interesting in mirrors are something that we also found independently on LinkedIn, they state that the future of work is hybrid. So So combination of working in the office, a different number of days, and then working at home certain amount of days. And that was 89% of workers of that 10,000 stating that they want flexible remote work options. Yeah, you know, Dave, we had a LinkedIn poll about a month ago, and we found almost identical numbers. And the question that we put on that poll was, do you find remote working beneficial. And in that poll, we found that 89.5 of the LinkedIn respondents said that it was beneficial. And the number that Asana came up with 89%, as well, it’s, it’s crazy how that is true. In our poll, we had somewhere like 650 respondents, and they have 10,000. But again, that mirrors very closely to the poll we had about remote work being beneficial. In this case. 89% say they want more flexible work options. It just seems like there’s a supermajority that understands the benefits of remote working or hybrid, in this case, hybrid working, and how that plays a role into possibly a more fulfilled type of work. And I don’t think a lot of people talk about being happy at work. I rather re engineer that word a little bit and talk about fulfilled at work. Because being happy is an emotion that can come and go, you’d be happy today with work, you could be unhappy by the end of the day. On one email alone, you feel unhappy. But being fulfilled is a different thing. Like is the work meaningful? Do you get the level of respect that you want as a worker? Are you being heard? Are you being recognized? Do you have the flexibility that you need to lead to lead a productive life as outside of work? Because if all Those things are missing, you’re not gonna feel very happy. So I want to rephrase the happiness of work and more the fulfillment of work because it could be very meaningful. And for some people, it’s just not fulfilling at all, which is different than being happy. All right. So Dave, we talked about the asana study that looked at the 10,000. Now let’s dive into the ways to combat context-switching so that the future work is not about burnout. We’ve touched and danced around some of these, but we’re going to give you some concrete examples on some of these that we’ve been able to implement here in house, as well as with other customers. And some of these are low hanging fruit. For some organizations, some, we’re going to require a little more heavy lifting. That just the way, the way it rolls depending on your type of firm. So let’s jump into one of the suggestions to combat the contextual switching problem. And the burnout is to limit notifications on your app, for example. Right now, as we’re filming this, I’ve got my PC, notifications on our chat, our internal chat completely turned off, turned off until we’re done with filming us. Otherwise, there’s a constant stream of Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, that will be coming through that through my PC, as well as on my cell phone, which is over here on the side. And so if you’re in the application, like teams, Google meet, or any other messaging app, or your email, for that matter, you may want to turn that off for a little bit. If you have the opportunity, go to lunch, turn it off, or put in your status as a way so that people know that you aren’t available right now, or that you will your do not do you do not want to get interrupted. And I think Dave, with some of that there’s some stigma, especially if you’re listening to this in the US, the culture of work is different than let’s say, our German counterparts, or maybe our our folks that are in the Far East, or in other countries where there’s a greater separation of work and, and things that are non work or even within work itself, you’re allowed to have that kind of leeway. Whereas here, you know, we have more of a culture of being on all the time and this this grinded out mentality. But I think if you’re really trying to be effective, limiting the interruptions, which we talked about an interruption can take you off task, almost 23 minutes. And if you’re really deep into a project that you’re trying to solve a problem that requires complex thinking, turning that do not disturb sign or in the away some of the way Status Notification so that people know that you are not to be interrupted, can allow you to be more productive when you have to be deep in thought and focus are getting other tasks
Dave Kelly 38:04
done. Yeah, agreed. And I think before jumping into those tasks, tell yourself that you have control, you know, you don’t, you can turn off these notifications, but it might take a little bit of practice might be a little apprehensive to do it. It’s always nice to set expectations with coworkers. You know what, during this time of the day, on Wednesdays, I’m probably going to be doing XYZ, if my phone is on Do Not Disturb. Please just respect that. Also, with some of these UC applications, like RingCentral, you can put yourself on Do Not Disturb. You can send people directly to your voicemail as well. So it’s always always smart to do that prior to jumping into the tasks.
Rolando Rosas 38:50
And that’s that’s the beauty of the technology. Dave, you just pointed out, all this technology is there at our fingertips. And sometimes it’s the apprehension to just even turn that notification, the notifications off. It’s the apprehension of maybe you’re not perceived as a good worker. But I think, like you said, calibrating the expectations so that if there are blocks of time that you have to devote for projects, or in our case, great content or whatever, I think sending those boundaries in place sends the right message that you’re available at this hour. And then after that, you’ll be glad to get that because if you don’t, people are going to assume that you’re ignoring them, right. But if they do know that you’re unavailable, and it says that on teams or one of these other application teams or zoom, keep saying zoom zoom because zoom does have a phone presence. They do have by the way, for those folks that don’t know zoom does have a phone voice capability, but sending the turning those notifications off or sending them away, I think sends the right message so that people don’t send you 10 more messages, which tends to happen when you don’t respond right away. All right. Anything else you wanted to add? David, before we jumped to the next suggestion, the combat context-switching? No.
Dave Kelly 40:14
I mean, we could go, we could go on and on about it, right? I just find myself sometimes it’s the same, it’s the same customer that requires so much and they will, they’ll send you five emails before you’ve even had a chance to digest the first one. I’ll tell you, even if you don’t plan on answering, if you see that email come in, it’s playing games with your mind, it’s totally distracting, you’re immediately in that zone, you’re defensive, or you’re inquisitive, you’re the problem solver. Turning off those notifications is going to be a huge time saver. But again, it comes down to you flipping that switch, you flipping that switch, or turning that switch off.
Rolando Rosas 41:01
Indeed, Dave, and so that that leads right into so you’re talking about switches and things. Oh, another suggestion would be to be leveraging integrations. And let me explain. There are on average, and Asana also found this, that on average, 10 different apps on a workers computer or mobile phone that they’re using, some of these apps can talk to each other. And some of these apps can take data and push it into another app that you’re probably in. This may take a little bit more lifting on with some organization, especially the larger ones and enterprise customers, where you may have standalone applications that there are, there’s nothing going in except that internal communications. But on the other hand, there are ways to automate and send data from one app to another. And this will lower the burden of needing to be in multiple apps, you know, like, well, this, this study found that around 10 apps on average, that folks are in or used throughout the day in order to get work done. So reducing duplication, and which is, which happens a lot. Sometimes I gotta put the same exact information here and say more information over here. And over here, just because these things don’t talk to each other, or because due to reporting, and I’ve got to feed this information into a couple of different things. So integrations can do that for you. There’s some apps today and the today the the world of apps is definitely way more integrated than it was three or even five years ago, where you can use a plugin. And it will feed. For example, you can use Microsoft Teams, and have voice communications into Microsoft Teams, you can use Zoom, and use Zoom with a phone application. So now zoom allows phone calls to go in and out of the application. That’s one way to integrate two different functions where your video meetings and your phone on one app, where you don’t have to go back and forth in and out of that. And from the from using data, you can back end you back on the back end, there’s so many different ways that you can move data between apps so that if you’re doing email, for example, I think of clickup. A lot of folks use that for project management, there’s a feature that allows emails to be sent into clickup. So that you can keep all those communications inside of clickup. There’s also a way to keep the Google sheets so you can have Google Sheets, information inside of clickup. All of these things allow you if you’re doing project management, allow you to stay inside of click up so that you’re not doing context-switching, or moving between Google Sheets, click up an email, just those three alone, you know, you’re fishing for information, all three of these can be integrated into clickup. So that all the information is fed there. So that’s an example of integration. Dave, anything you want to add on integrations?
Dave Kelly 44:16
You know, with integrations and automations we’ve we’ve done a lot of things, you know, over the years that have certainly saved us a lot of time and effort. I was trying to recall our guests that we had on about two years ago, when we they were from Data Automation. If you want to learn more about different types of automations we had we had Will Christensen from data automation on our show. So a quick quick shout out to will certainly check out that particular episode because the things that they’ve been able to do for us were huge, timesavers
Rolando Rosas 44:50
huge, huge. Anything that you do repetitive tasks on. It’s as simple as even a form um I know that we internally get, we get emails from different things. And then those emails go into clickup. Because we have those automated otherwise, you’d be taking that information that’s coming in via email, and then literally entering it in to click up as a way to communicate with another teammate that may be part of the project. Now, you can automate that. So you’re getting something from email, that email then gets sent directly into the applicable person that’s within the department or task or whatever that falls within their plate. So that’s like a huge time saver. All right. And that leads Dave into both improving collaboration, which is what contextual switching if you’re having a problem, and you’re burning out because of that, a lot of times, like I said, it’s tools that live in their own fiefdom, their own separate standalone Island. And one of the things that the pandemic showed us and as well as clients that we work with is that a lot of the times when clients are trying to become more efficient with what they’re doing, and save money, they can actually unify that experience so that everybody’s on the same page. And this sounds so simple. But you’d be surprised how many organizations small and large, are completely disconnected when it comes to their collaboration tools. Some are on one tool, some are on another. And if they’re on their computer, they use something else. And if they’re doing internal communications, they use something else for collaboration. And if they’re on their mobile device, none of those applications may be existing on their mobile device. And, quite frankly, this is kind of a disservice to all the employees, when you can’t unify that experience, or you don’t have the ability to collaborate in real time. And Dave, you were sharing how you had the other day, somebody come out to your house to work on your H fac. And how they spent another five or six more hours because they had they had somebody else come out and go back and forth. And over the phone, when this could have been handled with something as simple as video call, right on that person’s mobile phone to troubleshoot this and boom, off to the races.
Dave Kelly 47:37
No, they they literally, they literally had to have what someone from their team come 45 minutes out of their way to come on location here to solve a problem that easily could have been done. Using video, I was shocked when we talked about that after dinner, you could see the frustration on on the specialist face. And he’s like, I can’t believe I come all the way down here for that. And he was just kind of he was fuming, he was stressed. And I and I saw what he did. Well, I shouldn’t say I’m not an expert, I saw him examine, get down on the ground, look at something, examine it, come up for air and then propose a solution and then left, he did nothing. Nothing other than analyze what he was what they were looking at, and then offer a suggestion. So it was kind of this just lack of technology, you know, and it’s funny when you talk to these H vac folks, they they live and die by their phone. They know their schedules the night before, they’re very efficient with getting from location to location and the schedule. They know where they’re going to be. They track these people they know where everyone is. And to see them have such a high tech, high tech use on scheduling software. But such a low tech use with the will using a mobile phone. Just the video. Yeah, like, like just seeing how they weren’t they it’s like they had never been been exposed to video at all.
Rolando Rosas 49:19
I think it’s I think it’s sometimes a thing of, of clients, knowing and industries. I mean, I meant that the way you did H back was basically you show up right? You said you show up on site. If you have a problem, you pick up the phone and you call maybe somebody in the office to give you some information. And I think the new way, really the more efficient way. Today we have the tools to you know, grab your cell phone and point right at the thing. I know that there is a company I can’t remember. I think it’s Nellie. They’re doing virtual technicians. So but essentially what they do is you could set an appointment you don’t even need somebody to come out to your house to fix the refrigerator or, or I troubleshoot it diagnose what’s wrong with refrigerator, your stove, basically your appliances that are at your house, because we all run into it, you know, and the way it gets done today, somebody comes out, checks it out and says, Yep, you need a new data that’s in the stove that’s broken, we got to order it. Well, all of that can be done remotely, it’s actually done remotely today. And if they need to bring other people in to the conversation, they’re able to pull them in. And that’s that those are time time saving and money saving tools that every organization, especially if you’ve got to take people and send them on site, or even I’ve seen customers with what they do with tech support is, especially for your your more expensive tier two or tier three, they will troubleshoot with video. And they in turn, will provide the solutions to a tier one or the customer themselves. So that you can reduce the amount of back and forth. I know, I use, you know, I say this internally, if something is going to take more than three sentences with an email, it’s better set on video, because you can nip it in the bud rather than they go back and forth back and forth on email. And we all succumb to that, well, I’m just going to shoot. And you know, two paragraphs later you have an email, a quick phone call or video call, where you’re face to face on video on Zoom, or teams or whatever, solve that problem right away. And sometimes, like in this case, what you’re talking about this technician, they didn’t have that they didn’t have that solution at their fingertips. And because they didn’t, they had the SEM rush out another guy, another specialist,
Dave Kelly 51:50
which added stress, you know, which you could see the stress and it D prioritized. A client probably so probably just slowed up the works for for everybody involved
Rolando Rosas 52:03
in this situation probably multiplied that a million times a day if this is going on. And it really doesn’t have to the tech is there, it could be right on your phone. And it can make lives easier both for the customer and for the organization, they can save a lot of money. And which gets into the next piece that allows organizations to reduce contextual switching and burnout. And that’s by consolidating tools, which is a different kind of problem. We recently worked with a accounting firm, who had started using collaboration tools like zoom and teams, and voice over IP communications at the very beginning of the pandemic. And as more of their workers went home. And time went by they found out that what they really wanted to do was consolidate all those different software, the one for calling the one furs for teams, and the other things that they were doing all on one platform. And so we advised them that they could do all of that now in teams three years ago, they if you couldn’t do phone calls very easily through teams, you couldn’t do all your collaborations in teams, you couldn’t do all your collaborations in zoom, where today, both of those applications allow for integrations that we talked about earlier, as well as consolidating several software and using that one interface with teams or zoom as the interface for all the collaboration and communications.
Dave Kelly 53:43
And it did take them some time. Right. So they had adopted new technology. They were using that technology for three years. So they were just getting to understand how to work in this remote hybrid workplace. So they were exposed to new applications and software. And then when they revisited this in three years, you know, they learned where people are getting their most. So they learned the tools that the team uses most for collaboration. And their requirement was, hey, if everyone is living here and in teams, and some are using this application for phone calls, and then some are using Google for meetings, can we bring everything into one, you know, so it took them a little time to decide how they were, how they were choosing to work so that we could come up with that right solution. So it’s making them more efficient and probably saving them a few dollars to
Rolando Rosas 54:42
and not only that, Dave but as we now know contextual switching so that if you’re going between zoom, teams, other apps, cheats and all the rest. You definitely are going to have more stress on your daily work. Just because you know, you got to be in all these apps. So consolidation, it’s totally possible today, the options to consolidate are there that weren’t there just 12 months ago. So if you’re in that situation where you got a lot of apps, it may be worthwhile to talk about consolidation and reach out to us, we’ll be glad to help you out, like we’ve done for other clients. Now, let’s jump into a couple of more solutions to combat context-switching. And that is practicing time management techniques. Boy, this one we could do talk a lot about. But I’ll give you kind of an example of one of the things that I do with time management. One of the things that a while back ago I started doing with the folks that I meet, is that really evaluating how much time I need to give each of the folks that I work with, and what I found was that a lot of what we do, we could get it done in shorter meetings. That allowed us to more effectively take those tasks and actually execute on them. And managing your time is the most important thing that you can have can direct control over today. And a couple of months prior to me doing this, a good buddy of mine, Chad Rubin, he said, Look, examine how many emails you send in the day, examine how many texts you send in a day. And you really get to the nuts and bolts of what you’re doing, where you’re spending your time. And you’ll find the like in this study, as well, six a lot 50% or more your time is just on the work at work. And by really being ruthless with your time and really examining it, you’ll be better able to understand where you’re losing your time through the day, whether it’s an email, whether it’s in, you know, responding to other things. And then you can come up with a game plan on how to fix that. Because every one of us, you know, everybody does the work that just a little bit differently, we all have no the same amount, virtually the same amount of hours a day, we may get it done at different times. But essentially, the work of work is what bogs down a lot of folks. So examining how to bring back control with the tasks you’re doing. Whether it’s email, phone calls, video meetings, or otherwise, will allow you to then to understand, Hmm, yes, this is where I can curb some of that time or add more time to other things or increase the frequency of something else. Dave, you want to jump in?
Dave Kelly 57:50
You know, I mean, I’ve I’ve attended, I’ve attended court all day seminars on time management techniques. There’s many books out there. It’s not, it’s not an easy thing that you can just kind of talk about in one minute and then have had be done. Like a lot of folks understand about time management and the importance of it. But also, you know, prioritizing tasks. That’s always a hard one for me, Rolando, you know, you have your fight everyone else their fire is the biggest fire, right? Sometimes I feel I want to focus on the most difficult things that that are, that were that are the most time consuming. I like to handle those first. But before I before I jump into those tasks, the easier to manage tasks, I delegate delegate that to the team. I’ll copy out a couple of emails, I’ll simply ask them, Hey, take care of this. It’s easier it doesn’t take a ton of resources. The simple simple things I tried to get get those handled more complex items. Those take priority and potentially for you or do you take
Rolando Rosas 59:06
do you I just want to jump in and ask you this do you wrestle your hardest tasks in the morning in the afternoon? If I heard a lot of different things around that I have my own personal things that I way I go about when you prioritizing tasks. How do you handle you know that tomorrow you’ve got, you know, a thing that you got to work on? Do you try to tackle that first thing in the morning? Or do you have that an afternoon it’s a date range
Dave Kelly 59:35
that for myself, it’s a day by day thing because every day is different. Sometimes I’ll have a morning open sometimes I will have a morning that’s fully booked. So it’s blocking out time to get that done putting it on your calendar, but it’s a it’s a day by day thing. It really looks it depends on what I have scheduled for that particular day, but I tried to find gaps Where I can put it in my schedule don’t, where people can’t book my time. And then that’s the time that I have to dedicate to that task. And I’ll also tell, and not only is it on my calendar here, but I do my best to inform the people, it’s summertime people are in my home, I have a closed office, I’ll put a you know, do not disturb sign on the door. And I tried to have a conversation with the people in my family saying please respect. If this is up, just respect that.
Rolando Rosas 1:00:31
You know, I was listening to Chris Voss, who is the FBI hostage negotiator or was formerly, he had something really interesting on this. And his take on it was that, in the afternoon, when you go past two to 3pm, some of these more complex tasks, negotiations, seeing customers, meetings, those can be more difficult in a more heavy lift, because a lot of people are burnt out. So if we put this in the context, and we go back into, you know, people are context suffering, people are interrupted, by the time you get to the afternoon, you’re probably your mind is not as strong to handle all those complex tasks, like in the morning. So for me, what I’ve done is all of my heavy meetings where I am required to like really think and provide creativity or input or decision making, I try to do those in the morning. And that’s because not a lot has already jumped on my plate, there haven’t been that many interruptions, so that I can get on with the business of tackling those tough tasks or heavy decision making or processing of information versus the afternoon. So, pro tip, if you think the FBI negotiators think that trying to get things done in the afternoon is very difficult. Because of that I, I would pay attention a little bit to those guys, because those I’m sure those life and death situations, and they probably he’s in his case, he’s probably had years of experience dealing with people. And the results that come about when you do things earlier in the morning versus later in the afternoon.
Dave Kelly 1:02:19
I hope I’m never held hostage beyond 3pm. If Chris Voss is my negotiator, it sounds like he might not have enough brain power to take care of
Rolando Rosas 1:02:30
weight check in to rest he’s checking out I don’t know, he’s checking out by 3pm. I’ve heard him go on and on about this. But it’s something that I found interesting. And I’ve just find myself doing more my tasks in the morning. And it was good to hear I didn’t know about all this up until recently, and so pass that along to folks and use it as they may need to. Now let’s jump into the other one, connect work to goals. And we were talking to our producer about this one earlier. And our creative team that works with us. One of the things that is more difficult is sometimes to do that connect your work to goals, because you may be different. And maybe it’s in the case of creatives, the tasks, that they’re doing it at different times and trying to put that all together into one nice, neat thing isn’t always easy, but having those goals that you want to accomplish. And fitting those into the schedule, fitting those into the priorities, fitting those into how you go about doing the work ends up having a nice payout at the end. Because now you can measure them, you can track them. In some cases. You know the old way. People measured accomplishing things, you know, you had to make 50 calls a day. And that’s directly your goal of 50 calls a day. And if that’s what you need to do, then you need to be able to track those goals and keep track of you know, yes, you hit your 50 or whatever the metric tends to be and tying those on what do you need to do to get those 50 done, so you can do them as efficiently as possible with the least amount of disruption. Dave, anything you want to add here?
Dave Kelly 1:04:20
Connecting activity to goals, you know, you’re doing something you want to know why? You want to know what the desired outcome is. And when you’re achieving those goals, when you know that when you know what the organization’s goals are. And you’re accomplishing your tasks that are adding to that. That I believe is where you feel fulfilled with with your job, because you’re part of a team. This is a team most organizations or teams, everyone’s everyone has their part. Everyone’s on the field somewhere. If you don’t know that you’re playing defense, and you’re running offensive plays you You’re not going to add to that scoreboard. So I do agree that connecting your activities or connecting your work to goals is super important. Now there’s another piece on here, Rolando, that is scheduling co working
Rolando Rosas 1:05:14
time. Yes, and this is where I think it’s very important, especially if you’re got remote or hybrid working implemented in the organization. This is what will derail very good intended, remote working programs, you have to be very religious about times that folks that are in different places can all connect and collaborate on what they’re doing. If you don’t have a very good grasp of this, or your team doesn’t, this is where things will fall off the rails, there’s miscommunication, there will be folks that are completely out of the loop. So having those times where you can get your team together, picking those times is is important, it is important that they also have a weight when they are in those meetings, for them to have a voice. Because if it’s just one person doing all the talking, that’s not really collaboration. So scheduling time, when co workers can meet, virtually, if that’s the case, or if they are going to meet hybrid and they’re going to meet in the office, having those in a cadence is definitely going to be beneficial for reducing burnout and contextual switching. And lastly, this is this is this gets into this wraps up a lot of what we’re talking about here, cutting unnecessary meetings. So we all are in meetings that’s unavoidable. But having the right kind of meeting, you know, we had Steve Cadigan, on from LinkedIn. And he told us that at LinkedIn, they went through a whole they did like the work of work, they went through a lot of discussions on how to do meetings. And I think every organization is different in how much time they devote to meetings and what they need to do in meetings. But we can all agree that there are meetings sometimes that are either too long, or just frankly, flat out unnecessary. And what we found, I should say, yeah, in our organization, we have different size meetings, some smallest three, to us, three folks in one meeting, some is as large as 15. The ones that are 15, don’t happen nearly as often as the ones that are in smaller groups, because you can actually get more work done more effectively. And everybody have a voice in meetings that are smaller, and more manageable, and they are more productive. So Dave, did you want to say anything about unnecessary meetings,
Dave Kelly 1:07:57
you know, I think about how many partners were associated with. So you have your internal meetings, of course. And I think we’ve done a really good job with how we schedule and plan those to be effective. The other thing that I struggle with is with all of our partners, they’re conducting meetings, they want to have quarterly reviews, they want to have webinars where they’re doing new product launches, they want to have every day I mean, if I accepted every invite that came my way, there would be no time to do. No doubt you want to be respectful of your partners times. But you know, you can’t, it’s impossible to say yes to everything. No, you so pick, pick those, pick those wisely. You know, what does it mean to your team, if you miss the meeting is kind of what I like to ask, is it something that I could get an update on by watching and recording afterwards, or just reading an update or maybe even getting a copy of the presentation? But external meetings? You can’t accept everything, just like with every set every sale that every sales pitch that came your way? Can you imagine if you said sure, let’s let’s have that free consultation.
Rolando Rosas 1:09:18
Might you remind me of something, Dave, you when you’re said about getting a report or an update? There are I know this to be the case in RingCentral. I believe zoom also has a technology to not just generate a transcript and Google has transcript transcription. But there’s AI built into the RingCentral platform that not only gives you the transcript of the video meeting, but it will give you a summary at the very beginning so you can get an understanding of what this meeting is about. And in addition to that, one of the cool things that I mean are we using reaching out Full disclosure, we use RingCentral, internally is that if there was a meeting, and so I said, Hey Dave, you know, I met with the Microsoft guys. And they mentioned something about this new video feature called XYZ. You can go into the, into the video meeting, the playback, type in the search, XYZ, if that’s the thing I told you to go look for, that’s the new thing. And it’ll take you right to that specific spot in the video where that thing was mentioned in the conversation rather than you kind of like skipping every 15 seconds to get to that,
Dave Kelly 1:10:42
that huge time saver, huge, huge time saver.
Rolando Rosas 1:10:45
So where you didn’t, you weren’t in a meeting, but you, Hey, pay attention to this. And I don’t remember what it was five minutes or 10 minutes in, but you just do a search and you type it in boom, huge time saver. So if you are looking to get this type of support or service in your organization, we’d be glad to help you. It’s helped us tremendously. I don’t know if other platforms have it today. But I know that we use it a lot internally. And it really does make the work of work more efficient.
Dave Kelly 1:11:19
That’s right, I’ve actually seen that. So I’m seeing that AI implemented on some UC platforms, including RingCentral. I’m also seeing that same AI implemented into some of the hardware. T POS has a they have a speakerphone that will do some of that voice to text transcription, that also understands it will learn your voice. So it will write out when when when Dave is talking. In the transcript, it will show that Dave said this, you don’t belong to one of the things that I liked one of our best practices, when we have a larger team meeting and we have an all hands all hands meeting and let’s say someone couldn’t attend that call. What what I find us doing is will say, Hey, Sarah, this piece is for you. And then we’ll yes in that. So we’ll say someone’s name, we’ll talk about it. And then when we send out that transcript, all that person has to do is type in their name. And then it goes to what that person that person’s role is right question that we had for them.
Rolando Rosas 1:12:29
I like that I’ve been on practice I’ve I’ve gone back and listen to some replays in of meetings that I haven’t attended. And with the team says they had this is for Rolando, when you listen to this to do, here’s what, what, when you need to hand it off or needs approval, can you please put it up? Right? That’s really cool.
Dave Kelly 1:12:48
Yeah, that’s nice. So use use the AI,
Rolando Rosas 1:12:52
use the AI to your fullest, and it’s only going to get better and faster. So Dave, we were to wrap it up today, we were in to sum it up here in just a few seconds. What you’ve heard today, you’ve heard that contextual switching can have negative effects. There are ways to combat it, we’ve provided you strategies, there will be links to all the research papers that we used for this podcast so that you can go take a look at them yourselves as well, and vet those out. If we miss something there, it will be in there. And I think you’ll find those useful. If you need help in your organization and getting some of these things underway. Whether you’re consolidating software, or your want to upgrade to a new platform that allows you to do all your communications all under one roof. We’ll be glad to help you out as well. So today, Dave and I have laid out some tips and strategies for you to combat burnout and the negative effects of context-switching. And if you want to hear more about remote working, and the future of work, and how all of this comes together, we have several episodes on our Circuitloops website that you can listen to other great leaders talk about this subject. And as always, you can also view all these episodes in anywhere where you consume your podcast platform. So thanks for joining me and Dave today and I will see you the next time
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