Knowledge workers: your job is not to sit at a computer all day
Break the chains and finally do your life's best work
A few weeks ago, WeWork Palo Alto introduced “work stations”. People can walk up, plug in their laptop, and utilize the monitor, keyboard, and mouse. Pretty nice. I’ve been using this pretty regularly. I haven’t worked so close to others since college. After walking by everyone’s screen for the last few weeks, I’ve come to profound realization: our job is not to sit at our computers.
Most people work on the real stuff for a very small slice of their day. Most of the day is spent multi-tasking, juggling messaging apps, online shopping, email checking, travel planning, admin tasks, or scrolling social media. The amount of real work getting done is shockingly low. If you add the distractions from incessant phone calls and meetings, that’s the whole day. It is truly sad how much collective brain power humans are wasting each day.
Much of this has to do with the “mechanical routine” knowledge workers adopted over the last 30 years since personal computers became the primary interface of knowledge work. Most humans equate sitting at their workstation with being productive, but it couldn’t be further from the truth. Discipline is not sitting at your screen all day, discipline is what you do while you’re there.
Here are a few things to try:
Time-box computer time. With no multi-tasking and limited distraction, you could likely finish most of your daily computer work in 2-3 hours of focused time. Maybe 4 hours if you’re an engineer. The key words here are focused time.
Time-box meetings. Every time there is a meeting, there is cognitive drain which occurs 30-45 minutes before the meeting (to prepare, even if just emotionally), and then another 20 after the meeting to ingest (even if just subconsciously) . If you are spreading your meetings throughout the day, you are losing huge amounts of time. Keep them short and pack them together.
Keep the phone away. What do you need it for? If you’re keeping it around for phone calls, just keep the ringer on and put it inside a shelf. All day I see people juggling multiple tabs on their computer while also juggling multiple apps on their phone. That is the opposite of flow state and it is killing your productivity.
Reduce phone calls too. There are some people who waste away their entire day on the phone. It’s not even customer calls. They equate talking with being productive. Often it’s just the illusion of being busy and productive, when it’s just chatter.
Keep a notebook at your desk. Have some time allocated each day to reflect, plan, and harvest your learnings. Paper and pen is best for this.
Keep a book at your desk. Rather than aimlessly multi-task on the computer, turn it off to read and educate yourself. The most accomplished and successful people in the world read a ton of books. Here’s the thing: I almost never see someone at WeWork reading a book.
Limit social media to production, not consumption. If you want to use social media, be a contributor and limit your consumption. Sharing insights and content will give you energy and provide a more productive framework vs the endless scroll.
Work while you walk (without a phone). Take a one hour walking meeting by yourself with no phone and just a notebook. This may be your most productive time of the week.
Hope this helps! I’m trying it out too and will report back!
