Concentration and productivity of a knowledge worker

Perhaps it has happened to you too that you needed concentration to tackle a particular task and were continuously distracted by emails, phone calls, or meetings.

In a world where connectivity is essential for the natural flow of working life, it is often difficult to understand or, worse, to measure the productivity of knowledge workers, that is, those workers who use knowledge to operate on immaterial processes.

In this article I will try to explore the topic further.

Finding Concentration

The search for and the need for concentration are not the same for everyone: there are managers who actively use Twitter several times a day and manage to grow companies excellently, and at the same time there are developers who need to isolate themselves in a cabin in the woods, free from distractions, in order to find the necessary focus.

It’s true, there are hundreds of studies on the influence of social media and the Internet in general on attention and the ability to concentrate, but, acknowledging that there are also cases that go far beyond rare exceptions, it is worth exploring the issue by focusing on the world of work.

Measuring the Immeasurable

Let’s imagine, for purely statistical purposes, that we want to measure the amount of activities carried out during the day that are collateral to the role for which we were hired. We would have to assign someone to measure the time spent responding to emails, handling phone calls, or attending meetings. Surely after a few months we would have a very complete picture of how working time is distributed. But if, for example, it turned out that collateral activities took up 20% of total time, could we automatically calculate productivity? Is responding to an email productive? Does attending a meeting perhaps decrease the team’s productivity?

Even if we accept that distraction has a cost and concentration has value, we must admit that we are in a field that is hard to measure. No, it’s not the intrinsic fault of distraction and concentration, but of the type of work: since a knowledge worker performs more complex tasks, it is naturally more difficult to measure their efficiency.

The Culture of Connection

A Harvard Business School professor, a researcher in the field, tried to convince a Boston consulting firm to reserve one day a week for its employees to be completely disconnected. Needless to say, this proposal was harshly criticized at the top levels of the company. Furthermore, the company in question had such a strong culture of connection that it expected every employee to respond immediately to emails and phone calls. You can understand how destabilizing it would be, for both executives and staff, to eliminate internal and external communications one day a week. Nonetheless, despite resistance from managers, the experiment was launched, and the results were analyzed from the perspective of the end customer: calmer employees, better communication, and greater satisfaction.

Why, then, do many companies follow the culture of connection even while knowing it negatively affects productivity and final results?

It’s Easy!

In a corporate context without clear feedback on the impact of certain habits on the final outcome, there will be a tendency to carry on with behaviors that seem easier in the moment. [1]

If you are used to asking for information and getting an answer immediately, as soon as a problem arises, this will make your life seem easier. At least in the moment. Otherwise, you would need to plan your work, be more organized, and focus on something else while waiting for the answer.

Take meetings, for example. Frequently calling meetings for projects leads to an accumulation of interruptions that make it impossible to focus on the day’s tasks. So why do we insist? Because it’s easier. For many people, these meetings represent a personal form of organization: instead of using resources to manage their own time, they prefer to let meetings set the rhythm of decision-making.

Also consider the common practice of forwarding emails to one or more colleagues with the added question, “what do you think?” These emails give the sender a pleasant feeling of productivity, since they may have emptied their inbox of requests. This feeling, however, is only temporary and completely illusory.

The Industrial Age

So, people tend to adopt habits that seem to make life easier but that lead to poor time management in a type of work that is not measurable by nature. Let’s return now to productivity. If you think, for a moment, of manual work, it will be very simple to understand how productive a line worker was during the day. Probably you just need to count how many “pieces” came out of the production line. A knowledge worker, on the other hand, has no points of reference, no gears to count, and finds themselves in a historical era that has nothing to do with the industrial age.

In the absence of clear indicators of what productivity really means, many knowledge workers therefore try to get as close as possible to the indicators of manufacturing and do things in a way that is “visible.” [1]

That’s why people tend to respond to emails within an hour or repeatedly organize meetings—these are activities that make you feel “busy.” The serious mistake lies precisely here: considering being busy as an indicator of productivity, from which comes the automatic satisfaction of having done your job well.

Busy = Productive?

In 2013, the CEO of Yahoo decided to ban remote workers and force employees back to the office. The reason? After checking server logs, the company found that remote workers connected only a few times to the email service. The CEO thus concluded that “if you are not visibly busy, I assume you are not productive.”

Seen and analyzed objectively, this concept is outdated. Knowledge workers do not work on an assembly line; so-called “conceptual work” is much more similar to goal-oriented work (or Agile) than to a production line. That is why, more generally, concentration is a precious asset and distractions are a huge black hole that inexorably swallows up available time.

Bibliography

[1] Newport, C. (2016). Deep Work. Piatkus.