A common expression is “the more the better.” But that isn’t always the case. Sometimes, many times, more is clutter, confusion, and inefficiency. More, even of a good thing, can be overdone. A dessert can be too sweet. The sun can be too hot. You can get overloaded with too much information or too many choices. On an individual level, you can also try to do too much and get nothing done.
This is the dilution problem. It is death by a thousand paper cuts. You can mitigate the problem by attacking it at multiple levels.
Multitasking is a Myth
Everyone multitasks in an attempt to get more done. We follow up on emails during a meeting. We check our messages when we’re having lunch with a colleague. We think we’re being efficient because we’re busy, but being busy does not equate to being productive.
There is a cost to multitasking. When we’re not fully present, we miss important details that can lead to misunderstandings and mistakes. Who hasn’t quickly responded to an email while working on something else only to get a quizzical response back because you failed to address a key part of the request? Multitasking divides our attention and diminishes the quality of our work. And the cost doesn’t scale linearly, it scales geometrically. Juggling five activities is significantly harder than juggling three.
There is also a mental cost to constantly switching between tasks that impacts performance. It takes time to remember where you left off and what you needed to do next, which lengthens the time it takes to complete the task.
Multitasking is embedded in our work culture. You can’t eliminate it completely. The key is knowing when you need to focus your attention on a single task to be the most effective. A tactic I use is to block my calendar and turn off notifications to work on deep-thinking tasks early in the day when I’m at my best.
Drive Improvement Through Subtraction
On a larger scale, we typically fix processes by adding more steps, more reviews, and more approvals. We improve our data by adding more systems, more fields, and more values. We increase collaboration by having more meetings and including more participants. We enhance products by adding more features and options. We increase sales by offering more product varieties.
More, more, more. Why is addition our default solution?
One of the core tenets of lean manufacturing is the elimination of non-value-added activities (i.e., waste). Process improvement experts focus on streamlining processes by eliminating unnecessary or repetitive steps to make them simpler and more efficient. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos created the two-pizza rule—meetings shouldn’t include more people than two pizzas could feed—as a guideline to ensure that meetings and teams aren’t too large.
Why isn’t subtraction our default method for making things better? Subtracting a process step or canceling a meeting should be easy. No one will complain about not having to do something. You don’t need funding or approval. So why isn’t subtraction the first thing we try? Researchers have investigated this question. One of their findings is that there is no visible evidence when something is removed; out of sight equals out of mind. Consequently, people don’t get recognized for their contributions. People like positive reinforcement. It encourages them to repeat the behavior.
A core practice at IPM is that every meeting has a formal agenda and a specific objective. That information is used to determine the participants. Standing meetings with no agenda are seldom productive.
Strategy Starts with Making Choices
Strategy is a set of interrelated choices that positions an organization to win in the marketplace. Organizations fail at strategy all too often by trying to do too many things at the same time. This lack of prioritization overloads employees tasked with supporting more work than they can handle. Having to constantly switch between multiple projects on top of their day job decreases their productivity. Rushing to meet deadlines results in errors of omission. In my experience, the biggest reason a project runs overbudget or misses a critical deadline is because something was missed not because of a poor estimate.
So why do executives say yes to everything? It is human nature. More is better, isn’t it? It is also very hard to know when you’ve reached the limit of how many projects a person, team, or organization can handle. We all have fallen into the planning fallacy trap and underestimated how much effort will be required to complete a project. We make the decision to move forward with a new project when we know the least about it. Then we expect the team not only to figure out what needs to be done on the project but also whether it is more important than everything else they are responsible for handling. With everyone setting their own priorities, there are inevitably conflicts that delay progress. Prioritization is an executive’s responsibility that shouldn’t be delegated.
Are You Part of the Problem or Part of the Solution?
The key to driving results regardless of your role is focus. Resist the urge to multitask; it only hurts your productivity and the productivity of everyone depending on your output.
Think like a Lean expert and eliminate waste. Improve processes by simplifying them and eliminating steps. Challenge yourself and others to eliminate unproductive meetings.
Most importantly, make choices and prioritize. Don’t put the burden of choosing what’s more important on others. Work at the top of your job description and enable others to do so as well.
August 21, 2024
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