How to Get More Work Done – Leave the Office

How to Get More Work Done – This post is inspired by Jason Fried’s Ted Talk titled – “Why work doesn’t happen at work” - Fried.

In his talk, Fried equates work to sleep.  He says that you never really go to sleep.  There are five stages of sleep.  To get to the deeper stages of sleep (the ones that cause great rest), you must go through the earlier steps.  However, if you wake up or are distracted during the earlier phases of sleep, then you have to start all over.

How to Get More Work Done

Work is the same way.  The work day in the office includes small chunks of time that do not allow for any real thinking or real productivity to get done.  While we are in the office, we are constantly distracted by coworkers, bosses, lunch and everything that can and will get in the way.

Real work does not get done in the office.  It gets done at specific times or places.

If you ask a person how they get stuff done, they will tell you -
- I go to the porch.
- I work on the weekends.
- Etc.

Here is the link to Fried’s Ted Talk – How to Get More Work Done

They do not say that they go to the office.

How to Get More Work Done – Fried suggests three radical tactics that will lead to more productivity –

Periods of No Talking - Setting an office rule where there is no talking in the office for an entire afternoon will allow the employees to focus on their work for a long period of time.  This will be the single biggest contributor to a successful work environment.

Switching from Active Communication to Passive Communication - A meeting is an active form of communication and requires people to be held hostage to get the work done.  However, if work gets done through email, Instant Messenger or collaborative software, then people can chose when they should be doing the work.  Even though these tools are distractions, the difference is that people get to chose when they take these distractions.

Just Cancel Meetings - You will find that meetings are not productive and, even worse, they simply lead to more meetings.  Cancel meetings and you will find out that productivity will skyrocket in your organization.

The main take away for me is that we have to continue to challenge conventional thinking if we want to innovate our work and innovate our World.

Here is a little bit more about Fried taken from his Ted author profile -

“Jason Fried is the co-founder and president of 37signals, a Chicago-based company that builds web-based productivity tools that, in their words, “do less than the competition — intentionally.” 37signals’ simple but powerful collaboration tools include Basecamp, Highrise, Backpack, Campfire, Ta-da List, and Writeboard. 37signals also developed and open-sourced the Ruby on Rails programming framework.”