Does technology help productivity?
Does technology make us more efficient?
A few days ago I was talking to my brother. He works at a small consulting company, and he is not very happy with his boss (and I’m being polite).
They are struggling to get new contracts, and they have reached the point where they have agreed to work a few hours less a week, and obviously get paid less. The funny thing is that his boss is always extremely busy. He works over 12 hours a day, and it is not strange to receive an email from him at 1 or 5 a.m. And of course he has a Blackberry so that he can read and send emails from anywhere at any time.
Last Monday my brother sent an email to his manager because he needed an executive decision from him. On Thursday he hadn’t had any feedback from him and time was running out, so he went to his desk and asked him: “Did you see the email I sent on Monday?”. My brother was shocked when he heard the answer: “No, I haven’t read any emails this week”. And not only that, but he had a chance to see how many unread emails he had in his Inbox: over 1200!!! He then remembered that his former manager was low-tech, and instead of using the latest mobile, he used to write phone number on paper serviettes. So that lead to the question:
Do our high-tech gadgets help us be more efficient?
Of course there is no easy answer for this. It is obvious that technology helps us everyday. It’s hard to imagine how people lived without email a few years ago. Imagine sending a letter to the other end of the world and wait for a reply. How long would it take? Two, three weeks? A month? And now we do it in a matter of minutes. Or the internet. I still remember having huge catalogues for electronic components (it wasn’t that long ago) and now you just go to the manufacturer’s webpage, download a pdf file and get all the information you need.
But technology has a dark side too. Well, the problem is not technology itself, but how we use it. We sometimes think that we are efficient because we have email access everywhere and our phone is synchronized with our laptop. It can be the case, but many times it isn’t. Just think of how much time you spend everyday reading junk emails. And I don’t mean just spam, but emails with jokes, fancy powerpoint presentations with the most beautiful places in the world… And work emails can steal your time too. How many work emails have you read to realize that it doesn’t have anything to do with you?
Think also about the interruptions. Have you ever been concentrated doing something and then you heard the ‘beep’ indicating a new email? It is so hard to resist the temptation to check your inbox! You check it thinking that you will get back to what you were doing in 2 minutes… and fifteen minutes later you go back to it to realized that you forgot what you did. So you have to spend five minutes checking the point you were at when you got distracted by the email. That doesn’t look very efficient, eh?
Our high-tech toys can help us be more efficient. But we are the key factor. So do yourself a favour and spend some time checking how you use your time. There are many things you can improve: check your emails only a few times a day, mute your mobile at certain times of the day, check your project communications plan to see if there is an excess of information being transmitted…
Tags: efficient, email, technology, time mangement