Microsoft research estimates that knowledge workers spend 60% of their time in meetings, answering emails, or chatting. They call this growing phenomenon digital debt. Is it really new and what can we do about it?
As a person working in a professional capacity as a software development manager in a large company, I’m deeply interested in productivity and work-life balance. I was on a call with a friend at another company recently and they mentioned that they were currently taking a “paid time off” (PTO) day, and that they often find themselves taking PTO days to get work done. I laughed and admitted to practicing the same tactic for years. This wasn’t the first time a friend or colleague in the software sector admitted to such an obvious, “break glass in case of overload” use of paid time off. At face value, it is indeed absurd.
Anyone familiar with the work of productivity thinkers Steven Covey, or more recently, Cal Newport and Daniel Goleman, will be familiar with the concept of “focus days” or “deep work” vs. “shallow work” or “busy work.” Some organizations enshrine the concept of Deep Work in a weekly planning or “focus day” for some or all employees engaged in strategy in planning. Most organizations have a serious deficit of deep work productivity due to a phenomenon Microsoft’s productivity research team calls, “Digital Debt.”
Having to take days off to work in order to free ourselves of meetings, emails, chat messages, phone calls and various bureaucratic rituals points to potential dysfunction in personal time management, our ability to manage expectations with colleagues, or cultural norms. Any professional should have the latitude to schedule and communicate the need for a personal focus or planning day, so why don’t we? I couldn’t help but ruminate on my colleagues’ comments over the years and how I also continued to struggle with the same problem, constantly teetering on the verge of burnout.
A 2014 study by U.S. Travel Association found that forty percent of American workers will leave paid vacation days unused. The top reasons reported are: dread of returning from a vacation to piles of work, the belief that colleagues will be unable to step in and do their job for them while they’re gone, and the fear of being perceived as replaceable if they do.
Beyond these common personal narratives, there is an interesting set of interrelated dynamics at play. An effective, well-managed team is typically responsible for a finite number of responsibilities and processes to maintain operational continuity. If the team doesn’t have adequate depth and redundancy to allow for unexpected sickness or bereavement it represents an operational liability to the company that needs to be addressed with team cross-training or even a new hire. A good manager will identify that as a single point of failure and coordinate team cross-training and good documentation in that domain in case an emergency arises.
Cross training is a win-win for all. It’s an extremely common pattern on teams for an individual to take on a set of tasks and master them in order to gain a sense of value to the team while their colleagues reinforce this behavior because they are reluctant to have additional responsibilities added to their plate. What inevitably happens in those cases is this specialization becomes a constraint to their growth, promotion and makes it difficult to relax and take a vacation.
This scarcity-based narrative is nothing new. It exists in almost every profession. Individual contributors are often like entrepreneurs that start small sole proprietorships, doing everything themselves, but soon find themselves unable to scale and to advance to the next level because they are unable to recruit and establish trust relationships with employees, train them, and establish reliable systems of redundancy that afford them the ability to shift focus away from those core responsibilities.
Managers are usually promising individual contributors who get promoted. It’s an all too common pattern in companies to limit promotion potential outside of the management track. Often these individuals lack a management skill set that is completely distinct from the mastery of domain knowledge they acquired in their journey as an individual contributor. In a technical profession, it’s important for a manager to have reasonable mastery in the domain of knowledge they manage, but in reality, it’s not essential. A highly effective manager could apply many of the same principles in a restaurant or manufacturing facility that they would in a software development team.
This brings us to our primary thesis, that teams are increasingly less productive because of a convergence of trends in the modern digital workspace: various “agile” organizational structures tend towards flat, decentralized and self-organized groups that lack clear processes and hierarchy of information flow. Anarchic governance arguably can work well at a small team level if the members are motivated, but diminishes in efficiency at scale or when cross-team coordination is required to take on large projects. Managers are in a constant balancing act of encouraging often misunderstood and confusing agile or flat-management principles while attempting to establish boundaries of information flow with clarity, reasonable “vision” and transparency over a wide range of digital communication tools. Departments struggle to self-organize, self-direct project objectives, create informal arrangements and inter-departmental processes. This creates a massive amount of digital information overhead via chat, email and virtual meetings. This overhead contributes to burnout and stifles productivity.
A key role of a manager is to handle as much of this cognitive load as possible on behalf of the people they support: to communicate with a wide range of direct reports, stakeholders and superiors, gather information, facilitate interpersonal guidance and track and manage the progress of projects and people. An individual is not promoted to management unless they’ve demonstrated proficient time management, delegation and interpersonal communication skills. The problem in technical fields is this middle management job description is combined with advanced problem solving, planning and analysis. Problems inevitably arise when the individual is unable to balance these two very different styles of work. This is why middle managers in large companies often report low job satisfaction, high levels of stress, burnout and turnover. They are getting up early and working nights and weekends to analyze, plan and organize before they are bombarded with the distractions of meetings, interpersonal coordination and resource management. They answer to everyone who reports to them, everyone they report to, and often anyone else who needs information about the systems or business units they manage.
However, it turns out that this problem is not unique to management; it’s pervasive in the knowledge worker sector. A recent report from Microsoft analyzed a massive data set of usage statistics by corporate customers who supposedly use Microsoft Office Solutions exclusively for knowledge work, meetings, chat and communication.
- 57% of the average employee’s time is spent in meetings, answering emails, and in chat
- 43% is spent creating documents, spreadsheets, and presentations
- The heaviest meeting users spend 7.5 hours a week in meetings
- The heaviest email users spend 8.8 hours a week on email
At first blush, these are not surprising statistics for a digital workspace. These percentages are only counting the time in Microsoft apps, and don’t include other activity via phone, face-to-face meetings or other apps Microsoft is unaware of. It doesn’t include non-productive activities. Those numbers seem very conservative in comparison to the anecdotal reports from various people I’ve spoken to who are corporate knowledge workers, many of whom report spending 5-8 hours per day in virtual meetings. Cal Newport calls this the “digital coordination overhead tax.” Microsoft calls it, “Digital Debt.” Whatever you want to call it, it’s stifling productivity. It’s not that meetings, emails and chat are inherently non-productive activities, it’s that without a proper coordinated effort by managers to address the problem head-on, establish policies and provide guidance to reduce the frequency and distribution of that distracting overhead, both the quality and quantity of productive work suffers and leads to employee burnout. By default, many workers are obviously not self-organizing uninterrupted “focus” blocks to allow deep analysis to happen unless they are encouraged to. It’s literally the opposite of the type of work environments that have historically fostered innovation and creativity. It’s one of the reasons small startups can innovate — they’re not big enough for their staff to be buried in a deluge of digital debt overhead.
Taking a day off to work may be mistaken as a classic symptom of “workaholism” but it’s really more of a practical tactic to overcome this digital overhead tax in a work environment or team culture that doesn’t otherwise address it. It has multiple factors:
In an “always available” work culture, when an employee is not responsive, it may be perceived negatively.
There are tremendous demands on all employees, but particularly managers and above to be available to take meetings at a moment’s notice and be responsive to a large volume of information in real time. This makes it nearly impossible to set aside several hours of uninterrupted time to achieve a state of deep focus and sustain it long enough to reach a well developed conclusion. Cal Newport accurately declared that “deep work” is the superpower of the knowledge worker age. Cal Newport doesn’t address the needs of managers. Workers in the outlier time zones have an edge on their counterparts, as they have several hours at the beginning or end of their work day when the majority of the company is unavailable.
- Proactively communicate to teams and stakeholders when you are busy and need to block off time. Provide alternate contacts for escalation in the same way you would when out of office.
- Encourage your colleagues to do the same.
- Attempt to coordinate predictable overlapping schedules where team and cross-team meetings can happen so focus time is coordinated
- If you manage a team, propose a planning/focus day, or half day.
- Propose weekly or bi-weekly department-wide focus/planning days.
Managers often unknowingly set the wrong example
Middle managers often set the tone for high availability. Having been on both sides of this many times, there are scenarios where an important meeting or discussion is underway, and a manager or support agent in a mission-critical situation needs information in real time. When a manager is constantly interrupting their staff with questions or scheduling meetings, it sets the tone for their teams to do the same with their colleagues. A manager usually encourages direct reports to inform them when there’s an issue, so they can solve it before it escalates, in essence, reinforcing the team to constantly interrupt them. When any member of a team is particularly overactive in synchronous communication like chat or video calls it disrupts the productivity of the entire team.
Agile Is a Five Letter Word
And to most engineers, that’s all it is.
From the perspective of software development, the field from which The Agile Manifesto was birthed before it was reified by a generation of professional evangelists and consultants, Continuous Integration & Continuous Delivery using rapidly evolving cloud architectures and infrastructure as code is a very real evolving engineering science. How a team or company applies those technologies varies by use case. The solutions that arise from short sprint iterations by teams need to be robust, scalable and secure. These requirements are mission critical and require deep work and planning to establish standards and practices for sanity and interoperability. Agile is widely used five letter adverb that is not a significant consideration to most of the engineers making CI/CD work for your product because it’s too simplistic or nebulous to be meaningful. Software engineering has been doing some variation of this for at least fifty years, and if you include manufacturing and the applied sciences, the same so called “Agile/SCRUM” patterns of Kanban, iterative sprint development and refinement can be traced back through Toyota, US Automotive, and Bell Laboratories for over a century. You could even say it’s just a variation of scientific empiricism tracing back through John Dewey, Francis Bacon and beyond. You have a list of requirements that you experimentally iterate on toward milestones. Give your engineers the cognitive space to get them done.
There’s An Imbalance Of Producers vs. Administrators & Managers
Leadership and product management can often generate new ideas and proposals for discussion, estimation and analysis far faster than producing teams can reasonably evaluate their viability. Usually senior management of a group of domain experts (like a software development team or data science department) is equipped to manage most of that cognitive load and provide measured guidance on approximate time and cost, but it takes time and deep analysis to reach any reasonable level of confidence in estimation. They can’t do that if their schedules are peppered with meetings. Product management spends a significant part of their work week interfacing with stakeholders and are often put in the hot seat to answer questions or provide details, estimates and timelines they can’t reasonably speak to without conferring with subject matter experts or their teams. I know all too well from my own experience in both engineering and product management, that there is tremendous pressure to provide affirmative and ambitious promises to executives and stakeholders. There’s a fear of looking weak or incompetent to say, “I don’t know. I can discuss with our teams and provide you and estimate as soon as possible,” even when that’s always the prudent answer.
There’s A Lack Of Formal Or Informal Hierarchical Etiquette
Modern “flat management” or “agile” team dynamics often miss the crucial advantages of a well organized shallow hierarchy. Overly rigid hierarchies can and have gone terribly wrong when there’s bad information flow or over-reliance on waterfall style planning, but in a highly functional and well trained chain of command, waterfall department planning and team-level agile workflow are compatible. As a result, most large corporations are engaged in what’s been widely described, albeit tongue-in-cheek as some variation of “agilefall.” Labels aside, good project management requires great and well-organized personal communication.
It’s An American Tradition
The cultural norm that is rewarded in the corporate culture of the United States is conspicuous hard work. Max Weber theorized one eurocentric origin story of this phenomenon over a century ago. Even in comparison to Japan’s “Karoshi” (death by overwork) and China’s recent “996” trends, the average US employee works more than both their Chinese and Japanese counterparts, and ranks among the top ten countries globally in hours worked annually. By contrast, in highly developed European countries, it’s typically considered a shortcoming of time and interpersonal management skills to not complete your work within the designated work schedule.
The Right Processes, Not More Processes
In an attempt to make outcomes more predictable and establish measured governance of cost and risk, bureaucratic processes are established, usually as a solution arising from a retrospective or post-mortem analysis of an operational issue. Too rarely are the processes re-evaluated for operational or productivity cost and impact. This is the genesis of bureaucracy. This problem is compounded by a fair number of what the late David Graeber called “Bullshit Jobs,” or positions that are purely bureaucratic, add questionable value or don’t really require anywhere near a 40 hour work week of real work, leaving both the employees and their managers conspiring to look productive. Graeber’s humorous book abounds with testimonials from individuals who, out of guilt, or fear of being “found out” and terminated, go to great lengths to attend meetings, send emails, look busy and pester colleagues with the trivial administrative red tape they manage, often at the expense of the efficiency of high performing specialists, experts and producers.
There’s Always Operational Inefficiency
Stories abound of companies where large portions of their “operations” workforce was evaluated for redundancy, restructured or eliminated and productivity was maintained or even increased by simply reducing the complexities of coordinating headcount and digital debt overhead. A highly successful entrepreneur friend once proffered a rather cutthroat tactic for maximizing company efficiency from his days of managing companies after leveraged buyouts… “Think of a disaster scenario where you had to pick a skeleton crew of essential workers that the business couldn’t function without, then start slowly peeling the onion toward that core with rounds of layoffs. Once you hit the operational strain point, hire slow and fire fast so you don’t have dead weight.” It’s precisely this type of brutal “adapt or die” management mentality from the heyday of leveraged corporate buyouts that has probably contributed to the widespread workaholic phenomenon as a rational reaction to insecurity. It’s a far cry from the Big Blue IBM era of “lifetime service with pensions” or Japan’s culture of “lifetime security” during their growth period in 60s-80s that ultimately turned out to be an unsustainable export command cartel bureaucracy disguised as a “free-market miracle” that collapsed when the United States stopped absorbing its export surplus, its central bank was infiltrated by foreign financial interests and dismantled the unique keiretsu apparatus.
Reducing Digital Debt & Overhead Fosters Innovation
In conclusion, employees are usually granted more paid time off than they can ever take advantage of while meeting the demands of their teams’ deadlines and performance objectives. It’s ultimately easier to take a day off to save face, avoid the endless barrage of interruptions and get caught up on work that requires a different mindset, one that may involve going for a walk to reflect on a problem, changing locations, staring into space, meditating, procrastinating, or whatever it takes to achieve the elusive “deep focus” state for three or four uninterrupted hours.
As the cost and impact of this “digital debt” becomes more widely recognized, corporate management teams can take proactive measures to coordinate department-wide or team-wide guidance on “focus days” or “focus time blocking” with accountability so that organizations have a shared understanding and shorthand terminology that can help it overcome burnout, improve internal processes, and foster innovative productivity.