We've just finished a busy Monday here at the Mercury Underground Mines and a goodly number of us sat back in the latter part of the evening and wondered what had happened to the day?
Well, it seems we aren't alone when it comes down to getting regular work done while constantly being interrupted with irregular work ... or stuff that came along that we weren't expecting.
Of course that's what usually happens at news desks. That can be the fun part of the job.
But my eyeballs perked up last week as I read a short item in another newspaper about Intel, the computer folks, who did something unusual in an attempt to keep their engineers and managers focused on specific tasks.
What that company did was assign 300 of their engineers and managers to four hours of quiet time every Tuesday. That meant no phone calls, no e-mails to send or accept, no twitters in or out, no texting and so on.
They were simply giving their crew of thinkers some time to think. They were allocating them four hours in which they could plot and plan and develop ideas without having to communicate with an annoying outside world.
The company didn't come up with the plan out of the blue. They had studied the routines of these engineers and managers for some time and discovered that on average, they were being interrupted about every three minutes. They weren't being allowed to focus on the task at hand for more than three minutes before they were being waylaid by phone calls, texts, incoming twitters or plain old face-to-face discussions. A lot of it, they determined, was just dumb stuff. They were led astray by reading silliness on websites or text messages that had nothing, or very little, to do with their jobs.
Intel started the new Tuesday rule sometime last December and I don't know how the experiment turned out. Maybe some engineers used a good portion of their thinky time to have a nap. I've heard that a 20 minute power nap can be a good thing, especially for those who are deployed for their brain rather than their brawn. Come to think of it, I would think those deployed on the physical front might benefit from a 20 minute time out too. I feel pretty sure though that those thinky people appreciated the time to focus.
All we have to do is glance around any typical office or work site on any given day and we'll see all kinds of regular diversions and digressions going on. Cellphone calls or texts having to be responded to immediately, but not really. The pace of industry is no faster since we've lost the land line telephones in favour of those fancy phones with no wires. Nothing is getting done more quickly because of the newer technology, we're just getting our information more quickly. Our work time response is about the same as it ever was. So that tells me we're getting more information fired our way, but alas, most of it is useless.
But then some might find it quite compelling to learn that they are the first kids on the block to learn that Lindsay Lohan has just been released from a rehab facility, or a Maple Leafs coach just got fired.
Unless you work for The Enquirer, that kind of information does nothing to advance your work day, let alone your social life ... unless you have a date lined up with Lindsay, and I don't think you do.
So get back to work. And why are you wasting your time reading this drivel? I mean, c'mon man!
If you'd like to text Park ... good luck. He's busy and besides he's still trying to figure out how those phones with wires work. E-mail him at normpark@estevanmercury.ca He has no quiet thinky time assigned.
