Telecommuting * By Robert Moskowitz
A Method To Help You Turn Apparent Productivity Increases Derived From Telecommuting Into Realized Value
Over the past two or three decades of telecommuting and the relatively steady growth we've enjoyed in the number of telecommuters, one characteristic that has emerged with very little dissension or disagreement is that telecommuting generally produces significant productivity increases.
And that stands to reason, because if you shave from 20 minutes to two hours of travel right off the top of a person's workday, it doesn't take an efficiency expert to guess that person might accomplish more work with some of that newly available time. And it doesn't take a rocket scientist to suspect that the telecommuter might have a little more energy and enthusiasm for the job on those shorter-travel or no-travel days, and therefore might accomplish a little more than usual even if he or she doesn't actually work longer hours.
In fact, study after study bears out this analysis. Telecommuters are not only more enthusiastic, energetic, and productive, but they are also more loyal and less prone to leave their current organization for other jobs. What's more, they are far less expensive to support as employees, if only in terms of such easily measured tangibles as the far fewer sick days and personal days they typically take off from work.
Let's start thinking from the fairly solid assumption that telecommuters are more productive. It's easy enough to put that fact on the table and stop right there. But just as a larger net worth doesn't help your standard of living if all your assets are tied up in real estate or collectibles you cannot sell for spending cash, so it is that just being more productive doesn't help your organization do a better job if you don't put the extra time and energy made available by your greater productivity toward something tangible and useful. Another analogy would be a high-powered automobile that doesn't accelerate as quickly as it could because the tires spin and shriek instead of grabbing the road and transferring all that horsepower into action.
We're talking about the difference between abstract or apparent productivity and realized productivity, where you get far less wheel spin and a lot more tangible results.
The twin keys to turning apparent productivity into realized productivity, of course, are first knowing what parts of your work produce the most value, and second concentrating on doing more of that most valuable work.
It sounds easy. But if it were, we'd all have been doing it for years, and there wouldn't be any need to discuss it in this space.
Actually, the real difficulty of concentrating on doing more of your most valuable work lies not in concentrating on it, but in developing the kinds of enabling thought processes and habits that can make efforts to increase your "realized productivity" almost second nature. Here's a method that might help you turn apparent productivity increases derived from telecommuting into realized value.
You can start by identifying your most valuable business and career goals, with the ultimate idea of keeping your efforts directed toward at least one of them as much as possible.
Nearly every opportunity to work toward one of these goals is far more important than working toward a lesser goal. So just putting more of your time toward one of your more important business and career goals will automatically multiply your overall effectiveness. In particular, if you put a large portion of the extra time and energy you realize through telecommuting toward one of these goals, you automatically convert that apparent productivity improvement into reality.
To identify these important business and career goals, go over your job description. If you don't have one, develop one with your manager, your colleagues and co-workers, and with others whose opinion you trust and respect.
Your job description will tell you what you're supposed to be achieving. If it doesn't, it will at least list what you're supposed to be doing, and that will provide strong hints about which goals are most important.
You don't need detailed plans for every task that's within your job description, but you do need some plans. And you're far better off with solid plans for your most important work.
For example, if you're asked to organize an important meeting that brings together experts from great distances to discuss and perhaps finalize a crucial decision, you'll want a plan that will help you anticipate every detail and provide a facilitative environment for the discussion. You could probably organize the meeting without a plan. But why take a chance on overlooking something important? And why waste all that mental energy on re-thinking your whole effort many times just to make sure you haven't made a mistake?
With a solid plan, you'll know what steps to take. You'll know the best order in which to take them. And you'll feel confident at every step of the implementation that you're on target and on schedule to deliver a satisfactory result.
There's an added benefit, too: Your plan gives you a long list of details to complete--details you can attend to in a few spare minutes between other projects, details you can carry with you and tackle whenever you have some unanticipated downtime, details you can complete without a lot of high-level thinking and worrying.
For example, if your plan calls for you to arrange for limousines to carry the experts from the airport to the meeting venue, you can make that call between finishing one larger task and starting another, or even while you're stuck in traffic driving to your division manager's office to see her on an entirely separate matter.
Because your plans to accomplish your most important work give you a list of highly specific, relatively small tasks and actions to do, you can more easily work toward one of your most important business and career goals, even when other items on your agenda seem to demand your time and energy.
For example, when you hang up after a telephone call or complete a memo or project report, you might have the urge to clean up your desk, do some filing, or return a call on the basis of a message that happens to catch your eye. Ordinarily, that's exactly what you would do. But when you have a plan guiding you toward one of your most important business and career goals, you have the option of consulting that plan and starting a task that instead leads you closer to one of your most important objectives. With practice, that's exactly what you will do. And your results will skyrocket accordingly.
By this simple change in the stream of activities in which you participate, you begin to apply more of the time you save through telecommuting toward one of your important business and career goals on one hand, and withhold it from one of your less important ones.
In most cases, this approach can translate a great deal of the apparent productivity increase from telecommuting into realized productivity you can point to: deliverables, performance, and results.
In practice, concentrating your efforts this way on tasks more closely related to your most important goals comes down to a matter of choice. The most common choices you make about work can easily be expressed as: "What am I going to do next?"
You naturally make these kinds of choices many times a day--whenever you finish a project, hang up the telephone, start or stop a chain of thought, or even pause in the midst of a task, you have the option of doing something else. Your ability to convert the productivity increase that telecommuting gives you into reality depends largely on how well you make these choices.
Fortunately, your choices needn't be perfect. Even the best baseball batter gets a hit only 30-35% of the times he steps up to the plate. If you do that well--make just one-third of your daily choices in favor of working toward one of your most important business and career goals--you'll notice a significant increase in your bottom line results.
The enabling thought processes and habits I mentioned a few minutes ago are those that help you make the best use of your telecommuting days, if not all the time you spend at work.
If you pay attention, you'll be surprised to notice how often one of these daily choices presents itself. You can begin by mentally reviewing your activities so far today. How many times did you choose what to do next? How well did you make these choices? That is, toward what goal did each activity lead you, and how much of your total time and energy did you apply to one or more of the most important goals you're trying to achieve?
To be specific, what were the goals you actively pursued between breakfast and lunch today? During the afternoon? After dinner? Were there other, more important goals you could have pursued instead? How much of your morning did you put toward one or more of your most important goals?
Did these goals represent the best use of your time and energy? If not, what else could you have worked on that would have brought you a step or two closer to some more important results?
As you can see, the steps involved in concentrating your efforts on tasks that bring you closer to one of your most important business and career goals are not particularly complex or difficult. They're simply outside the mainstream of habits most people develop and acquire during a lifetime of work. So it takes a conscious effort to practice them enough to make them second nature.
By first cultivating the habit of watching what you do, you'll almost instantly increase your level of results and the amount of satisfaction you can generate in a day. After a few weeks or months of trying to direct as many of your efforts as possible toward one of your most important goals, you'll get in the habit of automatically considering your options and picking a task that leads you in a direction you really want to go.
With practice, it becomes possible to keep forging and revamping your telecommuting days--and even the days you spend in your office--to better pursue your most important goals and thus maximize your realized productivity.
But don't get lulled into thinking that rigid rules should be enforced here. It's not the children's game of Rock-Paper-Scissors where Rock always beats Scissors but always loses to Paper.
It's too easy to use the quest for realizing more productivity gains from telecommuting as an excuse for neglecting people or ignoring important emotional and social aspects of their work and their family life. The idea of pursuing your most important goals seems to demand some kind of objective accounting procedures to keep track of your options and to put them in rank order. But it would be absurd to begin trying to compare and to rank such disparate demands as:
your kids
a consuming interest in a new topic
a broken car
an impending deadline at work
They all demand your attention, each in a different way, and for a different set of reasons. No cold, dry logic can provide a meaningful comparison or ranking methodology.
The reality is that at any given moment, your options regarding where to put the extra time, energy, and productivity that's available because you're telecommuting form a dazzling array of the practical and the fantastic, the must-do and the should-do, the interesting and the deadly dull.
One good way to make these choices a bit more practical--in addition to knowing which of your goals are most important, and therefore which of the tasks you can do right now should command your first attention--is to set time limits. That is, you might ordain that between 9 am and noon, and then between 2 and 4 pm you're going to focus only on business and career goals. Within this time period, you simply don't attend to your car, your kids, your house, or anything else (except, of course, for legitimate emergencies). Now choosing become a little simpler, at least during those "core" hours of work.
You can do the same for the flip side of your life: You can decide that from whenever you wake up until 9 am, your family is your most important priority. So now it becomes a little easier to let your boss leave a message on the answering machine while you tie the laces on Johnny's shoes and pack his lunch for school.
Copyright © 1997 Robert Moskowitz. All rights reserved.