If your workday is continuously disrupted by the ‘ping’ of incoming messages and emails, a potential remedy is available: activating the silent mode. However, while this concept sounds appealing, it might not always be feasible. Certain jobs need immediate responses, making it impossible to completely disconnect.
Additionally, there’s the minor issue of ‘fomo’ – the anxiety of missing out – which makes many individuals nervous about silencing their gadgets.
An intermediary solution for those who don’t require constant connectivity is the concept of protected hours. There are various definitions of what protected hours entail. In this context, it refers to predetermined periods during the workday when a company or team agrees not to interrupt each other. The goal is to provide individuals with time for deep work and allow them to focus solely on a specific assignment without distractions.
An alternative interpretation of protected hours is what Dropbox refers to as “core collaboration hours”, which also involve a predetermined timeframe. However, in this instance, it’s the time allocated for tasks that usually require communication with others like video calls, meetings, and phone calls. This leaves the majority of the workday open for undisturbed work and other duties.
A plethora of time and motion studies reveal how chronic disruptions affect concentration and efficiency. They also hinder flow (a term used to describe being completely engrossed in a task in the workplace). Persistent digital distractions are particularly troublesome as they intensify mental stress.
When questioned about how much of their workday is wasted due to disturbances, individuals usually underestimate the duration significantly. However, the consensus estimate for the time spent checking and reacting to work emails is approximately two hours daily. Insistently checking emails adds an extra 21 minutes, and it appears that professionals are especially vigorous email examiners. They review their inboxes every 37 minutes, equating to an average of 15 checks for those working a nine-hour shift.
The vice-president for HR business partners teams at Dropbox, Caroline Nangle, states that ‘unnecessary meetings are one of the main hindrances to productivity’.
Estimating the amount of time consumed by texting and using in-office message platforms is more challenging. However, Slack approximates its users spend roughly 90 minutes each day actively utilising its service.
Drawing a line between personal and professional usage of our smartphones can be perplexing, thus leaving us to approximately general statistics. A study procured by Dexatel, a cloud communications firm based in Estonia, revealed that over 80% of people leave their notification settings on to receive text messages, whereas 35% say that they are perpetually reachable through SMS. Texting is the biggest utilised feature on smartphones, with people spending an average of 46 minutes a day scouring their phones for new messages.
The advent of hybrid and remote work modes has accelerated the speed of digital conversation. This has prompted companies, like Dropbox which pursues a digital-first work policy, to implement plans to help employees effectively deal with interruption surplus.
Caroline Nangle, Vice-president for HR business partners teams at Dropbox, acknowledges that undirected propensities and unrestricted flexibility of virtual operations can lead to challenges in delineating boundaries and designating time for intensive focus. She identifies that constant alerts and ubiquitous notifications, resulting from the over-reliance on digital tools and chatting applications, adds to the ‘noise’ of modern work and distracting ‘unnecessary meetings’ are a major barrier to productivity.
To counter this, she highlights the system adopted by Dropbox, titled “core collaboration hours”. This system structures the employees’ time into blocks of four hours allocated for ‘real-time collaborative’ work, with the flexibility to adapt this according to different geographical time zones. Outside these, the employees are given the freedom to lay out their own work schedule and allocate time for ‘individual-focused’ work.
She asserts that the shift from ‘all-day syncs’ (real-time communication) to ‘async by default’ (communication at own pace) thinking, has lent a more effective structure to the workday. In practice, it has resulted in around 70% of Dropbox’s employees confessing to now embracing irregular workdays for more fluid schedules.
Despite the promising results of the shift, Nangle highlights a caveat: the burgeoning of an async culture is contingent on having the appropriate technological infrastructure.
Chat applications utilised in workplaces have positively impacted team collaboration; however, they also rank among the major detractors of productivity globally. A study spearheaded by Economist Impact and sponsored by Dropbox recently demonstrated that half of the time expended by knowledge workers on these chat messages is essentially squandered every single day.
Therefore, it’s crucial for companies to carefully evaluate the variety of tools available, with the aim of maximising their employees’ efficiency. Merely increasing technological resources doesn’t always equate to improved technology. Rather, what workers really require are tools capable of streamlining their workflow, automating mundane tasks, and consolidating all of their content into a single, easily searchable location.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is poised to become a gamechanger in this area. Its capability to search and succinctly summarise content, not only in textual formats but also in imagery and video will equip employees with the information they need swiftly. Moreover, AI’s capacity to alleviate the tediousness of manual searches, organisation and execution of routine tasks will help individuals circumvent the inconveniences often associated with remote working.