“Quiet Time” pilot has launched!

posted by Nathan Zeldes on August 31, 2007

Our faithful readers will recall my promise to share our progress on piloting “Next Generation solutions” to the Information Overload problem, ones that go beyond training people to adopt voluntary behavior change. Well – the first pilot is underway! One of our engineering groups has launched this week a six-month pilot combining two work culture changes that give people more “thinking time” – contiguous chunks of a few hours at a time when they will not be interrupted, and will thus be able to focus on work that requires concentration and thought.

The problem we’re attacking here is that of constant interruptions (remember the finding of Prof. Mark at al from UC Irvine, that a knowledge worker can expect on average to do three minutes of work on any one task before being interrupted!)

The pilot group – 300 engineers and managers, located in two US sites – will adopt a “Quiet Time” agreement. Every Tuesday morning they will all set their email and IM clients to “offline”, forward their phones to voice mail, decline all meetings, and isolate themselves from “visitors” by putting up a “Do not disturb” sign at their doorway. Thus, for half a day each week they will have the ability to focus on the “thinking work” that researchers have shown is critical to creativity, innovation, and to faster, better production of output (see our white paper for the data).

The group will also address the addictive 24x7 email checking-and-response cycle which contributes to the interruption flow. After all, with an effective expectation of a response to any email within minutes, it would be impossible to meet the “Quiet Time” goal. Therefore, the management of this group has changed the expectation for email reply to 24 hours (all week long, not just on Tuesdays); this will allow participants to check email once or twice a day at predefined times and to turn off the distracting incoming email alerts.

Of course, all this is tricky stuff. These people are doing a critical job as a team, and messing with their communications culture is not something we do lightly. There will certainly be permitted exceptions, and the pilot is being monitored closely to find out what they are and how to optimize the methodology for best effect. We are also eager to see whether all this will lead to beneficial changes in the way communications are balanced between email, IM, phone and Face to Face interactions. I will share more as we make progress.

Our next pilot, which we plan to launch in a month, will address the problem of “emailing across the aisle instead of talking to one’s coworkers” – stay tuned!

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tagged: distractions, email, infoglut, infomania, information overload, interruptions, quiettime