“Quiet Time” on track – “No Email Day” is next!
posted by Nathan Zeldes on October 01, 2007
A month ago I reported the http://blogs.intel.com/it/2007/08/quiettimepilothaslaunched.php our attempt to push back on the problem of incessant distractions by assigning Tuesday mornings to uninterrupted work in full “offline” mode.
We are watching the pilot closely, and although our next formal survey will not go out until a month from today, we are seeing encouraging responses so far. Many of the engineers are happy about the newfound thinking time, and are protecting it by pushing back on interrupters during the Tuesday AM slot. Not unexpectedly there are also some who complain that this isolation prevents them from getting answers to urgent questions during that morning… we are assuming the benefit outweighs this cost, and are waiting for the mid- and post-survey to tell us whether this is correct.
And this week, we launch the remaining pilot – some 150 engineers will start applying “No Email Day”, a.k.a. “Zero Email Friday”!
Actually this is a misnomer, since email is not forbidden on the Friday; the idea is to solve the problem articulated by Intel CEO Paul Otellini in a recent interview in Financial Times, where he criticizes “the fact that engineers two cubicles apart send an e-mail rather than get up and talk. The whole nature of sitting down and hashing out ideas and collaborating is a bit stymied by the construct of the cubicles”. While other projects explore changes to the cubicle paradigm at Intel, we are testing a direct attack on the preference to use email rather than walk across the aisle and talk to one’s coworker.
In our new pilot, we encourage the members of an organic group to focus each Friday on direct conversation – face to face or by telephone – for interpersonal communication within the group. Processing email from other groups is OK; sending email within the group is also OK – when it is necessary. But as much as possible, they will try to walk across the aisle or pick up the phone. While this may seem a small thing, experiments done in other companies showed a great impact once people started exploring communication with the human voice. For example, PBD, a fulfillment services company in Atlanta, saw some amazing results – see here.
I’ll keep you posted on results as we learn them… wish us luck!
Comments (11)
tagged: distractions, email, infoglut, infomania, information overload, interruptions, quiettime, Zero Email Day
Comments
Oct 01 | Rafael Sidi said:
Nathan, best of luck in your project. Since I started reading your blog I commenced turning on my “out of the office” at least few hours during the day. and It’s great! Indeed as I don’t know how to change the text of the out of office message, i am saying that “I am in the office but not reading emails, if it’s something important call me.” I do hope that you’ll publish the results of your study.
Oct 02 | Scott Annan said:
Congrats - I think this is an awesome step and very forward thinking.
Computers 0 Humans 1
Oct 04 | Jim Grisanzio said:
hey, this sounds good. I think engineering groups need time away from distractions as well as group face to face time. I’m an American working from Sun’s office in Tokyo, so I have a lot of quiet time. :) What I suffer from, though, is the connection with California. I’m 16 hours ahead. Email is critical. So, when you increase your face to face time, make sure you consider the other guys in other geos that may be part of your teams as well. I can only imagine that your teams are as distributed as ours are.
Oct 05 | Tiffany said:
Interesting idea. I’m curious to see reports on how this turns out!
And if you haven’t seen it, an interesting initiative for those days you do have e-mail is http://five.sentenc.es/ - trying to make all e-mails 5 sentences or less!
Oct 05 | Susan RoAne said:
Three cheers for Intel!!! Forward thinking indeed… When I was brought on to speak about my book “How To Work A Room” for Intel’s international conference a few years ago, you were ahead of your time, and still are. Now more than ever, people need to foster their “face-to-face” interpersonal relationships in this ever-broadening digital world. My forthcoming book, “Face To Face”, explores this practice in depth. Intel, once again, proves it is a leader. Congratulations!
Oct 08 | Carl Schattke said:
I have found when my time is scheduled I have time for things and when it it not I don’t.
So given that I need think time and process time to do my tasks I schedule it out and if the interruptions come then I figure out what to ZBB, but when I commit the time to do the task gets scheduled so I KNOW I have a good shot at getting it done. It’s a matter of balancing the urgent with the important, the trickiest of all decisions on a daily basis. When I schedule my tasks - the schedule lets me know what’s at stake if I decide to do something else.
Oct 19 | Barry McAdam said:
quiet time has gone noisy, international coverage on the BBC!
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7049275.stm
Oct 30 | Laurie Buczek said:
Sharing a valid comment from Veni & Markovski “I think this is worth doing with a number of other organizations. One lesson you may learn from Bulgaria, Russia and other East European countries, by the way, is that e-mail doesn’t work - meetings are what matters most. Second comes a phone call. E-mail? May be, at some point, with some people, will do something :-)” http://blog.veni.com/?p=340
Nov 25 | Freddie Sirmans said:
Just browsing the internet. You have a very, very interesting blog. I’m sure I will visit again.
Jan 31 | S Laws said:
Hi Nathan, Just wondering if you will be posting the results from the survey. Would welcome any material you have on the effectiveness of “No e-mail days”
May 14 | B Nash said:
Three key points I learned which now allow me to manage my email and reduce the interruptions: 1) Do, Defer, Delete 2) Every action becomes a task “ctrl/shift/k” of low, medium, high priority [urgency vs. importance] 3) disable all email notifications and only check several times a day. My work is now more scheduled and organized, all work I perform no matter how small is auditable historically, and I’m not hovering over my inbox for the next great email! I’m a believer now of the no email fridays too!