Juliet Funt’s keynote at IMEX America in Las Vegas was extremely funny, but her message was very serious. The CEO of WhiteSpace at Work, a productivity consultancy, hilariously summed up a typical day for a meeting planner, responding to one emergency after another with no time for a bathroom break. But while the audience recognized their own experiences in her anecdotes, she finished her story by asking, “Is this how we design the finest events in the world? Is this how we are going to be creative?” She went on to say, “When talented people don’t have time to think, all businesses suffer.”
Funt explained that pausing to think can be a source of power, and by losing those moments of introspection, we are losing opportunities to have ideas and to question the status quo.
Funt added that 80 percent of corporations say their people are overwhelmed with information and activity. Research by her consultancy found that her clients’ employees felt that 32 percent of the time they spent in meetings was wasted. If those employees were in manufacturing, they would never tolerate that kind of waste, so why is it tolerated in other kinds of work? One of the most telling responses from WhiteSpace surveys was when employees were asked how many days in a five-day week they checked email after eight o’clock at night. Many of the respondents wrote in “seven.”
So, how do we stop being too busy to think and how will “white space” help?
First of all, what is white space?
According to Funt, some people are so conditioned to work being activity that they think white space is not work.
What White Space Is Not
It’s not meditation; that’s a disciplinary experience for the mind.
It’s not daydreaming or letting your mind wander; that’s when you lose focus.
It’s not mindfulness; that is mental state focused on the present.
What White Space Is
White space is a strategic pause between activities to think the unthunk thought. It is a time for reflection, for strategizing, for thinking about better ways to do what you do.
Funt offered a two-step plan to “decrapify” your workflow to make time for white space.
First, become conscious of the four thieves of productivity. Ironically they are all assets.
1. Drive can become overdrive.
2. Excellence can become perfectionism.
3. Information becomes information overload.
4. Activity becomes frenzy.
The way to defeat these thieves is to ask the following questions:
1. Is there project I can let go of? Do I need to be the lead on everything? (Drive)
2. What is good enough? (Excellence)
3. What do I really need to know to move forward on this? (Information)
4. Does this deserve my attention? (Activity)
Funt says productivity thieves are tied to personality; she gives the example of spending 20 minutes trying to figure out how to insert a bullet point into a report but then realizing she could add a dash instead and no one would die.
Funt says productivity thieves are tied to personality; she gives the example of spending 20 minutes trying to figure out how to insert a bullet point into a report but then realizing she could add a dash instead and no one would die.
Email Is the Voldemort of Busy Work
According to Funt, 204 million emails are sent every minute in America. While some might think that is too many, Funt thinks the biggest problem is not the quantity, but the expectation of an immediate response. She says, “It’s not digital ping-pong!”
To avoid turning emailing into a competitive sport, she counsels clients to use email codes to indicate the urgency of the request. This frees up the recipient to spend time actually thinking about an answer, instead of just firing off of a response.
Here are her codes, to be used in the subject line:
NYR: I need your response.
NYRT: I need your response today.
NYRTQ: I need your response quick.
NYR-NBD: I need your response next business day. Not Saturday or Sunday or at 11 p.m. on a Tuesday.
For people who say they are too busy to implement changes to cut down on the busywork, Funt ended her talk with an adage to inspire them to find the time to think again. She asked, “When is the best time to plant a tree? Answer: Twenty years ago. When is the second best time? Answer: Now.”
WhiteSpace at Work offers three free lessons for people interested in creating more white space. To sign up, go to Whitespacetrial.com.
