Cool Down (4 page)

Part of the reason that email seems to have such importance to us is due to the role that the emotional side of the brain has in interpreting these visual messages. Emotional signals travel faster through the brain's internal wiring than do logical signals. You can see this in some of the expressions we use, such as “You never get a second chance to make a first impression.” That's because first impressions are made by the emotional side of the brain milliseconds before a rational assessment is made. You'll get a feeling about someone or something within a fraction of a second (a concept that
Blink
author Malcom Gladwell calls “thin slicing”)
²
and this judgment will frame your actions and attitudes from that point on. Even retail purchase decisions work this way. Your choice of a brand of floor cleaner will be based on an emotional assessment of the TV commercial you saw, the color of the cleaner itself, possibly recommendations from friends, and your own level of trust in the brand or manufacturer. Seldom will it be based on your knowledge of its ingredients. The same goes for shoes, cars, and restaurant reservations. These purchase decisions are rationalized only after a preliminary emotional assessment has been made. Emotion is a powerful thing.

Since incoming email messages are handled in this visual-emotional way, the body has no choice but to give them top priority. All else seems secondary, and thus this new inbound information grabs the spotlight. Many would still say “Big deal. Email is part of work, so what does it matter I handle it first?” The answer to this is best presented through another analogy: the act of pumping gas.

When do most people stop at a gas station to fill up? In the polls that we've conducted, the majority of respondents say, “When the needle starts to point towards E,” in other words, when there is no other choice. A small number of respondents say, “When the price seems cheaper,” which reveals they have made a conscious decision based on price. A still smaller group might have identified a pattern in gas station pricing and say, “I go to fill up late on a Sunday night or late Wednesday evening,” indicating they have observed and noted a correlation between gas prices and station busy-ness.

Only a few say that they stop to fill up on their
way in
to work, since this is a very hurried time of day. Most people are already running late and cannot afford the five-minute delay unless absolutely necessary. However, they should rethink that. Gasoline is a liquid, and like all liquids, it responds to temperature variation. When gasoline sits overnight in the relative cool of subterranean tanks, it becomes a little thicker. For people who fill up their tanks in the early hours of the morning, the gas that pours through the pumps, one liter or gallon at a time, is a little more dense, which means they're getting more gasoline for the same price.
³
This is not a well-publicized feature of gasoline retailing.

This issue of early-morning viscosity applies equally well to human beings. Ninety percent of North American adults follow a circadian rhythm that orients them to morning activity. The remaining 10 percent of the population, who might refer to themselves as night owls, find their energy levels highest towards late evening. But for the majority of people, your customers and employees included, whether they feel chipper and energetic or not, the best time of the day for them is between 8:30 a.m. and 10:30 a.m., as daylight, caffeine, and the body's natural rhythms move towards the single alertness-and-energy apex of the day. This means that the
value
of the hours between 8:30 a.m. and 10:30 a.m. in terms of creativity, productivity, and mental traction, for nine out of 10 people, is far more than just the actual 120 minutes of a person's professional time. There is an intellectual viscosity here, in which more can be achieved during this period than in an equivalent two-hour time block anywhere else in the day. These hours are four-star premium time.

But what do most people do with this time? They check and respond to email. With nothing but the best of intentions, of course, they perform the ergonomic equivalent of pouring watered-down gasoline into their own gas tank. Prime creative time gets diluted by a mundane, procedural messaging system. Yes, some of the messages might be important—some of them anyway—and yes, you should respond to important ones reasonably promptly, but dealing with email
en masse
as an early morning task is like using a Ferrari to pull a camping trailer.

This is what cooling down is all about. There are better times than others to work on the important things. People need to be able to identify these times and turn them into opportunities. These are occasions in which more of the right stuff can get done at the right time. More, not less. Cooling down is not about working slower; it's about using the best of what the
Slow
movement espouses, so you can step off the carousel long enough to recognize the real strategy behind productivity.

Many people have discovered this viscosity principle on their own. They actually leave their email until after the first working hour of the day (if not the first two). They stringently defend their time against intrusion, and they negotiate rather than simply react. And you know what? They're still employed, and they're successful.

Of course, all of this depends on the requirements of a person's actual job. A frontline employee such as a help desk technician, for example, would not be wise to ignore her email first thing, if that's where the help requests come from, since in her case, these inputs constitute her primary workload. An accountant, by contrast, is a typical professional whose expertise is based on other types of tasks, and for whom email is but a communications device. What, then, would constitute the best use of his time in the morning? Obviously, it would be better spent solving his clients' problems.

But what if some of the emails in the accountant's inbox were from clients? Fear of offending the client swoops in and swiftly overrides this professional's ability to judge his own value. His need to respond speedily takes over once again, and he pushes the actual accounting work back into the less productive hours. That, once again, is the cost of speed. The speed of reaction—based on fear.

In 1945 George Orwell published
Animal Farm
, a satire of revolution, totalitarianism, and the trappings of power, in which freshly adopted principles of equality and justice were quickly challenged and defeated as the animals of the farm grew used to their new roles. Central to the story was a horse, Boxer, who was ever willing to work harder, never giving himself a chance to rest, and most importantly, never seeing how his increased exertion was actually leading him to his own decline. He died in harness.

In the cubicles, the offices, the home offices, and mobile offices of the modern working person, a similar death in harness is happening. There's even a clinical name for it:
infomania
. Infomania describes a condition of overload that comes from attempting to handle too much information simultaneously (too many lamps in the lamp store), where the effects on the brain in terms of clear thought and problem solving skills are worse than the effects of marijuana. A study performed by psychologist Dr. Glenn Wilson at the University of London, was recently undertaken for the computing firm Hewlett Packard, and it describes what happens when people become addicted to email and text messages. The study stated that “Workers distracted by email and phone calls suffer a fall in IQ more than twice that found in marijuana smokers,” adding that their researchers found 62 percent of people checked work messages at home or on holiday. “More than half of the 1,100 respondents said they always responded to email immediately or as soon as possible, with 21 percent admitting they would interrupt a meeting to do so.”
⁴
Dr. Wilson suggested that people who constantly break away from tasks to react to email or to text messages suffer “similar effects on the mind as losing a night's sleep.”
⁵

Though Dr. Wilson's study may have been inflated somewhat by the media, it serves a purpose in highlighting the negative impact that distraction and busy-ness invisibly imposes on productivity. Working fast creates a type of output that requires revision, correction, and reprocessing. The lamp store of the mind, ever ready to accept more light fixtures, cannot see how its own brightness is driving customers away.

Infomania represents Boxer's death-in-harness on many human levels. It represents the death of full profitability, and the death of self-determination. It represents the loss of the chance to ever strike gold due to being mired in tedious, day-to-day work. It represents the death of enthusiasm through burnout and the death of consistent growth through high employee turnover. It represents the loss of full-life experience at home—of relationships with children, spouses, and parents, and of hobbies, passions, and leisure. It is a thankless, literally dead-end approach.

The next decade and beyond will be very different for the working Western professional. The twin giants of the East, India, and China, as well as the reawakening economies of Eastern Europe, Russia, and South America are eagerly and aggressively populating the business playing field, using manufacturing muscle, high-tech skills, and ferocious enthusiasm to deliver products and services to every corner of the globe. As Thomas Freidman points out in
The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century,
⁶
globalization has allowed the people of India and China to staff the call centres of the world's largest companies and speak to North American customers in well-practiced North American accents. They can do the same for Japanese customers in Japanese, right down to the local dialect. Meanwhile, to use two brief examples from Friedman's book, many U.S. hospitals routinely send X-ray and MRI images by email to India to be read and diagnosed by qualified “nighthawks” who then email their interpretations back to the requesting American physician. At the same time, accounting and law firms of all sizes are discovering that many of the services that they sell to their North American clients can be subcontracted out to these highly educated, ambitious, lower-wage professionals half a world away. Though this has actually been done by the larger firms for many years, Friedman makes the point that even corner-store accountants and lawyers—one-person operations—are now taking advantage of these same opportunities. Or at least the astute ones are. The others, those who believe their expertise to be too unique to be copied and franchised by someone in Bangalore, are instead continuing in their old ways, doing the best they can, staying responsive to the increasing speed of expectation, and all the while setting themselves up for extinction. Friedman's message is that virtually no job is safe from offshoring and globalization, and that the world is fast becoming a very different, very flat place.

Though others might argue that the threat is not as huge or as straightforward as Friedman and others contend, it remains a reality that the future for the North American professional, while not necessarily grim, will be different. Employability will be based on talents and procedures that offshore communities admit that they can't do well (yet); to be creative, for example, or to communicate closely and empathetically with clients and employees; to arrive at solutions through close attention and contact. Traditionally rigid professions such as accounting and law will have to learn to market to attract clients. Those who have seen their proprietary services opened up to wider competition will have to find out how to strengthen the bonds of loyalty in an era when loyalty is in short supply. Companies of all sizes will need to deal with higher turnover rates as employees either reject current workloads or simply fall sick and burn out. There are answers to these problems. The answers are human and intellectual. They will require, though, that we first transcend the borders of pure task orientation.

If workers spend more and more of their time in purely reactive mode, reading and responding to email, moving from meeting to meeting, keeping busy on the train as well as in the office with work that
appears
important, always behind the eight-ball of expectation, they might not notice the damage occurring and the opportunity might slip by.

Does this make sense to you? Can you perceive changes happening in your own industry? Are you interested in suggestions on how to modify your habits so you will be ready to capitalize on these changes rather than become a victim of them? If so, I invite you to read on.