Escaping the False Productivity Trap

We live in an age of distraction. Our phones buzz and bing and demand our attention, and as they do, they send us off into an infinite scroll adventure that steals thirty precious minutes from our morning. You may have already experienced similar patterns in your life as a manager. You can’t peel your eyes away from your email inbox on the off chance that something new will land in it. There’s that DM that’s vying for your attention.

Before you know it, you’ve become addicted to input. You become reactionary. You only feel successful when you’ve been able to respond to all of those distractions, such as answering those emails and messages, having those meetings, and doing task after task after task. You rely on responding to external inputs to feel satiated.

Don’t be sucked in by this false sense of productivity. In this section we’re going to look at why this hurts your performance as a manager and what you can do to fix the problem. You need to let go of the behaviors exhibited by one part of your brain to enable the behaviors of another part. Let’s find out more about them now.

L-Mode and R-Mode

Your brain is amazing, but it’s buggy. We can work out those bugs. In Pragmatic Thinking and Learning [Hun08], the brain is modeled as a dual-CPU, single-master bus computer. Only one of those two CPUs can work at any given time, and they’re quite different:

• The first CPU is a slow, linear, traditional Von Neumann architecture. Instructions are processed one after another in order.

• The second CPU is a digital signal processor: it searches and pattern matches asynchronously. It can magically find links between unrelated things, but you have no control over it.

They share the same memory bus, so if one is working, the other isn’t. If the first CPU is executing instructions, the second isn’t asynchronously searching, and vice versa. The first CPU is called L-mode, where the L stands for linear. The second CPU is called R-mode, where the R stands for the rich creative and holistic processing it does, as shown in the image.

You need both of these modes. R-mode helps you innovate, come up with new ideas and connections, and break through walls. L-mode lets you execute the details. Remember that time you magically came up with the solution to a programming problem while you were having a shower? That was R-mode. Then when you got to work, you sat down and wrote each sequential line of code to implement it? That’s L-mode. Thinking, Fast and Slow [Kah12] similarly defines System 1 (R-mode) and System 2 (L-mode) modes of thought.

However, even though we need both of these modes, we quite often don’t realize that we need them, nor do we put them to good use. Being a great manager isn’t about being an L-mode robot all of the time: answering email after email, checking your messages, answering that DM, checking your emails, ad infinitum. Great managers are also being creative. They’re utilizing their R-mode to find new solutions to problems. They’re creating space to let their R-mode find new connections: to get that insight about how to make their team better, how to solve that tricky programming problem, or discover some excellent questions to talk through in the coming week’s one-to-ones.

Enabling Your R-mode

The thing about R-mode is you can’t control what it does. But, you can create the space it needs to do what it does best. To do that you need to carve out time for yourself. To get away from those emails, bleeps and bloops, and distractions. To sit and think and have no agenda. To disengage L-mode and let R-mode run amok.

Here’s what you should try and do. Try to carve out 10% of your time each week to do absolutely nothing other than let your thoughts emerge. Yes, seriously. You need to block out time in your calendar in which to do nothing. Get away from your desk. No meetings. Maybe even get out of the building and go for a walk. You need to create the conditions of that shower where you suddenly solve the problem, or that drive where you needed to pull over on the highway to write down your brilliant idea. You need to get your R-mode firing.

How you decide to do this is up to you. You know yourself best. Do your best ideas come to you during the beginning of the work day or toward the end? Could Friday afternoon be full of insightful ideas? Pick your times, block them out in your calendar, and do an activity that lets your mind wander. Bring whatever tool you’re using as your place to capture information—such as a notebook—outlined in Chapter 2, ​Manage Yourself First​ so that as your mind wanders and up pops an incredible insight, you can note it down and forget about it for now. You can schedule it for L-mode processing later.

Once you reach the end of your blocked-out R-mode period, sit down and go back through the notes that you made. Flesh any of them out if you need to. Commit them to your to-do list, or follow up on any of them that you need to. Perhaps your time away from your desk gave you that insight on how to refactor that particularly gnarly piece of code. Perhaps your brain reminded you that your team is about to tackle a challenge similar to something one of the other teams solved last year and you should go and talk to them. It’s funny what pops up when you give yourself the space.

Using Your Capacity Wisely

In addition to purposely blocking out time for R-mode to discover insights, you should be thinking about your capacity more broadly. As you probably already know by now, being a manager can bring all sorts of unexpected twists and turns:

• Sometimes the proverbial hits the fan and you can get interrupted by the production system exploding, with the fallout eating up the rest of your day.

• Perhaps one of your team is having a hard time and needs to confide in you in private, despite the fact you’re in the middle of something important.

• Various points of the year trigger extra work such as taking part in the budgeting process and preparing and doing performance reviews.

You need to think about your work capacity and what you commit to. Ideally you should be planning your week and your commitments so that you’re operating at a comfortable 85% capacity.

“But,” I hear you cry, “isn’t my own manager going to think I’m slacking off?” It’s a good question. However, as the list above shows, there’s always going to be extra work. What it means is that you can take on that extra work willingly, diligently, and complete it to a high standard. If your team needs you, you’re available. If your own manager needs some help, you can offer. If one of your staff is getting stuck or is feeling unhappy, then you can easily flex into that spare capacity and be there.

Don’t underestimate the power of being able to be there. So many managers operate at capacity that they quickly become weak links in the chain. That ad-hoc request goes unanswered. That member of their staff that needs their extra time doesn’t get it. That urgent matter that needs following up gets dropped.

Operating at this capacity requires some changes:

• Perhaps you could block out even more time in your calendar for thinking and reacting. Try a thirty-minute slot at the beginning and the end of each day.

• Purposefully take on 85% of the work that you think that you can get done, especially when it comes to planning sprints. You can look back at your to-do list and calendar over a month period and categorize your activities. You can then scrutinize them to see whether or not they were a good use of your time. Then cut out anything not worthwhile going forward.

• You’ll have to learn to deal with the guilt of taking time for yourself. It’s real and it will be uncomfortable. However, with time, the ability to react to unexpected events quickly, and the additional insights that your R-mode brings to you, will make you wonder why you didn’t do this sooner.

So, you’re being told to work a bit less hard. But actually, you’re being wiser with your time and letting yourself work more effectively. Trust me. It’ll make you a better manager. Let go of needing to fill every minute of your week.

Stop Checking Those Notifications!

If it isn’t clear by now, the magic begins to happen when you free up some time, allow your R-mode to engage, and have more space to do your job in a holistic and creative way. However, we opened this section talking about the distractions of everyday working life. The push notifications, the emails, the buzzes, bleeps, and bloops.

They’re addictive. Many pieces of software are designed to keep you coming back for more, triggering those little dopamine hits as you clear off your notifications, answer your messages, and achieve inbox zen. In addition to managing yourself and the way that you use these tools, you need to manage how often you use them in the first place. It’s likely you’ve spent most of your life hooked to the drip feed, so it’s time to disconnect.

Limit the amount of times that you open your email inbox to just a few mindful occasions every day. Do the same with your chat software, your instant messaging clients, and whatever else you use that distracts your attention. See what times of the day work best for you to batch your communication. Close them at all other times. Perhaps you could answer your messages once in the morning with a coffee, once before lunch, and then have a clear out at the end of the day before you stop work. See what’s best for you. But don’t keep them open. The eyes wander, the mind wanders, and the dopamine hits of keeping on top of the flow of conversations will keep you from really making an impact in your job.

Let go of compulsive checking. Resist, resist, resist.