Links for this week (weekly)

  • “Businesspeople would be better off if they did less and thought more”

    tags: work workduration overwork management coordination timemanagement timewaste meetings pressure creativity

    • Yet the biggest problem in the business world is not too little but too much—too many distractions and interruptions, too many things done for the sake of form, and altogether too much busy-ness. The Dutch seem to believe that an excess of meetings is the biggest devourer of time: they talk of vergaderziekte, “meeting sickness”. However, a study last year by the McKinsey Global Institute suggests that it is e-mails: it found that highly skilled office workers spend more than a quarter of each working day writing and responding to them.
    • Americans now toil for eight-and-a-half hours a week more than they did in 1979
    • 80% of respondents continue to work after leaving the office, 69% cannot go to bed without checking their inbox and 38% routinely check their work e-mails at the dinner table.
    • workers are generally more creative on low-pressure days than on high-pressure days
    • The most obvious beneficiaries of leaning back would be creative workers—the very people who are supposed to be at the heart of the modern economy.
    • One of the secrets of productivity is to have a very big waste-paper basket to take care of all invitations such as yours
    • Indeed, creative people may be at their most productive when, to the manager’s untutored eye, they appear to be doing nothing.
    • But there is certainly a case for doing a lot less—for rationing e-mail, cutting back on meetings and getting rid of a few overzealous bosses. Leaning in has been producing negative returns for some time now. It is time to try the far more radical strategy of leaning back.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Head of People and Business Delivery @Emakina / Former consulting director / Crossroads of people, business and technology / Speaker / Compulsive traveler
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