Time November 2/November 9, 2020THE GREAT RESET
Leanne Robinson,
left, and Shea
Costales at Column
Five on Jan. 23.
The firm is trying
new ways to help
employees be
productive while
working at homehope their experiment motivates
others to try something different.
“This is really the time, as a soci-
ety, to think through all of this,” says
Thomas. “People are really getting
excited about new ways of thinking
about work.”
Since the 1970s, knowledge work,
made up of non routine, cognitive
tasks generally performed by people
sitting at desks, has blossomed. This
has freed millions from the routine
and often physically grueling jobs
of the past as bookkeepers, factory
workers and the like, but the tech-
nology that helped create knowl-
edge work has ushered in endless
distractions.
The pandemic has added heaps
more, with as many as 1 in 4 peo-
ple working from home globally, up
from more than 1 in 12 before the pan-
demic. Aside from interruptions by
kids, roommates and spouses, work-
ers are in more meetings so that col-
leagues can hear what everyone is up
to. After companies transitioned to
remote work in March, the number
of meetings jumped 12.9%, the num-
ber of internal emails increased, and workdays grew 48½ minutes
longer, according to one global study of 3 million workers.
What this means is less time for the type of focused work that
keeps workers happy and productive. Instead, people are spending
their time switching between meetings, emails, chats and their core
work tasks. Multi tasking has been shown to cost as much as 40% of
someone’s productive time.
This has implications for the world’s economy. After growing
globally at a rate of 3% per year in the early 2000s, productivity—
essentially how much people get done in an hour of work—grew at a
rate of 1.4% in 2019, according to the Conference Board. Some econo-
mists argue that the same technology that fueled a boom in productiv-
ity in the early 2000s has become so disruptive that it ruins workers’
ability to focus. “We’re in a productivity crisis, and the arrival of email
in the 1990s is really what kicked it off,” says Cal Newport, a George-
town computer-science professor who studies technology’s impact
on cognition. “If you are writing an article, checking Slack and jump-
ing into email, your brain is performing at a fraction of its potential.”
With so many people struggling to balance work and family time
during the pandemic, more companies are stepping in to help work-
ers achieve what’s known as “fow,” the state of being so absorbed
in a task that you lose track of time. Kribs, of TGW, first noticed the
benefits of fow when women who were new mothers returned to
work. Eager to get home to their babies, they would sit down and
get into a deep groove, accomplishing more than people who spent
long hours at the office.
Column Five, a marketing company with headquarters in Costa
Mesa, Calif., was experimenting with
the idea of incorporating fow time
into employee schedules before the
pandemic. Between around 12:30 and
4 every day, it encouraged everyone
to refrain from Slacking, emailing or
calling one another so workers could
concentrate on their own projects.
But during the pandemic, as Column
Five employees shifted to working
from home, they saw their schedules
disrupted by family responsibili-
ties. Flow became more difficult to
achieve, so the company redoubled
its efforts, says Tamara Hlava, the
vice president of people and culture
at Column Five.
Workers now set a blue fow emoji
that looks a bit like lightning on their
Slack status to let colleagues know
not to disturb them. Some employ-
ees, like finance manager Daniella
Hughes, instructed family members
like her husband to follow fow too.
“I’ve really had to train him to allow
me to be in fow time,” she says.
Other companies are helping
employees get into focus time by