Taking a little time

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Sir John Hegarty once presented some work to Sir Paul McCartney. Paul, as clients always do, asked for changes to be made, and requested revisions the following day. “Um, could we have until the end of the week?” John asked. “After all, nothing decent is ever done quickly.”
“That’s not true,” said Paul. “I wrote Yesterday in 15 minutes.”

To this day, John still regrets not supplying the obvious rejoinder: “Well think how much better it could have been if you’d only taken some time over it.”

Who’s right in this debate? Does more time always lead to better work? Well, it’s complicated. But there is one rule that holds – there is a special value to uninterrupted time. Paul might have written the tune to Yesterday in 15 minutes (the lyrics took months), but he didn’t write them to order in the space between a conference call and a budget meeting.

Inspiration can be lightning-fast, but you have to wait for it to strike.
It’s this finding that might explain why improvements in technology have had so little effect on business productivity. Technology gives a seductive immediacy, but at the expense of discretionary time.

The world of work 30 years ago was, in many respects, worse than today – not least because what you could do was heavily constrained by where you were. You could only make a phone call if you were at your desk. In other respects, it was far better. This was because, er, what you could do was heavily constrained by where you were.

So, when you weren’t at your desk, no-one could phone you. By opting to go to one place rather than another, automatically you were compelled to focus on something – in the photocopier room you made photocopies; in a meeting room you met.

To understand why fragmenting our time and attention is such a problem, you need simply to understand the non-linear algebra of productivity, where 6 x 10 does not equal 60. As Paul Graham explains in his essay Maker’s Schedule; Manager’s Schedule, what you can accomplish in six periods of 10 minutes is only a fraction of what you can achieve in one uninterrupted hour. Every time you switch from one thing to something else, you lose a portion of time simply in changing your focus – email is ghastly in this respect.

What distinguishes the internet revolution from previous advances is that it revolutionises how we can spend our time.

In our leisure time, where we exercise choice independently, the results have been largely beneficial. In the world of work, where our time is spent at the behest of others, the results have perhaps been net negative.

What if we could all be more productive; if we organised a video conference rather than spending a day travelling, say? Or worked from home one day a week? Or began work early at home and then commuted later (meaning you can easily work on an empty train)? Or deliberately ignored emails for four hours a day? Alas, all these productivity-boosting behaviours risk making you look lazy. The very fact that they are easy makes us reluctant to adopt them for signalling reasons – at least until a significant number of our colleagues do the same.

In addition to this, the utterly absurd notion of being paid by the hour is a disincentive to becoming more effective. The Telegraph featured 50 high-flyers who work a three-day week; unfortunately, the reward these people get for being spectacularly efficient with their time is a 40% pay cut.

In one New York advertising agency you can opt to work a four-day week in return for 90% of your five-day salary.

The more mathematically inclined will notice that looks wrong. In fact, I suspect it simply recognises reality. More than 60% of people would like to work a four-day week; unfortunately, what everyone knows is that, in reality, this often means being paid 80% of your salary for producing just as much work as you did before.