Musings of a Marketing Maven

As 2008 nears, I’m resolved to make room for a more bal­anced life, less clut­tered with frenzy and mean­ing­less busy­ness. Yoga helps, but it’s time to invest in some men­tal and lifestyle “house­keep­ing” as well. As a first step toward de-cluttering, I’ve decided to con­sult some expert coaches.

I find myself drawn to two books we pur­chased this fall, Sarah Susanka’s The Not So Big Life: Mak­ing Room for What Really Mat­ters, and David Allen’s clas­sic, Get­ting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Pro­duc­tiv­ity.

Although both books look quite inter­est­ing, Susanka’s approach appears more holis­tic, prob­a­bly not so sur­pris­ing, when you con­sider her pro­fes­sion as an architect.

Are We Really More Productive?

With hun­dreds of in-bound email and other elec­tronic com­mu­ni­ca­tions every day, it’s hard to believe that our work­ing lives are bet­ter than they used to be. As Susanka writes in The Not So Big Life: Mak­ing Room for What Really Mat­ters,

With all the instant mes­sag­ing, e-mailing, and cell-phoning going on, often simul­ta­ne­ously, there’s not nearly enough thought or dis­cern­ment involved in any of it. We’re engaged in a race against time, but the race itself is entirely fab­ri­cated and of our own mak­ing. And we’re rarely present in our inter­ac­tions at all.

When was the last busi­ness meet­ing (other than a one-on-one in a cof­fee shop) in which meet­ing atten­dees weren’t check­ing email (even if surreptitiously)?

One good thing about web-based con­fer­ences: at least you can’t see when people’s atten­tion has drifted off to their email (even if you can hear their key­boards clack­ing away)… Need­less to say, group inter­ac­tions suf­fer as a result when everyone’s atten­tion is any­where but the meet­ing. I won­der how much pro­duc­tiv­ity is actu­ally lost as a result of multi-tasking while in meetings?

Quan­tity Does Not Equal Quality

Qual­ity suf­fers too. My hus­band, who works for an enor­mous For­tune 50 com­pany, com­plains that the inces­sant emails have become so over­whelm­ing that peo­ple have lit­tle time to read or think about what’s in their in-box. He grum­bles that ill-considered responses to incom­ing mes­sages only add to the con­fu­sion and rework. Peo­ple fire off half-ass responses because they don’t take time to think through the impli­ca­tions of what they’re read­ing. He’s seen mul­ti­ple sit­u­a­tion when deci­sions are made and unmade and remade over the course of sev­eral months as a result of this multi-tasking malaise.

To make mat­ters worse, many peo­ple check their email via Black­ber­ries or Black­Jack phones with tiny screens — ill-suited to longer mes­sages required for deal­ing with com­plex sit­u­a­tions. Cer­tain sit­u­a­tions just require more than a few sen­tences to set out the argu­ments or ratio­nal­ize the rec­om­men­da­tion — regard­less of the device being used to check email.

What’s the Solution?

I cer­tainly don’t have an answer on how to deal with the elec­tronic frenzy that’s over­tak­ing our lives, but I’m look­ing for­ward to explor­ing options in 2008. In the mean­time I’ve got some great books to read and pon­der — and some exer­cises to try.

And if you’ve found a solu­tion that works well for you, please share it!

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