Proximity Matters

When work involves sharing information, the people involved should sit together. The reason why is captured in a passage I came across describing how currency brokers work in the London Review of Books:

Brokers in major money-market currencies don’t work as individuals, but in teams of up to a dozen or more, sitting close together in subsections of large, open-plan offices. Good eyesight is useful – trainees still sometimes called ‘board boys’ write unfilled bids to borrow and offers to lend on whiteboards surrounding clusters of brokers’ desks, and you can occasionally see a broker using binoculars to read a distant whiteboard or screen – but a more crucial skill is ‘broker’s ear’: the capacity to monitor what is being said by all the other brokers at nearby desks, despite the noise and while at the same time holding a voicebox conversation with a client. As one broker put it to me: ‘When you’re on the desk you’re expected to hear everyone else’s conversations as well, because they’re all relevant to you, and if you’re on the phone speaking to someone about what’s going on in the market there could be a hot piece of information coming in with one of your colleagues that you would want to tell your clients, so you’ve got to be able to hear it coming in as you’re speaking to the person.’

When you first encounter it, broker’s ear is disconcerting. You’ll be sitting beside a broker at his desk, thinking he’s fully engaged in his conversation with you, when suddenly he’ll respond to a question or comment, from several desks away, that you simply hadn’t registered.

I know this idea runs counter to tradition in a lot of places – usually seating is by seniority (all the executives in the corners and along the windows) and functions. In my industry (mortgages), loan officers are in one section, processors in another, underwriters somewhere else, and closers are over there). This is an organization-centric arrangement – good for the egos of managers who can look over their domain, and good for training people within their function. But, separating functions requires information handoffs, and inevitably there are fumbles and failures to communicate. For example, I’ve heard closers asking customers to resubmit information directly to them because it’s easier than finding out if it’s already been provided to someone else in the work flow.

Putting people in earshot of each other greatly reduces the effort needed to keep everyone in the loop, and results in better execution. It’s also much harder to maintain “us versus them” distinctions when everyone sits together.

Focus on Others’ Minutiae

Yes, this is the opposite of the typical time management advice. The usual approach is to determine your goals, identify the tasks you need to complete to accomplish the most important ones, and give those tasks top priority. Suggestions include doing the big rocks first, and and identifying what's important as opposed to what's urgent. The conventional advice, then, is to focus on your goals, and do what’s important. My advice is to do the opposite – focus on others, and don’t prioritize what’s “important”.

Here’s an example. You get to work in the morning and are informed the deadline for an important report has been moved up and it must be done in time for a meeting first thing tomorrow morning. You estimate it will take 8 hours to complete. You also have emails from three coworkers requesting information, and each response will take 10 minutes to complete. Conventional wisdom would have you work on your report and push back the response to the coworkers (if you’re nice, you’ll let them know you can’t get to it today). My advice is to respond to the coworkers. Here’s why:

• You have four things to do. Your brain has a lot of trouble distinguishing between accomplishing something big and something small; all achievements register roughly the same in your brain regardless of their magnitude. If you do the three small items, your brain will feel like it’s accomplished 75% of what you needed to do today in the first half hour. You will be happier and more productive, offsetting the time you “lost” responding to your colleagues.
• If you do the report first, the fact that you have three more things to do will weigh on your mind at some level, making you less productive. Better to clear your mind and rid yourself of other tasks you can accomplish quickly so you can fully focus on the big one.
• Your coworkers may be waiting for your response to complete their own urgent projects. Everyone's productivity goes up when bottlenecks are eliminated, and the best way to do that is to give priority to other’s needs.
• The total 1/2 hour you need to respond to your coworkers represents a little over 6% of the time you need to complete the report. Work tends to expand to fill the time available, and it’s not hard to squeeze 6% out of the total time needed to complete the project.
• If you put your coworkers off, they will probably be thinking to themselves, “He only needs to spend 10 minutes on this, is everything he has to do today so important he can’t spend 10 minutes on my request?” This situation gets really ugly if your coworker catches you taking a break from your report (and you will, or should, take some breaks – no one can work productively on a single project 8 hours straight).

Of course, if you find yourself never getting to your own projects there’s an overload problem (to be discussed in another post). There are times when you shouldn’t follow this guideline (for example, see my post Do What You Dread). However, when I focus on responding to others I’m both happier and more productive, and so are the people around me.