11 Nice Productively Unproductive cartoon – Marketoonist

Dwight D. Eisenhower reportedly prioritized his work life by classifying duties as essential or not essential, and pressing or not pressing.  The ensuing two-by-two graph turned often called The Eisenhower Matrix and it influenced a variety of considering in work productiveness.  We usually spend far an excessive amount of on work that’s pressing however not essential.

As Stephen Covey famously summarized it: 

“What’s essential is seldom pressing and what’s pressing is seldom essential.”

Instruments like Slack and Groups may help us be extra productive, however it’s all in how we use them.  Trendy work tradition prioritizes the pressing over the essential.  So the default setting is to have fixed notifications, alerts, and messages to answer as quickly as they occur.  

The common Slack consumer retains Slack open for 9 hours a piece day within the background, actively utilizing it for 1.5 hours throughtout the day.  That common consumer checks Slack 22 instances an hour, sending 70 messages a day (“energy customers” ship 1,000 messages a day).

The result’s that we have now to consciously put in guardrails to make time for deep considering on essential work, or we are able to fill our days simply by responding to the distractions of what appears pressing.  Sarcastically productiveness instruments themselves can get in the way in which our productiveness.

Right here’s how Ian Bogost on the Atlantic wrote about this final week in an article titled “Slack Is Principally Fb Now“:

“Slack’s new redesign, with its recent prods to have interaction, makes the software program really feel much more like social media.  The interface has at all times appeared hell-bent on getting you again into this system, even for those who’d desire to do the precise work that your job calls for…  

“Virtually all software program desires you to have a look at it, however Slack, a supposed productiveness software meant to assist information employees get better from their e-mail, calls for extra fixation than e-mail ever did.

“There may be refreshing honesty within the Slack replace … it admits that work is secondary.  Making offers, managing staff, designing merchandise, executing advertising — all of these actions are certainly worthwhile pursuits of data employees. 

“However as with all the nice enterprise software program that preceded it, one now will get these issues carried out despite Slack reasonably than by the use of it.  Most essential, for the employees utilizing Slack, is utilizing Slack.”

Listed here are just a few associated cartoons I’ve drawn over time:

“If advertising saved a diary, this is able to be it.”

– Ann Handley, Chief Content material Officer of MarketingProfs

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