In this edition Ann Gomez, Speaker, Author & Founding President at Clear Concept Inc. shares the importance of how controlling your time allows you to feel like your focusing your time on what's most important, personally and professionally.

Key Takeaways:

• Despite a wealth of tools, productivity remains a greater organizational and individual challenge due to the ever-increasing volume of information, our pace of life, and level of interruption;
• Key to regaining the reins of productivity is setting no more than three core priorities, keeping a MAP (main action plan) to guide your efforts and creating workday routines that put interruptions in the background; and
• A renewed focus on productivity from this perspective not only reshapes how we feel as individuals, but directly impacts organizational results.

Spurred by her own early experiences in the workforce prior to her first maternity leave, Ann took the time for retrospect and relaunch. Not only was she going to capture the most of each moment in her own life, but help others do the very same. What Ann realized then and has helped countless others accept in the intervening two decades through her coaching, speaking and two bestselling books, Email Warrior and her most recent, Workday Warrior, is that the number one barrier to performance is actually, well, us.

“So many of us are passionate about what we do and that that's an important part of self-actualization? Loving what we do is an important part of living a terrific life,” said Ann, “And we give a lot when we love what we do, but we need to balance our personal lives and goals as well, which is really important. It can become a marathon at best and a really frustrating situation when people don’t have a great work experience.”

“People are willing to give up a lot for work—their time, their passion and energy. So, we want to set them up to succeed. It's in the best interest of all organizations out there to create a culture where people can show up and do their best work,” said Ann. “My team and I at Clear Concept help champion workplaces where people can thrive and while there are four aspects to that, individual productivity is one of them.”

Volume, Pace & Constant Interruption

Over the years, the workplace has changed considerably and the volume of information, the pace of work, and the number of interruptions we now face has grown.

“Let's go back 30 years. Email wasn't a thing. Maybe you had a few memos sitting on your desk when you came into the office. If people needed you, they had to call you. The frequency of meeting invites and of information shared was much smaller,” said Ann. “But over the last three decades with email, we've seen that increase exponentially. Now we are truly overloaded with information. So, that's a major issue.”

In short, we went from drinking from the garden hose to the fire hose.

“Along with that came the pace of work. With today’s tools it is so much easier to collaborate with people from all different jurisdictions. We’ve seen the size of projects, the pace of projects, the number of projects, all of those have increased alongside the speed of competition,” said Ann. “Over the last few decades, the advances in technology have really facilitated this global market and so the pace of everything has increased exponentially.”

The third biggest barrier, Ann notes, is the rising sum of the those first two changes—the number of interruptions we face.

“Gone are the days where you can go into a room, close the door and have uninterrupted time for an hour—and we can move mountains with under interrupted time,” said Ann. “Now though, if people go a minute with uninterrupted time we consider that fantastic.”

With those three challenges in mind, Ann steps in with the strategies needed.

An Onus on Managers Who Care

When everyone reported directly to Alison and Trevor in Jane’s early days, phil notes, they were able to have a direct impact on fostering a delightful team. As Jane has scaled to over 90 managers, the responsibility of fostering a delighted team has shifted from the co-founders to each and every individual people leader.

“Where we put a lot of the onus of employees having a delightful experience at work is on the manager. So there are things that we do at the macro company level to create delight such as our company retreats and “holiday gift-giving extravaganza”, but we put a lot of responsibility on managers to be fostering delightful teams and their own delightful micro culture,” said phil.

“We’re really big fans of Russ Laraway, who's done a ton of research on management and leadership. He recently came out with, *When They Win, You Win: Being a Great Manager Is Simpler Than You Think.* That book went a little viral at Jane because his research actually uncovered that 70% of the employee experience is impacted by the manager.”

“Knowing that the manager has such a huge impact on the employee experience, we put a lot of focus on making sure we have great managers and actually built our own in-house manager training program called Leading with Care and Purpose,” said phil. “The logic is that care is a huge part of our foundation at Jane. We care deeply for our customers and we want managers that care deeply for their team.”

To take an accurate measure of that care, Jane also asks a question that Laraway recommends for every engagement survey—‘Does my manager care about me as a human being?’

“That question is key because if you know that your manager cares about you as a human being, it just makes a huge difference in your psychological safety— knowing that if something goes off in your life, if something were to happen, knowing your manager cares about you really matters” said phil. “As of our last Health Check in May 2024, we scored 98% on that question.”

Delight in that care carries over directly to engagement as well, with the most recent engagement survey pegging 86% and scores over 90% well within the norm. “It can fluctuate, and we also know it’s seasonal since we do it a couple times a year, but we are consistently in the top 10 percentile of employee engagement according to Culture Amp’s benchmarks. It’s unbelievable to see.”

The Benefits Building on Business Fundamentals

“We need to have strategies that address those three challenges. We need a different approach to productivity,” said Ann. “I’m a huge fan of Stephen Covey's work and Seven Habits of Highly Effective People has a lot of solid productivity strategies in it—like first things first and Eisenhower’s matrix of urgent versus important. There are really foundational principles in that book. The same goes for David Allen, who wrote Getting Things Done, which is another fantastic productivity book. We need to build on those core strategies, because while those books have excellent foundational principles in them and met the needs at the time, we need to build on those principles to address our current needs.”

The benefits of doing so, Ann notes, run the gamut from self to team to bottom line.

“I think when you gain more control over your time, and you feel like you're focusing your time on what's most important, personally and professionally, the benefits are true game changers for yourself, your team and your organization,” said Ann. “There's a big difference between a team that feels in control, energized and like they're making progress on what matters most versus a team that feels defeated, out of control and exhausted. We’re not as productive as organizations. Clients are not as happy. Profitability goes down. These are true bottom-line results. It impacts us personally and professionally.”

Guiding organizations and individuals out of the second scenario and into better business and quality of life boils down to a few core steps and strategies.

Step One: Get Clear on Priorities

“What I see at at the organization level, and it is the same with individuals—we’re trying to take on too many priorities. What we know is the more priorities we take on, the less of our time, energy and resources we can apply to any one of those priorities. This is just simple math,” said Ann. “The tipping point appears to be three—three priorities. This is true at the organization, leader level, and individual level.  That said, individual priorities will look different than organization priorities. That’s why we all want to have what I call our core priorities.”

This does not require or endorse ignoring life’s minutia, Ann notes, as there will always be colleagues in true need and invoices that truly need a moment. However, it does involve putting the cart before the wild horses for a positive change.

“Life happens, but it’s the minutia of life that has to fit around core priorities,” said Ann. “I'm not going to expect to spend 100% of my time on my core priorities. In fact, if I spend 60% of my time on my core priorities, I'm far above what most people do,” said Ann. “It's actually pretty rare for us to have time to spend on our core priorities. If we can protect 60% of our time for our core priorities, that is where we make progress—60% or more. If you do get pulled into something here and there, that’s okay—it’s going to happen to all of us.”

What Ann does not recommend is adding to those three core priorities until you’ve made progress and are ready to recalibrate. For HR leaders looking to bring their best, there is often a strong temptation to do so

“I think HR leaders are pushed to take on more and more and more because they are responsible for the backbone of organizations—the people—and this work is endless,” said Ann. “With the rapid growth in technology, complexity, and unpredictability coupled with the sometimes very hard messages around things like downsizing, all of this leads to endless work for HR. But we’re people not widgets, so not every lay-off chat fits into a 12 minute window. It doesn’t work that way,” said Ann. “So that is the challenge for HR executives—the pressure to do more and more from everyone around them—while prioritizing what matters most.”

Step Two: Make A MAP (Main Action Plan)

“At Clear Concept, we use a tool we like to call your MAP—your main action plan—and it is crucial. When we don't have a good system to manage our work, it's easy to feel overwhelmed and lose time just taking stock of everything, so we need a great priority management system. Your map is really one central, strategic, to-do list for your core priorities,” said Ann. “As an HR professionals, one of your core priorities may be training and development and you have 1,000 tasks for this core priority. Your MAP is where you have a clear ranking of the order you're going to do those 1000 tasks—and where you've got clear deadlines associated with everything. Getting that organized helps us feel focused, calm and in control. That alone is a game changer for people.“

Ann also has a warning for those who rely on their memory as their to-do list.

“David Allen has a great quote on this—‘Our mind is for having ideas, not holding ideas.’ It works for less busy people, but not HR professionals, where we’re juggling so much and want to save our brains to process the deep thinking, not to be the ticker tape of all the things we need to do. Our MAP is foundational and holds our focus when we are interrupted from a variety of sources, be it emails, chats, texts, phone calls, people knocking on our door or dogs barking.”

Step Three: Stop Interruptions—Starting With YOU

“A lot of people think the number one cause of interruptions is email, but there is a bigger one—ourselves. We choose to check email. We choose to shift gears to another project—and we do it a lot,” said Ann. “There is a false belief that we need to respond instantly when we do not.”

Ann draws the example of someone who needs 30 minutes of uninterrupted time to review a priority HR policy—but leaves their email window open on a second screen and their phone an arm’s reach away beeping away with texts and alerts.

“Multitasking is not productive. In fact, research shows what we call multitasking is actually switch-tasking. And every time we switch from that document we’re working on, over to check email, and back again, we lose time in transition, our stress level goes up, and we’re more likely to make mistakes. Focusing is far more effective, less stressful and we produce better quality work.”

“Making coffee and having a conversation might not require a lot of horsepower, but anytime we’re doing something that requires thought, like reviewing that HR policy, we do our best work when we focus on doing one thing at a time and this is supported by research. Our brains process sequentially. They don't parallel process. We can walk and chew gum at the same time but our deep thinking, focus work requires more cognitive power than walking and chewing gum, so we need to stop multitasking, turn off our alerts, minimize email, and really commit to that one thing.”

Ann notes a key component of your focus strategy is identifying the right amount of focus time best suited to your role and your organization. “

“Most of us can set aside 20-30 minutes of focus time where we do not check email, let unscheduled calls go to voicemail, and turn off our alerts. On some days, your focus time slot be may longer. Only you can decide what works best but whatever the time slot is, it’s important to protect this time for yourself. Balancing the need to be responsive to our clients and colleagues is equally important with balancing time for our focus work.”

Step Four: Build & Stick To A Routine That Works The Way You Work

“Routines drive our habits, so the more we can build routines into our workday, the better,” said Ann.”I talk about sleep routines so you can get the sleep you need, downtime routines so you can disconnect, time for exercise and other forms of wellbeing—we have all sorts of routines throughout our day.”

For HR, Ann recommends identifying what works best for your focus work, when is optimal for meetings and when works best for informal communications—then make a routine you can stick to and flex around as needed.

“Your routine does not have to be perfect. We just want to know if we are getting our focus hours or spending too much time in meetings. We have to be thinking, ‘How can I scale back, streamline, seek help? Can I send someone else to that meeting? Can I go to half the meeting? Can I push that meeting off till next week?’”

Step Five: Lead & Live by Example

“This really comes down to wellbeing in the name of the individual and organizational bottom lines. The most important thing to remember is HR can’t do this alone. A leader can’t do this on their own,” said Ann. “Everyone has to be on board because there is a trickle-down effect.”

Fortunately, Ann has witnessed a definite evolution in terms of organizations understanding that wellbeing is foundational, and perhaps more importantly, we are seeing a healthy change in the dialogue around mental health—along with some positive modelling by leaders.

“I'm seeing a big shift in terms of organizations encouraging wellbeing and talking about mental health in the workplace. Leaders are modelling, taking breaks and finding time to disconnect, so I’m happy to see that shift,” said Ann.

It’s clear that with greater competition for our energies and our attention now more than ever, productivity strategies like these, and a fresh mindset can yield not only better workplace relations, but far more productive results for employees and shareholders alike.