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“There were times I was averaging 90 hours a week at the office, but 60 hours of actual working. Work would come in waves at totally random times. So it could be midnight. You’d think you were finishing up, and something gets fired off that somebody needs you to do. So you stay all night. Go home and shower, take a two or three-hour nap. Come back. My longest work day was 41 hours. I was delirious by the end.” – Patrick Curtis, former Wall Street investment banker, now CEO of start-up, wallstreetoasis.com, California

Work has become increasingly complex. In the past two decades, the amount of collaboration between managers and employees has ballooned by 50 percent, leading to what researchers call “collaborative overload.” In a typical week, as much as 80 percent of workers’ time is spent on meetings, phone calls, and responding to e-mails, leaving little time for actual work.¹ The typical knowledge worker is interrupted every three minutes, and can take as much as 23 minutes to get back on track.² These frequent disruptions and task-juggling tax cognitive bandwidth and force workers work faster, increasing time pressure, frustration, and stress.³

• Egocentrism: Humans have a hard time seeing the world accurately from another’s perspective.⁴ We often overestimate how vital we are at work and don't see how our actions affect others, so send e-mails to get ideas off our plates, without recognizing we’re loading others’. We also have a “fear of missing out,” so we’re inclined to go to all meetings and be part of all conversations.
• Asymmetric cost structures: When we send an e-mail, we may just want to get an idea or thought out quickly before we forget, especially if we work at different times and in different places from coworkers. Our inbox may be clear, but we’ve just added to the workload and cognitive load of others. When that e-mail comes from the boss, research shows we’re driven to answer, regardless of time of day or night.⁵
• Risk aversion: Technology makes it easy to overcollaborate—to CC colleagues on e-mail, to send a host of calendar invites for meetings. Because humans are driven to seek safety, the safe choice for the sender is often to include more people than necessary. The safe choice for the recipient, particularly when the sender is in a position of power, is to respond to e-mail and attend meetings. This leads to a culture of inefficient collaboration that bogs down individual attention.⁶

Promising New Ideas

• Reduce meeting time by making the agenda divisible. Dividing up meetings by time and topic reduces risk aversion and encourages advance thinking and intentional scheduling. The idea is to create a norm that respects other people’s time.
• Make invisible individual work visible. Schedule time for concentrated work, and make it as important as meeting time.⁷
• Be clear about trade-offs. When scheduling meetings or asking to collaborate, make it a practice to acknowledge that other work will have to be done at another time.

Best Practice

A multi-year study at the Boston Consulting Group of giving workers predictable time off, with no expectation of work or e-mail checking, wound up not only improving personal satisfaction, but also project performance, with a 35 percent increase in teamwork and collaboration, a 35 percent increase in value to clients, and a 100 percent increase in team effectiveness.⁸

“I talk to 100,000 people a year. I ask them what they spend their day doing. They all answer: ‘e-mails and meetings.’ No matter the country or the culture. This is what drowns us every day. You can’t innovate and change if there’s no space for it.” – Lisa Boddell, CEO and founder, futurethink, New York