Ever feel like it’s getting increasingly difficult to focus on important tasks at work?
You’re not alone. Research shows that a rise in interruptions from meetings, emails and instant messaging is disrupting people’s ability to get individual work done.
People’s workdays are increasingly chopped up into dozens of tiny fragments of free time. Most of these small fragments are too short to allow for any real deep work or thinking.
At Worklytics we’ve aimed to help organizations address this issue by directly measuring the amount of Focus Time their teams have. And using this key indicator to identify problem areas, companies can take action to buy people more space and track the impact of these improvements over time.
One interesting pattern we’ve noticed in our research on this topic is that some people are far better at carving out focus time. Two people can have exactly the same number of meetings, emails and messages and yet one of them will find double the amount of space for individual work.
How is this possible? It all comes down to intentional scheduling.
People with more focus time tend to batch their collaborative interactions at work. For example, they only check Slack or Teams messages at certain times of the day. Or they compress all their meetings so that they only occur at the start or end of the day.
This ensures that work days are far less fragmented, buying them significantly more time for individual focus work.
Today we are introducing two new metrics to help organizations highlight and address this phenomenon.
Fragmented Time is a sum of the total number of minutes people have in blocks of time that are too short to get any deep work done.
Another way to think about fragmented time is as the opportunity for improvement through better scheduling. If someone made a concerted effort to intentionally schedule their collaboration they could win some of their time back.
Ever heard someone say something like: “Sorry, I couldn’t get that important thing done, I kept getting interrupted all morning!”?
Interrupted Time is a metric designed to measure those periods of the day where people keep getting interrupted and just can’t find enough concentrated time to finish an important task. In essence, Interrupted Time is the opposite of Focus Time. It is the total amount of time each day without any free blocks of sufficient length to allow for focused individual work.
Anyone with high values of Interrupted Time will probably find it really hard to get their individual work done.
Our goal with these new metrics is to increase our shared understanding of calendar fragmentation and encourage us all to be more intentional about how we spend our time.
By batching collaborative time and encouraging practices like bookending meetings, we can reclaim the time we need for focused individual work.
Managers and other leaders have a key role to play here. They tend to create the majority of meetings within people’s calendars and need to think carefully about the interruptions and fragmentation they are creating.
For more on these metrics and more, please check out the Worklytics Data Dictionary.
