Jyri Virkki

Time Allocation

Last week I wrote about the time spent dealing with email. While writing that entry I though it'd be nice to also visualize where all the time went, not just how much was spent on email. So tonight I went over the data to generate the following pie chart, showing relative allocation of working hours from early May until today, split into high level categories:

The 'Email' slice is self evident.. 'ARC' is the time I've spent in my role in Sun's Architecture Review Committee. 'Communications' includes conferences, presentation, blog entries, articles and other related work. 'Administrivia' is a catch-all category for all kinds of mindless unproductive overhead. Finally, 'Engineering' represents the time spent doing "real work".

About the only thing I can add is that this is about as concise a representation as we can get on why very large companies have trouble competing with agile startups. Part of my goal in this exercise is to find ways to grow that nice blue pie slice, but I realize there's a limit to what can be achieved in this environment. All those TPS^H^H^HPTL reports needs to be filed, after all.

Posted at 08:54PM Aug 18, 2009 by jyri in Other  | 

Let Me Check My Email

About two months ago I posted on attempting to keep email in check so it's a good time to review some statistics and results...

The following graph shows the percentage of time I spent reading email each day:

The average over the past three months is about 45% Wow.. So over the last quarter I've spent just under half of all working hours reading (and answering) email. No wonder it is hard to get concrete work done!

This is somewhat higher than the 37.5% (three hours a day out of eight) that I had predicted in the previous article a couple months ago. This is largely explained due to the recent release of Web Stack 1.5. Due to the impending release I found myself having to check email more often than scheduled to keep on top of last minute pre-release activities.

A few points worth noting out of the experiment so far...

• It is not easy to limit email activity to the scheduled two or three hours a day. Ideally the graph above should be mostly flat. While part of this is inevitably due to the release activities, I'll try harder going forward to stick to the scheduled email times.
• While the total times may have fluctuated more than I wanted, I did (mostly) manage to contain my email activities to bounded windows of time within the day, instead of checking emails every three minutes all day long. This has helped a great deal. Even while spending nearly half my hours on email, I've managed to get many other non-email tasks done more productively than before. This part has been a success and I highly recommend it. Shut down that email client!
• I found myself doing three (or even four) email sessions per day. This is too many. I need to more strictly limit myself to reading email only twice a day, at the beginning and end of the day. If these sessions need to be longer it is better to make them longer but stick with only two. Whenever I started inserting email tasks in the middle of the day, it fragmented my concentration too much, making the day less productive.
• I'm convinced the ideal arrangement is to do one single email session per day, at the end of the day. That way all the concentration disruption occurs after the days work is done, so it does no harm. The end of the day is also a good time to be entering new tasks into the to-do list so they'll be there tomorrow. Given our distributed time zones it is difficult to do only one email session per day, but that would be ideal. Maybe I'll try that at some point.

As a longer term goal I need to think of ways of reducing the time spent on email. Not sure how to do that yet but spending 45% or even "only" 37% of all working hours on email is totally insane. I suppose email overload is inevitable at a large company with tens of thousands of employees (all of whom, it seems at times, are emailing me) but there has to be a better way. I suppose I could cap my email time to an hour a day and let whatever goes unread just go unread. I'm sure people will be unhappy but will that unhappiness be greater than my productivity gain at doing real work? It's all about tradeoffs, after all. Hard to say what's worse.

Posted at 08:21AM Aug 12, 2009 by jyri in Other  |  Comments[3]