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  |  Comments[0]

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]

Email Backlog

It's no secret that email overload is a problem these days, here's just a few of many articles on the topic:

• http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/14/technology/14email.html?_r=1
• http://www.thepersonalfinancier.com/2008/11/email-becoming-distraction-heres-how-to.html

A quote from the second article above is particularly interesting (or scary):

   In this study Dr Jackson found that it takes an average of 
   64 seconds to recover your train of thought after interruption 
   by email. So people who check their email every five minutes 
   waste 8 and 1/2 hours a week figuring out what they were 
   doing moments before.

In nearly 20 years (wow!) of reading lots of email daily this has never been much of a problem for me though. I always managed to keep my inbox almost empty from day to day (I long considered 100 emails to be the maximum threshhold to ever have pending in the inbox).

Thinking back, I'd say historically the bulk of my incoming email has been either

• Administrivia (meeting announcements and such): quickly dispatched without thought or mental interruptions
• Engineering content, directly related to whatever I'm working on that day: these take time to read and process but since the emails are relevant to the current project they don't cause a mental context switch and may even help further the project at hand so there is a net win

As resources get tighter and I find myself filling more and more roles simultaneously the dynamic has changed in the last 6-9 months or so. From a perpetually clean inbox I've now gone to a significant backlog. Even more annoying is that I find there are many days where all I get to do is read email!

After some months it is clear this is not a temporary crunch, so I need to change strategies from what has worked in the past. I spent some time monitoring my email activity to figure out what is different. It's not really quantity, I've always received lots of email but it hasn't been a problem. The key difference appears to be that now I'm involved in many projects each one with many unrelated trains of discussion.

As emails arrive, each one is more often than not unrelated to the previous ones and also unrelated to what I'm actually trying to get done at the moment. And thus, I find myself facing the case made in the Dr. Jackson study quoted above.

As each email arrives I read it and start thinking of that particular project/problem for a few moments (a few seconds to a minute or two). It is not enough time to solve or address the issue, just enough to get distracted. Hoping to get back to the real work I was doing instead of spending more time on this new train of though, I don't actually process the email, so it remains in the queue.

By then, several other emails have arrived so I repeat the cycle with each one. By the time I finally get back to what I was actually working on, that project is so many mental context switches behind I no longer have any idea what I was doing and need to spend several minutes getting back into it. By which time, of course, ten more emails have arrived... and the cycle repeats all day.

So I need to address the interruption and context switch problem. A few weeks ago I started to allocate limited time to email. Specifically:

• Only read email in specific blocks of time preallocated for email on that day.
• If I can answer or resolve the issue in less than 5 minutes, do so right then, within the time allocated for email handling.
• If it's going to take any longer than that, add a task to the bottom of my to-do list and move on.
• The rest of the time, quit mutt and resist all urges to go look at email.

I started by allocating two hours a day to email, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. Quickly it became apparent this is not enough to keep up, so I increased it to three hours. I'll gather more data before settling on the final timing but looks like it'll have to be a bit over three hours a day for email processing.

Here's a graph, showing only a few days from last month. I'll post another one with much more data once some more time goes by so I have more numbers. The yellow area is my current email backlog and the blue line is the number of minutes a day spent processing email.

Posted at 12:22AM Jun 16, 2009 by jyri in Other  |  Comments[2]