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Nine Ways To Kill Productivity

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nine ways to kill productivityMark over at Productive Strategies has a pretty amusing posts that list nine ways to kill productivity. My favorite:

Use email for things that should be done in person. Things that require a quick back and forth conversation or where you know you aren’t providing everything they need for an answer are bound to lower their productivity. You have to come up with something that they will feel like they need to respond to but where they will need to email you back several times for clarification. This turns the simple interruption of an email into 5 or 6 interruptions as they try to acquire more information in order to give you a reply. If you do it well, it can have a network effect. You send a single email which forces them to send 3 or 4 emails for more information to other people who in turn have to ask for more information… You get the idea.

Ugh… who doesn’t have at least one of these people to deal with? Great post Mark!

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  • http://joeganley.com/ Cujo

    Same goes the other way, though: If you have a single, simple question with a short answer, emailing it instead of phoning or asking in person is far less disruptive. There’s nothing I hate more than a phone call that knocks me out of flow to ask a question that could easily have been emailed.

  • Rob

    Mmm. When someone ‘drops in’ to initiate a ‘quick 2-4 minute question and answer’ it could take me as much as an hour to refocus and get back to where I was before the interuption. Sure, its more ‘human’ but it is a pretty big zap on productivity all by itself.