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It was last week Goldman Sachs. It was last week JPMorgan Chase. It won’t come as a surprise if other Wall Street banks tell workers they should be ready to return to the office as usual by June or July next week.
Where there are signs of pandemic mitigation, it is conceivable to quickly restore the appearance of ordinary working life. Or is it?
I didn’t realize how much Covide had changed my view of normalcy until an unsolicited email passed my spam filter on the third day, announcing the best time management trick.
“Start the habit of waking up before dawn,” someone said calling Silicon Valley a “growth-minded hacker”.
Before 2020, I would calmly hit the delete button and continue with the day. This has been a general approach that I have fallen into with almost every idea to boost productivity.
People I admire swear bullet magazines, time boxing, decrease time and other things that promise to make unnecessary individual addiction harm a model of high efficiency. I’ve never been able to convince myself that it’s worth it, even if I make an exception to the principles behind the Pomodoro Technique, because you put a timer on it to cause intense workloads of the day.
In any case, seeing this email from Silicon Valley sparked an unexpected wave of exasperation. For anyone who has time to think about time management like this, it seemed crazy to me.
My workday is usually spent in a blurred Zoom of meetings and conversations, and it’s a lot easier than others. I don’t try to take care of small children or school-age children, unlike some tired friends.
“I don’t know how I’ll ever find time to recover this year,” said one who had a great job on Tuesday. Given that we are both excited to continue working, it’s no surprise to see productivity levels rise in many businesses, including when Covide sent people home to work.
More than 80% of leaders with a suddenly distant workforce said their companies were at least as productive as before, examination found in Europe last year. More than 40 percent said they are somewhat or significantly more productive.
It was the year 2020. As the pandemic has eroded this year, some have begun to worry. “We are starting to see a decline in employee engagement. You can’t sustain those kinds of productivity levels, ”Sunil Prashara, director general of the professional team at the Institute of Project Management, said at a conference last month.
In other words, many employees need more than a newsletter to help them deal with exhaustion. That’s why it’s disappointing to say it’s time to get more into our busy days before dawn. In fact, the Covid crisis has revealed a fundamental flaw in changing our routine that we can promote the path to productivity. Millions of people have now seen the need for broader systemic changes – just as everyone is ordered to work at home at the same time – to enable many efficiency improvements.
On a daily commute from a horrible two-hour dawn to a second walk to the kitchen table, I start working earlier and calmer than ever.
Once there, I don’t have to download any apps to deal with the disturbances of a busy open plan office, because those deviations no longer exist. As the US academic Cal Newport showed in his latest book, A world without email, is a monumental escape from the time caused by work emails systemic disease this cannot be fixed by playing with spam filters or writing better topic headers.
As is so much the case in modern working life, the problem requires much more serious structural innovation than anything that can only be achieved by one person, even if they get out of bed early in the morning.
pilita.clark@ft.com
Twitter: @pilitaclark
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