“Carlson’s Law” coined by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman describes why managers must balance between autocracy and democracy in an organization. He says “In a world where so many people now have access to education and cheap tools of innovation, it happens from the bottom”. Bottom-up innovation is where ideas originate from employees at the lower ranks; they recognize opportunities through their day-to-day operations over the years. In organizations people at bottom keep innovating small yet meaningful improvements in products in areas such as flavours, shifting to better or all-natural ingredients, packaging improvements, faster/slower functioning, just-in-time supply chain enhancements, bigger or smaller sizing, cost reductions, heavier/lighter weight. Those innovations can be easily visualized and organizations can make a fortune out of it.
When leaders behave tolerant to failures and give scope and space to employees to express their ideas organizations grow faster. Most importantly employees must never be interrupted when they are working.
Carlson’s law states when organizations minimize interruptions, employees work with zeal. Employees must know the outlook of the management after which they do not like to be disturbed, unless it is urgent. Employees agree with people on a time for a meeting in order to manage time effectively and avoid unjustified disruptions. Carlson’s law is also called the “Law of homogeneous sequences,” which states that interrupted work will be less effective and will take more time than if it would completed in a continuous manner.
It is shocking yet a factual statistics to know that today’s knowledge workers are notoriously distracted. The average employee wastes up to 41% of their time at work on low-value tasks such as attending whatsapp messages, Facebook chats, instagram pictures, showing all of these to others and commenting on them.
And when people do start doing real work, they are rarely able to concentrate. Workers typically attend to a task for about three minutes before switching to something else which is usually an email or data file. A recent study found that a typical employee only has 11 minutes between distractions. Other studies show that office workers are interrupted about seven times an hour, which adds up to 56 interruptions a day, 80% of which are considered insignificant in nature.
Why distractions are deadly for productivity?
Not only are distractions frequent, but they kill productivity. Even brief mental blocks created by shifting between tasks can cost as much as 40% of your productive time. This is due to a phenomenon called “attention residue”. Research shows that when you switch tasks it takes a long time to get back to the level of efficiency you were at before you were interrupted. It is important to stop thinking about one task in order to complete one task fully and transit their attention and perform well on another.
When someone is trying to do deep thinking work for writing a big report, completing performance reviews or sales projections, creating the new presentation, etc it is nearly impossible to maintain a persuasive train-of-thought when he is gets ting attacked with interruptions. After each interruption the person takes nearly 45 minutes to get back to his thought process.
DHL Express, the world’s leading international express provider, has been named as one of the “100 Best Companies to Work For” in the U.S. by Great Place to Work® and Fortune. The company is certified as a Great Place to Work for four consecutive years. The company has a multi-national multi-cultural environment. Typical meeting may have an American, Italian, German, Chinese and Indian all in the same team. DHL respects its employee’s space, ethnic culture and employees call it a company with heart which says it all. Basically employees need freedom to work and productivity increases when employees are given uninterrupted work atmosphere which is strictly followed by DHL Express.
Carlson’s law emphasizes on focusing one task at a time for an extended period yields overall better results than constantly switching back and forth between tasks. Because of the inevitable delays required to get back to effective work after each interruption, the entire task’s duration will be longer.
In today’s global economy, organizations seek leaders who bring out the best in their subordinates. Carlson’s Law is about the negative impact of involuntary breaks. Taking much-needed and deserved intentional breaks is one thing – getting involuntarily distracted is another. It is proven: interruption seriously wrecks productivity.
Resuming a task after an interruption is generally far more complex ones; they are called ‘resumption lags’ which are problematic. Studies have found that interruptions threaten work resources, creating time pressure, work overload, and employee stress.
Emails, SMS, online messaging, phone calls, discussions between colleagues, and outside distractions prevent us from concentrating and doing our work as effectively as possible. A phone call takes between 3 and 5 minutes to get back to work. Over a week, this makes up a significant loss of time. A study from the University of California Irvine suggests it takes an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to refocus.
Organizations must make changes in the working fashion in organizations; interrupting is a bad habit that needs correction, but depending on the reason, or the degree of relationship, it needs to be handled differently. Some people interrupt just for the heck of it. It is a kind of bully. Some people are very sensitive to being disrupted as they find it very difficult to go back to their work. In fact highly creative people find it impossible to go back to their on-going work.
Sune Carlson was a Swedish economist and a pioneer in business research. His observation of the “Law of Homogenous Sequence” or the famous term called “Carlon’s Law” made him famous. Sune Carlson’s productivity concept of “one task at a time” became more popularized with different names: “Batching” and “Deep Work”.
Batching is a task productivity concept and consists of doing all similar tasks in one batch. Checking and replying to your emails only two hours per day, one hour in the morning, one hour later on in the day would be an excellent example of batching tasks to improve productivity. “Batching” is probably the closest productivity idea from Carlson’s Law.
Deep Work is another productivity concept. “Deep work” is a task for mind productivity. It can be seen as a development of the “Batching” idea. “Batching” is about doing related tasks in a given timeslot to avoid loss of focus that may arise from significant changes in the tasks’ requirements. “Deep Work” goes further and consists of entirely focusing on the current task at hand, instead of thinking of other things at the same time.
