Unclutterer

1. Posted by Theresa Finnigin, Ready Aim Organize - 02/04/2010

   Excellent points! Picking up the phone goes a long way when it comes to e-mail miscommunication. E-mail should be primarily to communicate to multiple people. Also, don’t forget social media(twitter, facebook, etc) can be a big time waster.

2. Posted by Julia - 02/04/2010

   Gee, I tend to lose time reading blogs about self-motivation and how to be more efficient.

   Which, I think, is how I got here at 8:45 on a Thursday morning…

3. Posted by MikeTV - 02/04/2010

   What about office-mates who send useless email fwds about cats, bad jokes, wishy-washy vaguely religious ‘uplifting’ messages or ‘send these to everyone in your contact list or you’re crush won’t talk to you!”. These are grown people sending these emails. I’m sure most of the time the people passing these low-brow emails along aren’t spending the time to CREATE them, but it takes me and everyone else valuable time to sort through the wheat from the chaff.

4. Posted by Simon - 02/04/2010

   Meetings anyone?
   Every workplace I’ve been, there were meetings.
   Only a minority lead to actual work being done based on the conclusions of said meeting…
   It seems most meetings are a way to spend time faking work so bosses won’t notice.
   Organised slacking if you ask me. Not that I don’t like a meeting once in a while…

5. Posted by Erin Doland - 02/04/2010

   @MikeTV — Simply ask them to stop e-mailing them to you. Explain that you’re having a difficult time staying on top of your e-mail and that you’re looking for ways to reduce the flow of messages to your inbox to only job-specific mail.

6. Posted by Sarah S. - 02/04/2010

   Meetings! Yes!

   On Tuesday, I sat through an hour and a half meeting that did not cover a SINGLE item which pertained to either of my jobs. Worse, my boss reprimanded me last time I left early but he was on his laptop doing other work through the entire meeting. When I finally got back to my desk, I had 86 emails and four missed phone calls.

7. Posted by Rue - 02/04/2010

   The internet is my biggest time-waster! Only rarely do I actually use it for work stuff…

8. Posted by Glenn - 02/04/2010

   Great post, Erin.
   Now I just have to get my coworkers to read it.

9. Posted by amandalee - 02/04/2010

   Meetings, meetings, meetings. I don’t think people do it on purpose at my workplace, as Simon said above, but I think I work with a bunch of people who have quite simply never seen it any other way. Want to get something done? Have a meeting, and make it a standing one every week [never mind that you could share information via email more quickly]. Want to train someone on something? Have a meeting, and block out a whole afternoon [never mind that they could read the training manual themselves]. This is my first time in the corporate world after several years of freelance/contract work, and it’s been a huge eye-opener as to how much this meeting habit does NOT work for me.

10. Posted by Jenny - 02/04/2010

    I live in a world where I have meetings every day to cover what has already been emailed, and then an email to recap the meeting. And my boss is the one who propogates the office gossip and unproductive email.

11. Posted by Handy Man, Crafty Woman - 02/04/2010

    ohhh,I hate those type of emails about pets, religion, and all that. grrrrr! !!!!

12. Posted by Leah - 02/04/2010

    Yes, emails about things unrelated to work. But also emails sent to a giant listserve that only pertain to a handful of people on that listserve.

    For example, the IT team for our division on campus sends a mass email EVERY time there is any hiccup, glitch, notice, or occurrence relating to networking/computers/internet. Sometimes (my favorite) they send email notices when the network is down. Yes. When it’s back up, I have to delete five messages about the network being down.

    Oh, and reading blogs.

13. Posted by Ris - 02/04/2010

    Useless meetings are a big time-waster at my job. People seem to think that everyone needs to be there, regardless of whether or not the meeting pertains to their job.

14. Posted by Rachel - 02/04/2010

    Unproductive verbal/phone exchanges: The moment you suspect that information was not conveyed as intended or there is confusion in the communication, open your email and take advantage of the clarity provided by the written word. What might take you hours to resolve on the phone can take mere minutes to solve with e-mail.

    

    Just a little reminder that it goes both ways, depending on whether the people’s strengths are more focused on verbal or written communication.

15. Posted by Abeline - 02/04/2010

    A big YES to meetings. When our company was undergoing Six Sigma, we actually had a meeting about how to properly hold a meeting. My head nearly exploded.

16. Posted by HappyDogs - 02/04/2010

    Reading blogs on the Internet. I managed to make it all the way through December without, but now here I am back again.

    I was really interested in Frontline this week — especially the part about multitasking and distractions. Makes me think I need to renew my vow to read no blog.

17. Posted by chacha1 - 02/04/2010

    For me, it’s reading on the Internet – except right now, I have so much downtime it’s often all I have to do. Our department took advantage of the downturn to add staff who were suddenly on the market – like me – anticipating more new business this year.

    For some co-workers, it’s personal conversations. Often several a day, often for more than a half-hour at a time. I appreciate that people are friends, but come on. Your life doesn’t change that much from Monday to Tuesday that you have to take an hour of your WORK DAY to recap it all.

18. Posted by Matt - 02/04/2010

    My colleagues and I all use MS Word to write technical documents. Word is very powerful, and can make writing these things easier. But I am always amazed at how much time people spend struggling with formatting and so on. A little training would go a long way. Learn to use your tools!

    As for meetings, one project I was on had a Monday morning update meeting. Because there wasn’t a room big enough to hold us all, we would congregate at one end of the office, standing up, which meant the boss would bash through the important points and the meeting would be about 5 minutes long. Good use of time.

19. Posted by Matt - 02/04/2010

    Also, I agree with Rachel. When a little chat about one thing turns into a technical discussion, send a follow-up email to clarify what was agreed.

    And as regards meetings, the old traditions about how to run meetings still apply, because they work. Stick to the agenda, listen to the Chairperson, do the minutes.

20. Posted by Mike - 02/04/2010

    @MikeTV – You are the wind beneath my wings.

    To the general question — yes, these seem like genuine time-wasters. Once you’re in a professional position (as I am now), you’re getting paid for what you do, not when you do it. (or: “not how long you take to do it.”) Deadlines do apply, but aside from that, my time is my own and it’s up to me to produce efficiently enough that I finish deliverables on schedule and don’t burn out doing it. I can gossip all day if I like, but all that’s done is reduced the more valuable time I might have if I worked, finished faster, and was able to take a longer lunch or roll out a little early.

    For those who are in hourly positions, you’re not getting paid for what you do, but instead for “coverage of a position for a given time interval.” That might be literal in the case of a security guard or receptionist, or it might be figurative if you’re a clerical worker and you’re covering the position of a task-completer that has to be executing delegated work as assigned and perpetually on call to receive more for the time interval in which you’re being paid. In hourly work, office gossip, junk e-mailing, and READING BLOGS is just as much a waste of time, but it’s NOT YOUR TIME. It’s your employer’s time. So you’re stealing from him/her. This is why hourly workers are usually micromanaged. The flip side is that if a project doesn’t get done on time, responsibility does not typically fall on the hourly workers, but on their supervising professional.

21. Posted by Busy@Work - 02/04/2010

    Gosh, I love a nice mental break from the seriousness at work. I work at a non-profit that deals with cancer and sometimes I need a light break of silly fwd’s, gossip or emailing my friends.

    I do agree that meetings are a waste of everyone’s time at my office. My boss does not make it through agenda (ever) and ends up talking about who knows what for 90 minutes.

22. Posted by Stormbringer - 02/04/2010

    (Raises hand.) Add me to the list of people who hate worthless meetings. We have two kinds of worthless meetings: Someone who has something to prove that calls a meeting when it could have been handled in a company e-mail, and also big corporate stuff that has nothing to do with how we do our jobs and is available on the corporate Website anyway.

    We were having a non-productive discussion about those cheesy “I am your friend, forward this and you will be blessed, if you don’t, St. Swithens will drown a puppy” messages. Sure, you care about me, I get it. A simpler message with less sap would be appreciated.

    Speaking of worthless e-mail, I have actually been told that people count on getting some humor to get through the day. I try to oblige once in a while for my morale as well as theirs, but I do not accept the responsibility for their happiness.

    One other thing, not only is backstabbing a waste of time, it also sabotages productivity when people feel that they have to watch their backs all the time.

23. Posted by ms. brooklyn - 02/04/2010

    How ironic that I’m reading this at work.

24. Posted by Rae - 02/04/2010

    I used to work for the Canadian government and had a job that required me to use a computer 100% of the time. If the computer system was down, there was literally nothing to do. Even though a computer was a vital part of my job, it was not considered a priority for me to have a computer that ran well. The last year I was there, the computer processor was on the fritz and the computer was always seizing up, making me lose my work and otherwise impeding my productivity. I always felt like a carpenter who was trying to nail stuff with a rubber hammer. Here’s a tip to employers who want their employees to be more productive: don’t skimp on the tools they need to do their job.

25. Posted by Tim Wilson - 02/04/2010

    All three of those are major issues, although I’d say the second one about lack of training or software is closely related to another time wasting trap — learning to use systems or tools that don’t get used, at least not for very long.

    Having said that, I work in education. New ideas, policies, systems and procedures seem to come and go all the time. I guess the trick is to know how much time to invest in learning them.

26. Posted by timgray - 02/04/2010

    Meetings, Managers that are not managers, Commuting for no reason, and Internet.

    90% of all meetings do not need to exist, we all sit there listening and at the end one or two people decide and send out the decision based on their own talking… Why did you suck up an hour of my day for this….

    Managers that cant manage, Micromanaging your experts slows them down. and Honestly my way is faster and better than your way for me. I get the job done, get it done right, and on time doing it my way.

    Commuting for no reason, today is a perfect example. I spent 2 hours to drive here to sit in a cube and use my laptop to do my work. EVERYTHING I needed was on my laptop or on the server I can access from home or my normal office. Why I have to drive in every day to do what I could do at home or at the main office is nuts. But no, dave in accounting is nervous if someone does something remotely… so we must appease his disorder….he has to be able to walk by every 2 hours and look at you.

    Internet… It sucks up time at work and home, that’s a given. It’s everyone’s biggest time vampire.

    Sorry, had to vent. It’s been a long week where I have to waste time for silly reasons that are “corperate culture”

27. Posted by timgray - 02/04/2010

    @mike glad I don’t work for you. I’m hourly because the company cant afford to pay me the wage that is required by law to be Salaried Exempt. I’m hourly and I’m hired for my special expertise. My boss can not even begin to do my job, he has zero understanding of it, yet because he is a manager he feels that he must manage me in all aspects. I smile and nod and then go on doing it my way, which is the correct way.

    Micromanaging works for very low wage unskilled workers, It only slows down and even angers highly skilled workers. Good managers know this, bad managers micromanage no matter what.

    I’ll take your view if I can stop thinking of work on my time. Many times I come to a solution on the drive home or in the shower… I don’t write down those hours, so I’ll gladly STEAL time from my employer by posting here right now on company time.

28. Posted by Noah - 02/04/2010

    We have a management team conference call every morning at 10am where I work. This call used to frequently last 45 minutes or more with everyone asking questions that could be answered with a private call or email or having small discussions that only applied to a few members.

    I’ve fixed it two ways.
    1) I set a 15 minute limit on the call. The program gives a warning a 2 minutes and just hangs up on everyone at 10:15. This forces everyone to consider if this is an issue the whole group needs to discuss.
    2) We setup a block of “anytime” conference call numbers. This allows someone to get a group together without actually scheduling a call and prevents small groups from discussing irrelevant issues during the morning call.

    BTW, the morning call is a mandate from the company president. I tried to reduce it once or twice weekly, but he said no.

29. Posted by Lori Paximadis - 02/04/2010

    Thank you all for reminding me of some of the many reasons I no longer work in an office environment. Truly, I’m not sure what I miss less: the absolutely unnecessary cross-town commute that could take anywhere between 45 and 90 minutes, or the daily first-thing-in-the-morning meeting where we had to take turns talking about what we were going to work on that day.

    And yes, you have to keep tabs on which clients like/need to communicate which ways and not waste your time trying to e-mail a phone person or vice versa. But I *hate* the phone — it’s very hard for me to hold a conversation and take good notes at the same time — so I tend to gravitate away from taking on clients that need regular phone calls. I need to be able to search my e-mails to refresh my memory about things we’ve agreed on.

30. Posted by Melanie - 02/04/2010

    Tim- so, so true about education. If it doesn’t work for me I ignore it and *poof* the system or procedure is gone within a few months– regardless of how many millions of dollars my district spent to implement it. sigh.

31. Posted by Sreedevi - 02/05/2010

    Set up filters on your mail, and send the auto-generated mails (server down, server up) to a separate folder. Review and delete it whenever. As to jokes and other forwards, try to route them to a ‘leisure’ folder. Some may still creep into your inbox, but you can see the mails you need and shift+del the rest. Taking some time to set up an email system has saved me precious time, and saved my back many times. Especially when I have to retrieve old mails, “you-said-this” mails, and during audits.

32. Posted by Richard | RichardShelmerdine.com - 02/05/2010

    I detest all 3 of these things! especially office politics. The only people involved in it are people who have jobs that are so unfulfilling they have to fill their day with something vaguely interesting.

33. Posted by Aslaug - 02/05/2010

    Regarding the mass emails at work: If you work at a place with more than a handful of employees, a solution could be to set up a mailing list that is for jokes and such. Any person can then decide to subscribe or not to subscribe to that mailing list and those who send jokes send it to the list. You might want to try talking to your computer guy about that.

    @Abeline: that’s just hilarious, a meeting about meetings. It’s like at my place of work, they hired a consulting company to help the staff brainstorm (for almost half a workday) about ways to save money.

34. Posted by Darius - 02/05/2010

    Trying to find misfiled, or unfiled files….I spent 45 minutes last week trying to find a file that needed immediate changes but because the originator of the file didn’t file it and had left for the day (he was the originator of the file of course so it was “his”, not the organization’s), I had to dig all over the place for it. There’s a filing system for a reason – to make it easy and efficient to share information.

    Which leads me to hoarders of information. They invariably come to a meeting unprepared because they can’t find the documents in their own offices to run the meeting, or contribute their part to the meeting. They’re the ones who waste my time at meetings.

    And then there are the people get upset if the meeting doesn’t involve half the place because “that’s the way we’ve always done it”. I reduced the number of people required at a meeting to the core people needed to get the project done and all the hangers on got mad – caused such an uproar it was hours of wasted time for me trying to fix broken egos.

    I have staff who won’t learn basic software on their own. They refuse to use it until they receive formal training (not our IT department training but off-site training by a 3rd party), then advanced training, then refresher training because they haven’t used the software since it was deployed (they preferred to do it the “old way” which usually took 10 times as long) then more training, training, training. Then they complain because they didn’t get enough training….they waste so much time because they won’t learn the software, or refuse to apply their learning. They simply like the old, manual ways better – mainly I think because they are afraid that the new tools might reduce the number of them when actually it would free up their unproductive time to do other value-added things we’d like to move into the 21st century on…

    Finally the people who don’t want to follow established processes because, well, just because. I wasted 3 hours of my time unraveling and fixing a mess caused by a department leader who felt he didn’t need to follow established protocols for booking a venue for an off-site meeting…ended up with a venue to small for his needs, no a/v capacity, no wireless capacity, no consideration of additional space for office. Ended up having to redo the whole contract…thing is if he had followed the procedures, it would have taken 30 minutes of his time for the events coordinator to speak to him about his needs. Instead he wasted hours of his own time “researching and finding” the venue, when if he just followed procedures, someone else woulda’ done it for him.

35. Posted by Tracy - 02/05/2010

    When I worked at a big company, we actually had a meeting to tell us we were in too many meetings. “Stop having meetings and get out in the field.” That meeting took 90 minutes !!

36. Posted by WilliamB - 02/05/2010

    Meetings can be good or bad. If you’re working on something that needs a lot of different people to agree on it (software design, for example) then it’s a good idea to get them working at once. Otherwise you have a gazillion two-way discussions and backtracking and…

    Second the point about some people communicating better in writing, others verbally. I don’t think the choice will always be for one or the other. (There are also cases when I want the request or response in writing, but that often shades into office politics.)

    My biggest two timewasters are
    - Management changing priorities frequently
    - an incessent stream of new technology. If the new tech *replaces* the old tech then the question is whether the impovements outweight the startup and learning costs. Too often, though, the new tech doesn’t fully replace the old tech so I have to learn the new and still use the old.

37. Posted by Nina - 02/05/2010

    Useless meeting and preparation of 30+ pages presentations, which nobody admitedly read. I don’t understand how we still manage to do some work because all we do is either preparing this presentations or sitting at the meetings listening to them.

38. Posted by Mike - 02/05/2010

    @timgray – You may be an exception that proves the rule. If you’re really an hourly employee, and not a professional, you don’t gain anything by thinking about work while you’re at home. Why should you bother? Your input on processes etc is not needed nor solicited. An hourly employee is on call for a period of time to perform tasks. That’s it. A professional, meanwhile, is responsible for completing projects to a deadline and has a HUGE stake in process improvements.

    You might be a professional who is letting your company treat you like hourly (in which case you’re getting the short straw), or you’re an hourly employee, plain and simple, and don’t have the pull you think you have.

    Ask yourself: If your current project FAILS, are YOU the one who will be held responsible (meaning get fired)? If so, you might be a professional getting treated (unjustly) like an hourly employee. But if your supervisor is the one who will get sacked, not you, then sorry, you’re not what you think you are.

39. Posted by Karyn - 02/05/2010

    I absolutely loathe dividing people into “salaried/professional” vs. “hourly/nonprofessional.” It reeks of elitism and hierarchy, and suggests that one class of employee is somehow “more equal than” the other class of employee.

    Ethical principles apply to everyone, not just to those with less power and prestige in the corporate structure. Whoever you are, if you’re at work, you’re not getting paid to dink around on the Net. I realize that effective work includes taking brief respites, but that’s true of everyone: If it’s O.K. for one employee to take a short brain break, it’s O.K. for any employee to take a short brain break.

    And, as many of you reading Unclutterer probably know, you can’t judge the caliber of the employee’s brain by the label on her or his position in the company.

    That being said, I’d also like to point out that sometimes hourly-wage jobs do have “down” time, gaps in which one might be able to read, write, or surf the Net without penalty. Some years ago I worked overnight computer operations, and my primary duty was to cover the shift and make sure the overnight end-of-day processing ran smoothly and that all reports were printed and distributed. On slow nights, everything went smoothly, there were relatively few reports to print, and if there were no odds-and-ends projects to work on I was free to do whatever I damned well pleased, short of stripping and dancing naked through the halls. In contrast, I’ve known salaried “professionals” who never had a free minute all their own, in or out of the office.

    I think what all of us owe our employers is a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay. That means neither screwing off nor selling our souls, hardworking but humane and sane.

40. Posted by Mike - 02/05/2010

    Of course they’re not equal. That is entirely the point. It is an entirely different approach to work. This is clearer and probably seems “less mean” to touchy-feely folks if you think about it in terms of a self-employed person. When a person is self-employed, all that matters in the entire world is deliverables. Produce or starve. And if you’ve produced enough to pay your bills for the interval, you have a choice: Keep going so as to pad your profits, or go fishing. And nobody else gets to second-guess that decision.

    @Karyn wrote: “I think what all of us owe our employers is a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay.” NOT TRUE. Hourly employees yes, professionals no. I don’t owe my employer one clock minute, and neither does any other professional. What we owe our employers is performance according to the terms of our contract. That means deliverables turned in on time and of sufficient quality. That’s it. This isn’t grade school; there is no extra credit and we don’t get brownie points for being in our seat when the bell rings. My time is mine, my methods are mine, my approach is mine… all that matters at the end of the day is: Did I meet the bottom line? And if I did, I get paid and my contract continues. If I did not? Fired and contract ends. Very simple. This fundamental shift of responsibility from overseer to laborer is the very essence of the difference between hourly employee and professional, and is at the root of why hourly employees who goof off are stealing from their employers and pros are not.

    That’s why I’m here on Unclutterer right now. I’m ahead of schedule on all my projects so I can goof off a little. My employer doesn’t care one whit. But if I was hourly and I sat here reading blogs and ignoring incoming customer calls, then we’d have a problem, right? And to complete the analogy, if I fail to complete a deliverable, my employer doesn’t care why. Whether I goofed off or was sick too many days or was incompetent or was just unlucky — not my employer’s problem. There are no excuses in a professional’s world. The word “excuse” ceases to exist.

    Look at the example of Karyn’s hourly work with her overnight job. Her responsibility was to be there during the scheduled time interval and intervene to whatever extent was necessary to keep the reports going on time. If she sat there surfing the web while a report was failing to print, and her boss caught her, she would have gotten in trouble. That’s because it was her boss’s responsibility to see to it that her post was covered. If she is surfing the web as an hourly employee and her boss doesn’t find something else productive for her to do, her boss is the one who answers to the upper-ups, not Karyn.

    In point of fact, I think you GENERALLY CAN judge a person’s brain by the label of their position within a company. That’s why companies are set up the way they are — because it generally works. Everyone thinks they’re a unique snowflake and that they’re the exception, but in most cases a cigar is just a cigar. In fact, yes, the MBA who wears a monkey suit and speaks in business buzzwords IS usually smarter than the junior assistant IT guy. The IT guy THINKS he is smarter because he has specialized knowledge about a subject PHB doesn’t, but the truth is that PHB has more useful knowledge about the broader picture of how the business functions and the landscape of the business’s market, and that knowledge produces more money for the company. Bottom line. So IT guy can snicker all he wants that PHB didn’t know the difference between GSM and CDMA. The company doesn’t care, because IT guy doesn’t know the difference between East Asian market liquidity and South Asian market liquidity, but the PHB does, and the latter is more useful knowledge for the company to make money.

    Those of you who think I’m just being a big jerk or whatever: get over yourselves and read again. I’m telling you the road map to getting a better job. The fundamental concept that people stuck in hourly jobs have failed to learn is that you have to be willing to stake your job on your performance. After all, if YOU won’t bet on yourself, why should someone else? Until you understand that, you’re going to be stuck punching a clock and resenting the micromanagement of a pointy-haired supervisor. Improve yourself, maximize your skill in a specialization, and then put your stones on the table and earn your just reward. Best of luck to all of you.

41. Posted by Mike - 02/05/2010

    …come to think of it, I imagine our host could speak to the concept of “goofing off” for a self-employed person. Erin runs a blog, and to generate revenue, the content must flow so that the viewers grow. If the ad hits aren’t there, revenue dwindles. And it’s probably pretty frustrating due to the displacement of revenue realization from the activity period in which it is generated. Almost like farming, but you don’t get to see if your crops are doing okay until weeks later, they suddenly spring out of the ground fully-formed, either ripe or withered. So Erin just has to do as much planting as possible (generate lots of rich content) to maximize the odds of a good harvest.

    Still, during a particularly flush week here at Unclutterer Central, Erin probably finds herself with the odd spare hour here or there and can either devote it to her family, to growing her business, or to goofing off. My bet would be that she’s doing a lot of the first two and not much of the third.

42. Posted by Karyn - 02/05/2010

    @Mike – “In point of fact, I think you GENERALLY CAN judge a person’s brain by the label of their position within a company.”

    Not really. You’re comparing different forms of “intelligence.” There are plenty of people who are highly intelligent (as in above-average IQ, conceptual intelligence) who are working in hourly jobs. And I’ve met people in so-called “professional” jobs who know how to fit in with the subculture but aren’t particularly flexible or adept when it comes to probing different ideas and concepts. In a word, they’d make lousy philosophers. And in the greater scheme of life, maybe the philosophers are truly more valuable, even if they aren’t seen to be so in market terms.

    I don’t see the difference between the hourly jobs and the contract-based jobs as one of greater or lesser intelligence or capability, but rather as different workstyles. Hourly jobs still depend upon getting a certain amount of work done, not simply upon being a warm body occupying space for X hours per day. Last I checked, hourly employees are, like their salaried counterparts, held accountable for productivity. And a GOOD manager allows a measure of flexibility and autonomy for hourly employees and recognizes that most human beings thrive under such conditions. Again, it’s a matter of a reasonable balance.

    Salaried employees are paid on the assumption that they will work a minimum number of hours per week, or at least produce the amount of work expected to be produced in that minimum number of hours per week. If you are an exceptional person who can crank out top-quality work in the labor equivalent of cramming for the final exam, well, lucky you. Most people find they work more hours, not fewer, than the non-salaried, hourly employees, and “company time” is usually too filled with either productive things to get done or else the endless meetings everyone else is b*tching about.

    Frankly, if I were an employer (and I am a supervisor in my current position), I would be less than impressed with the attitude of entitlement your posts are suggesting, as well as with the condescension towards your hourly-wage coworkers as some kind of lesser beings who aren’t capable of the same kind of autonomy as a salaried project-based employee. The view you are espousing is not an immutable truth but rather one way of viewing and valuing work. Other ways are possible–and, in case you didn’t guess by now, I would say desirable.

43. Posted by Karyn - 02/05/2010

    By the way, I’ve also worked in the past as a contract employee. It never occurred to me that I should have used “professional” as a euphemism for “contractor for hire.” Seriously, I think using the terms “salaried” and “contract” in comparison and contrast with “hourly” is more neutral and more useful for discussion than to claim “professional” as the province of the contract worker. Professionalism is an attitude of responsibility and reliability which can and sometimes even may be found among people employed in all structures of employment.

44. Posted by Christine - 02/05/2010

    I think sometimes office camaraderie (which sometimes deals with gossip and politics, unfortunately), is really a necessary part of being tuned into what’s going on in the office. When I first started at my current job, I felt completely left out socially, and I think it led to me being left out professionally. That said, recently, I get very annoyed by people frequently popping in to say hello and chat.

    On unnecessary emails, I have one coworker who forwards everything to the entire office. Not jokes, but just random mass emails about weather or street closures. She’s on lists available publicly, so there’s no need to disrupt everyone–they can access this information themselves.

    I also disagree with the hourly v. professional argument. I am a salaried professional, but there is an assumed hourly committment associated with that. As a consultant, my time is billed to clients on an hourly basis, and the equation to get to my salary is based on that. I think all positions should be based on deliverables, but that’s just not the way it is. And, my company’s policy is to limit “time theft” and use of company technology for non work uses no matter if the person is paid an annual salary or by the hour. It’s an ethical issue that extends to all employees.

45. Posted by Mandyfuji - 02/06/2010

    Thanks for the GREAT article! I actually did send this to my coworkers to make it clear that I’m not going to stand for anything that is going to clutter up my work life as well as my mental space. I hope that they would get the idea and leave me out of all office gossips and politics and unnecessary meetings. If only I could work up the courage to send this to my boss, too.

46. Posted by Mandyfuji - 02/06/2010

    My solution to those annoying fwd emails is the “Delete” key. I won’t even give a second of my time to open them. Straight to the trash they go, which is where they belong in the first place.

47. Posted by Karyn - 02/06/2010

    @ Christine: I wouldn’t count cameraderie as “politics.” A certain amount of friendliness and cooperation is both pleasant and helpful to a well-functioning work environment. That being said, even the “good” human contact can get annoying if it becomes excessive, or if work starts to resemble high school clique socializing more than actually getting things done.

    Introverts and extroverts also have very different ideas of how much social contact at work is excessive and distracting. I highly recommend the opening chapters of Marti Olsen Laney’s “The Introvert Advantage,” especially if you’re an introvert in a sea of extroverts, to understand how different human brains are wired differently in regard to most effective work styles.

    As for gossip/politics at work, unfortunately, as you point out, we can’t always completely ignore it. We need to be aware of what’s going on so we can deal with it effectively instead of keeping our heads in the sand till it’s too late. My own guideline is to try to avoid engaging in “gossipy” or otherwise harmful communication myself, try to keep anything I say constructive. If I would be comfortable saying it TO the person in question, then I will also say it ABOUT the person in question.

48. Posted by Rachel - 02/08/2010

    Can we please separate the two points that Mike is conflating?

    I disagree profoundly that there is a difference in intelligence or quality between hourly and salaried workers. My IT guy is smarter than my boss, for example. My friend who is the general manager of a restaurant and is paid hourly is very smart and talented and could have a much better salaried job if he wanted to, but likes being his own boss.

    HOWEVER, Mike is absolutely right that salaried workers are not being paid to work as fast as they can from 9 to 5 and then peace out. They are paid to get their work done, and in some cases, to be available to respond to unexpected time-sensitive tasks during a certain time of day (say, 9 to 5). This means that it is NOT STEALING for them to spend a couple of hours looking at cute kittens in the middle of the day, and that it is NOT UNREASONABLE for them to have to spend “non-work hours” working to get their stuff done.

49. Posted by Nicole - 02/09/2010

    I agree with Lori– I hate picking up the phone because if I write something down incorrectly or then lose my notes on the conversation, I have nothing to refer back to. Where with email I have a record in their own words of what needs to be done.

    Also, I feel the phone is a big time waster in many cases because then people feel the need to chat: “Hi, how are things? What’s new?” … that sort of thing. Even if I talk to a client five times that day there seems to be this rule about being polite and asking them how they are (and vice versa) every time we talk, whereas you can get to the point quicker in email.

50. Posted by Justin - 03/10/2010

    Wow, nice points. The biggest one around my office is definitely the gossip aspect- it drives me CRAZY!

51. Posted by Some Awesome Articles You Need to Read | Justin's Advice - 03/10/2010

    [...] had a great article called Three Time-Wasting Traps at Work. He makes some great points that you may not normally think [...]

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