Author: Dr. Lynette Reed

If you’re like most project managers, in addition to the administration of your project, you likely have a multitude of daily activities that distract you from essential tasks. These distractions can impact the overall success of your project. Dr. Gloria Mark, an associate professor at Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California, found that the average amount of time people spent on any task before an interruption was about three minutes, with an additional 25 minutes spent dealing with the interruption before they returned to the work at hand. Wow! Interruptions come in external form, where individuals are disrupted by other people. They also occur internally. We’ve all had personal distractions pop up throughout the workday. All these interruptions we, as project managers, experience can lead to higher stress, a negative attitude, and lower productivity—obviously impacting the success of our projects! Professors at Carnegie Mellon have found that groups that were interrupted were twenty percent less correct in answering questions than groups that were not interrupted. When you become distracted by the activities of the day, your work’s accuracy and performance declines. This is also true for multi-tasking. Multi-tasking in today’s society has become the norm, and most people at work struggle with juggling between e-mail, texting, social media, and managing multiple tasks in a way that is currently identified as rapid toggling between functions. “RTBF” continually shifts the context of the work day, so that alignment within the project is compromised. Another recent article in the Harvard Business Review reported that efficiency at work could drop by as much as forty percent when multi-tasking a plan. Long-term memory also suffers, as does creativity. But, interruptions are inevitable, aren’t they? The good news is that these studies have also showed that individuals can train to prepare for distractions, even when they don’t know when, or in what form, the interruptions will come. The challenge for a project manager is to keep their focus on those activities that have the most impact on the success of the project. We know that this focus becomes difficult to maintain while managing the distractions and tasks that arise throughout the day, but there are a few activities you can engage in that will help minimize negative impact on your project. Follow the tips below to keep your focus, even amid a work day full of distractions and multi-tasking. Maintain an Accurate Visual Picture Individuals have different styles of learning and remembering information. Kinesthetic and visual learning styles are two of the most common forms. A visual chart gives the manager, as well as team members, a way to see the progress of a project and better track milestones. One way to keep individuals involved and focused is to allow them to review and check off activities as they complete their tasks. This provides a sense of completion and connectedness to each one’s part in the process. The PM should set aside time to review projects with their team to make sure that people, activities, and timelines are accurate. You can quickly lose track of management milestones when the focus of the day reverts to distractions. Reviewing a visual tracking chart daily also helps you redirect your attention to the primary goal of the project—which is, of course, to implement the project efficiently to completion. Communicate and Celebrate the Milestones Keep team members informed as to the progress of crucial milestones and maintain contact with employees who have time-sensitive material or events that are critical. Take time to celebrate these milestones as this activity helps you become more intentional about the way you communicate a favorable outcome in a chaotic process. Send a quick celebration email or take a break in the process to share a celebratory activity. These “built in” breaks serve as planned interruptions or distractions, in a way, resulting in less actual interruptions taking place. Remember, also, that communication is only as good as the people communicating. If you have a large team, you may need to find a way to break it down into smaller groups that can communicate and celebrate as units. As Jeff Bezos, founder, and CEO of Amazon suggested in his two-pizza team rule; teams should only be a large as two pizzas can feed. Work Towards a Human Focused Culture People are an asset to any organization. When people feel engaged and connected, then they execute the process at a higher level. When this happens, project management takes on a different level of performance. Your project benefits when you take time to define and maintain a culture that supports your human assets. Human elements such as trust, accountability, and balance play a role in increasing the effectiveness of a project. Find ways to work with your team to build this behavioral structure into the plan. Time, money, and efficiency improve when your project reinforces these qualities of human potential. Project management takes on a new role in business as companies work faster and longer in this technological era. With advancement; however, there is an increase in distractions and a greater need to multi-task. Be intentional to keep your project moving forward and organized as you navigate your day. 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Meetings remain a necessary part of business. They help employees to coordinate efforts, allow for troubleshooting problems, and infuse creativity into an organization. According to a recent article posted by The Muse, an online career resource, an estimated twenty-five million business meetings occur each day within the United States. These meetings are typically taking up fifteen percent of an organization’s time, and sixty-seven percent of executives consider them unproductive. Robert Keidel, on his Wharton Magazine blog, proposes that a productive meeting occurs when it focuses on either learning, making decisions, strengthening a team, or creating a forum. If one of these areas is served during a meeting, you’re creating a valuable opportunity to save money, time, and/or energy. Elizabeth Grace Saunders, who also supported this outlook of purposeful meetings in her Harvard Business Review article, Do You Really Need to Hold That Meeting, offered a decision tree to help define when to request a meeting. Determining the need for a meeting is half of the challenge. However, once scheduled, the method for how you facilitate the meeting determines the success of the event. Without structured facilitation, meetings often dissolve into long, drawn-out gripe sessions or become prolonged deliberations about unrelated topics. A well-facilitated meeting encourages employees to stay organized and could even revitalize them. If you’re leading a meeting, your role is to maintain the flow and complete the goals set forth. A successful meeting transpires when you, as the facilitator, keep the meeting on time, on track, and relevant. These three elements contribute to the overall success that you, the participants, and your organization as a whole will experience. On time The best meetings stay short and are to the point. Try to constrain meetings to less than an hour. Start and end on time, so that you manage expectations. When you communicate and sustain time commitments, you infuse the meeting with authenticity and accountability. It is your responsibility as the facilitator to make sure that you cover the information that needs to be discussed in the allotted timeframe. Suggest a follow-up meeting at a later date or email exchanges, as needed, when a meeting looks like it’s going too long. With today’s available technology, e-mail and/or text can help you to converse before or after the meeting itself, which reduces the actual meeting time required. Meetings that stay on time also help to retain focus within the conversation. On track Create an agenda. Before the meeting, email or text the agenda to all attendees to manage expectations for matters of deliberation in the meeting. Identify themes that need to be added or changed before the meeting to see if the new information is pertinent to the discussion. You will help manage expectations and sustain the forward momentum of your meetings when you outline things ahead of time. Then, make sure that the discussion supports the agenda items. As the facilitator, you may need to redirect participants so that they discuss only agenda items. If people want to talk about other topics, suggest that you add them to the next meeting’s agenda, or that they share these thoughts after the meeting. Relevant Maintain appropriate deliberations for each agenda topic. As the facilitator, manage the interchange between all participants. People may want to talk about subjects related to the agenda that do not necessarily impact the result of the matter. For instance, if the topic is about a project timeline, limit the discussion to conversations that will have an influence on the deadline or outcome. Think about the number of hours that are wasted in meetings with prolonged debate that does not contribute to the end goal. Know when to shift the talk or draw it back to the agenda and objectives you’ve set forth. If someone expands the dialogue beyond the goal, suggest that you address the broader area at a later time, so that you stay on track and on time with your meeting. When you are able to maintain the relevancy of the dialogue, you decrease time in the meeting, streamline the exchange, and maintain focus on relevant topics. Keeping things on time, on track, and relevant will make your meeting efficient and effective. When you manage these three areas, you construct an opportunity for people to coordinate their efforts, you allow for troubleshooting problems, and infuse your organization with a sense of the value of time, which increases productivity. This meeting process also helps to generate a coalition of people who want to work together. Establishing this practice could shift the culture of your organization. Emphasize effective time management and project alignment with this method, and tell us what results you see. Related Content Webinars (watch for free now!): The Basics of Schedule Planning – It’s ALL about Communication Leveraging Project, Project Server and Project Online for Better Communications Articles: Getting Earned Value Metrics from Microsoft Project Two Great Ways to Publish your Plan to the Web—without SharePoint! Exploratory vs. Explanatory Visuals in Planning