It would be easier and faster to transfer all your clothes from the dryer into one drawer and be done, but you spend the time to separate things today, because tomorrow, when you need to put an outfit together, it’s much faster. Your underwear goes in one drawer, your T-shirts in another drawer, and so on. What you’ll do is take your clothes out of the dryer and separate them. For example, when you do your laundry, do you just take all the clothes out of the dryer and throw them into one drawer? Probably not. We already do this in so many aspects of our personal lives. Align as a team on where information should live and stick to it so everyone can easily find what they need. Was it in a direct message or was it in a channel? What channel was it in? Social media-marketing or marketing-social media? So, the idea here is simple. Was it in an email, a text message? Maybe it was a Slack message. The problem is when your colleague needs to find that piece of information next week or next month, they don’t know where to look. You do whatever you can to just get things off your plate and be done with it so you can move on to the next thing. Everyone does whatever is quickest for them in the moment. Not having an aligned framework and process around where different types of information live results in this game of hot potato. Or, delegating tasks it feels a bit faster if I just send it off to another person. Does that sound familiar? Need to send something to a coworker? What’s the harm of a quick text message and it’s just done. When you’re out of capacity, you’re overworked, you have no time whatsoever, you get into this mode where you’re just trying to get things off your plate as quickly as possible. It’s when you find yourself spending more time searching for what you need than it actually takes to get the work done itself. This can be referred to as the scavenger hunt. This consists of activities outside of their primary job function, like communicating about work, searching for information, managing priorities and more. In Asana’s 2022 Anatomy of Work Index report, they found that 58 percent of employee time is spent on what they call work about work. Teams should optimize for the retrieval of information, not transfer of information. Listen to the audio version-read by Nick himself-in the Next Big Idea App. He currently heads an operational efficiency consulting firm called Leverage and he is also a guest lecturer at Columbia University.īelow, Nick shares 5 key insights from his new book, Come Up for Air: How Teams Can Leverage Systems and Tools to Stop Drowning in Work. Nick Sonnenberg is a former high frequency trader and entrepreneur.

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