Michael Harrison: Ignore emails and do more thinking to survive office life

Amazon boss Jeff Bezos has a rule that all meetings begin with 30 minutes’ silence while participants digest a pre-prepared six-page memo about the issue up for discussion. He has banned Powerpoint presentations.

You can quibble with some of the finer details of the Bezos approach.

Any good idea or argument ought to be capable of being communicated on a single page of A4 or perhaps two at most.

And one person’s crisp, clear memo that stimulates a sparkling and productive conversation will be another’s discursive ramble ending halfway up a blind alley. The 30-minute rule is also a bit arbitrary since the speed at which people can absorb information varies.

But you cannot argue with his overall drift. How many of us have suffered death by Powerpoint at some time in their life and wished for the torture to end? Who in business would deny they waste heroic amounts of time in pointless, non-productive meetings, inserted into their electronic calendars simply because nature abhors a vacuum?

The Sloan School of Management at MIT has calculated we spend an average of two whole working days a week in meetings and that their contribution to productivity is virtually zero. If Bezos would like to add to his list of ways to improve and sharpen business performance, here are a few more suggestions.

First, tackle the blight on modern life and executive time that email has become.

Ban the use of the Reply All option (or the Backside Covering button, as it is also known) when responding to internal emails, except where each person who is cc’d into the reply is given a specific action to carry out.

Robert Pozen of MIT goes further. On average, we look at our inbox every three to five minutes. His Pozen Productivity Index recommends reducing these visits to once every two hours and then only to check on the subject matter and sender.

Second, liberate more time for thinking about the company’s purpose and goals by accepting that not every hour in the day has to be scheduled.

A colleague was once contacted in January by the diary secretary to Rod Eddington, an otherwise brilliant chief executive of British Airways, and offered lunch the following September. He declined, saying that one of them could and probably would have better things to do when the time finally came, supposing they were still in their respective jobs.

Third, stop using up valuable time by sweating the small stuff. Too many chief executives stress over what to wear at important presentations. Barack Obama didn’t let this variable disrupt his schedule, famously travelling with a handful of identical blue suits.

Fourth, if you have to hold a meeting, then, as Pozen’s MIT colleague Donald Kieffer suggests, write the agenda on the wall and structure the conversation and the time allotted to each issue as if it were a production line. It gets results, and he should know because he began life doing piecework on a factory floor.