How to manage expectations to increase your productivity: 7 tactics backed by research

If you want to get more done at work, you need to change the way you manage expectations. Expectations frame what we expect and what others expect of us (no dah!) but too often we let our expectations (and those of others) evolve organically.

It's easier to be passive. We assume that our shareholders', colleagues', and customers' experience is optimised by instantaneous responses.

As communication platforms proliferate we're increasingly open to stealth attacks on our attention. Kooti et al. confirmed the pressure we put on ourselves to jump to attention. The researchers looked at more than 2 million users exchanging 16 billion emails over several months and found that 2 minutes is the most likely reply time.

Sure, responding promptly is an easy way to signal that you care. But at what cost?

This article explores the impact of managing expectations on productivity and suggests some tweaks that can have a profound impact on you and your team's ability to get work done.

Manage your own expectations

Most of us are unrealistic about our ability to get work done and unstrategic in the way we approach it.

To be productive at work, we need to understand our limitations and schedule our days accordingly. Here are a few insights to get you going:

You can only do a few hours of deep work per day. If you accept the assumption that deep work is analogous to deliberate practice then, we've got 1-4 hours a day. 4 hours of deep work is heroic, 1-2 is more likely.

You're probably most productive in the morning. Here's what the data on 28 million tasks says:

• On a typical day, we complete the most tasks (9.7%) at around 11 AM
• After lunchtime, our productivity drops — and it completely plummets after 4 PM
• We complete the most tasks at the beginning of the week, on Monday (20.4%)
• We’re least productive at the end of the week (Friday, 16.7%), and unsurprisingly, get virtually nothing done on the weekends (Saturday + Sunday, 4.7%)
• The highest percentage of tasks are completed in October (9.5%); the lowest percentage of tasks are completed in January (7.2%)
• Autumn ranks in as the most productive season, and winter (22.8%) is by far the least productive season

We're extremely prone to distractions and app developers know our weak spots! App designers use variable intermittent rewards (eg. notifications) to get us hooked -- the same principle used to design slot machines. The more variable the rate of reward, the more addictive the app.

Most of us need to use apps for work, so we accept the disruption. But most of us underestimate the disruption it causes.

On average, you're distracted 2 hours a day and 80% of these distractions are trivial (see cat photo). For example, on average, people look at their phone 85 times a day (twice as much as they think). More importantly, it takes you 23 minutes to get back into a state of flow after an interruption -- our denial about the impact of distractions is killing our ability to do work that requires our full attention.

This is a cat photo. You're being distracted.

On average, you're distracted 2 hours a day and 80% of these distractions are trivial (see cat photo). For example, on average, people look at their phone 85 times a day (twice as much as they think). More importantly, it takes you 23 minutes to get back into a state of flow after an interruption -- our denial about the impact of distractions is killing our ability to do work that requires our full attention.

Strategies to manage expectations of your own performance

Schedule your deep thinking work in the morning. Deep work is scarce, but your ability to do it is probably why you were hired. So do it when you're performing at your peak. Block out a few 1-hour blocks and hide away from distractions (see below for tips on how to hide).

Be boring! App developers are winning the war for your attention. You can make some significant gains if you accept that you're incredibly distractable. Turn off your notifications and think about how to make your devices and apps less appealing. To get you started, here's a quick hack to reduce the attractiveness of your smartphone.

Manage your colleagues' expectations

Your colleagues can be your best asset or biggest liability when it comes to productivity. It's up to you.

Building 20's data (see Figure 1) shows that the average person loses between 18-30 minutes a day to colleagues stopping by their desk. That's around 7-10 distractions a day, which might not seem like much but when it takes 23 minutes to get back into deep work and you can only do 1-4 hours of deep work a day it's a killer.

Figure 1: Time lost to the five most common workplace distractions.

Constant interruptions from colleagues have a real impact beyond drying up your ability to do deep work. Mark et al. (2008) found that:

People compensate for interruptions by working faster, but this comes at a price: experiencing more stress, higher frustration, time pressure and effort.

Strategies to manage your colleagues' expectations

Signal. Be proactive. The best signalling devices are those that keep distractions away without taking up your attention. The two that I recommend are headphones (here are some insights on what music you should listen to at work) and an hourglass. The 30-minute hourglass works because it doesn't add to your already cluttered digital environment and the falling sand is a clear signal to colleagues that you don't want to be interrupted.

Hide! If all else fails, go into 'monk mode'. Find somewhere quiet away from your team, turn your phone off, and pump out an hour of deep work. If you have freedom over your calendar, try scheduling regular monk mode mornings. If you don't have freedom over your calendar, read this article twice.

Get the team on board. Signalling is difficult if no one knows what you're signalling or why. Improving productivity unilaterally is hard, you're better off getting the whole team is onboard. Onboard means the team understands why they're doing something and commit to trialling it. By getting the team to buy-in you'll create community pressure to maintain the change and eventually productivity will become a priority of the team's work culture.

This is what we do at Building 20 (shameless self-promotion). We create team buy-in by teaching teams the fundamentals of productivity; we use data to identify their biggest productivity killers; we empowering the team to design practical solutions to their biggest productivity issues; and we measure the impact of the solutions.

Manage customers' expectations

People get anxious about responding quickly to external stakeholders and clients (let's call them 'customers'). The safest option is to respond immediately. If you feel anxiety to respond instantaneously then it's a pretty good sign that you haven't managed your customers' expectations with your own performance in mind.

Michelle Rial for BuzzFeed.

Communication is king. Harvard researchers Perlow & Porter did some fascinating experiments with the Boston Consulting Group to understand the impact of being uncontactable for a day a week on performance. The research showed that with the right communication they could be uncontactable for a full day without impacting the client's satisfaction.

"Forcing a full day off was like tying your right hand behind your back to teach you to use your left hand. It really helped the team overcome the perception that they had to be on call 24/7" (Perlow & Porter 2009)

Strategies to manage your external stakeholders/clients' expectations

Be proactive. If a customer is used to you jumping to attention every time you receive an email then it's hard to roll back their expectations. It's much easier if you let people know when you're difficult to contact during your first interaction.

Have a Bat Phone. Sometimes (rarely but sometimes) customers need an urgent response. If you're going to take back some control over your interaction with customers then take a lesson from Ari Gold of Entourage fame-- have a Bat Phone (note, this is the only professional lesson we should learn from Gold). A Bat Phone is a way of getting in touch in an emergency, whether it's a second email address; a second phone; or a homing pigeon, let customers know that you are offline but can be contacted in case of an emergency. By communicating that you're offline but contactable, it puts the onus on them to think about whether they really do need an urgent response.

Be clear. Let people know how to contact you and when they should expect a response. For example, as part of your email signature, you could include: "I only check email at 10am and 3pm, for any urgent matters please call me on my mobile".

If you want to be extreme, follow the example of Stanford Professor Donald Knuth. On his personal homepage, he explains:

"I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address. I'd used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime. ... On the other hand, I need to communicate with thousands of people all over the world as I write my books. I also want to be responsive to the people who read those books and have questions or comments. My goal is to do this communication efficiently, in batch mode -- like, one day every three months. So if you want to write to me about any topic, please use good ol' snail mail and send a letter."

Prof Donald Knuth, hero to productivity geeks everywhere.

Conclusion

Too often we forget that our colleagues, customers, and shareholders are on our side! If your performance increases, everybody wins (except for your competitors). The key ingredient is managing the various expectations than are baked into the way we do work. For example, if you can improve your performance by having a window of 3 hours a day when you're on 'monk mode', then do it. Do it by managing your expectation, block out time when you know you work best (probably in the morning); do it by signalling to your colleagues that their questions will have to wait; do it by letting your customers know that you'll respond to questions in the afternoon. Just make sure you do it!

Luke Hurst is the Managing Director of Building 20, a Melbourne-based productivity consultancy that delivers data-driven evidence-based programs to help teams reduce workplace distractions and optimise productivity.