Think piece books, October 2003

This article is filed under: business capability, organisation, organisation design, organisational performance, time management, transformational leadership

Issue 05: decluttering

“Less is more”
William Shakespeare, King Lear

Clutter culture

Apparently, the average US office worker spends 30 minutes to two hours a day looking for things. We might call this ‘non-value-adding activity’. We prefer to call it ‘clutter’, and it’s the theme of this booklet.

You might recognise clutter from some of the things you hear around your office:

• ‘I went out for lunch and when I got back I had twenty five new emails’
• ‘That meeting was totally pointless; I don’t see why I had to be there’
• ‘Apparently it’s filed on the system somewhere’
• ‘I’m sorry but I’m back to back in meetings all day’
• ‘The delay’s due to the fact that it hasn’t been signed off yet’
• ‘I go to meetings all day and do my job in the intervals’
• ‘I can’t fill the vacancy until HR finish redrafting the new policy’
• ‘What happened to that project we were doing last year?’
• ‘Didn’t you see my email?’
• ‘We have to bring everyone up to speed’
• ‘Let’s pass it on to the sub-committee for further development’
• ‘We’ve lost the plot’

Sound familiar? The uncomfortable truth is that in large organisations huge amounts of people’s time is consumed doing things which add no value. This is expensive: it means lower productivity, things
take longer to get done, it obscures the pathway to the future and it drains people’s energy.