specifically why people can't seem

to get work done at work,

which is a problem we all kind of have.

But let's, sort of, start at the beginning.

So we have companies and non-profits and charities

and all these groups

that have employees

or volunteers of some sort.

And they expect these people who work for them

to do great work --

I would hope, at least.

At least good work, hopefully, at least it's good work --

hopefully great work.

And so what they typically do is they decide

that all these people need to come together in one place

to do that work.

So a company, or a charity, or an organization of any kind,

they typically -- unless you're working in Africa,

if you're really lucky to do that --

most people have to go to an office every day.

And so these companies,

they build offices.

They go out and they buy a building, or they rent a building,

or they lease some space,

and they fill the space with stuff.

They fill it with tables, or desks,

chairs, computer equipment,

software,

Internet access,

maybe a fridge, maybe a few other things,

and they expect their employees, or their volunteers,

to come to that location every day to do great work.

It seems like it's perfectly reasonable to ask that.

However, if you actually talk to people

and even question yourself,

and you ask yourself,

where do you really want to go when you really need to get something done?

You'll find out that people don't say

what businesses think they would say.

If you ask people the question: where do you really need to go

when you need to get something done?

Typically you get three different kinds of answers.

One is kind of a place or a location or a room.

Another one is a moving object

and a third is a time.

So here's some examples.

When I ask people -- and I've been asking people this question for about 10 years --

I ask them, "Where do you go when you really need to get something done?"

I'll hear things like, the porch, the deck,

the kitchen.

I'll hear things like an extra room in the house,

the basement,

the coffee shop, the library.

And then you'll hear things like the train,

a plane, a car -- so, the commute.

And then you'll hear people say,

"Well, it doesn't really matter where I am,

as long as it's really early in the morning or really late at night or on the weekends."

You almost never hear someone say the office.

But businesses are spending all this money on this place called the office,

and they're making people go to it all the time,

yet people don't do work in the office.

What is that about?

Why is that?

Why is that happening?

And what you find out is that, if you dig a little bit deeper,

you find out that people --

this is what happens --

people go to work,

and they're basically trading in their workday

for a series of "work moments."

That's what happens at the office.

You don't have a workday anymore. You have work moments.

It's like the front door of the office is like a Cuisinart,

and you walk in and your day is shredded to bits,

because you have 15 minutes here and 30 minutes there,

and then something else happens and you're pulled off your work,

and you've got to do something else, then you have 20 minutes, then it's lunch.

Then you have something else to do.

Then you've got 15 minutes, and someone pulls you aside and asks you this question,

and before you know it, it's 5 p.m.,

and you look back on the day,

and you realize that you didn't get anything done.

I mean, we've all been through this.

We probably went through it yesterday,

or the day before, or the day before that.

You look back on your day, and you're like, I got nothing done today.

I was at work.

I sat at my desk. I used my expensive computer.

I used the software they told me to use.

I went to these meetings I was asked to go to.

I did these conference calls. I did all this stuff.

But I didn't actually do anything.

I just did tasks.

I didn't actually get meaningful work done.

And what you find is that, especially with creative people --

designers, programmers,

writers, engineers,

thinkers --

that people really need

long stretches of uninterrupted time to get something done.

You cannot ask somebody to be creative in 15 minutes

and really think about a problem.

You might have a quick idea,

but to be in deep thought about a problem and really consider a problem carefully,

you need long stretches of uninterrupted time.

And even though the workday is typically eight hours,

how many people here have ever had eight hours to themselves at the office?

How about seven hours?

Six? Five? Four?

When's the last time you had three hours to yourself at the office?

Two hours? One, maybe?

Very, very few people actually have

long stretches of uninterrupted time at an office.

And this is why people choose to do work at home,

or they might go to the office,

but they might go to the office really early in the day,

or late at night when no one's around,

or they stick around after everyone's left, or they go in on the weekends,

or they get work done on the plane,

or they get work done in the car or in the train

because there are no distractions.

Now, there are different kinds of distractions,

but there aren't the really bad kinds of distractions

that I'll talk about in just a minute.

And this sort of whole phenomenon

of having short bursts of time to get things done

reminds me of another thing

that doesn't work when you're interrupted,

and that is sleep.

I think that sleep and work are very closely related,

and it's not just that you can work while you're sleeping

and you can sleep while you're working.

That's not really what I mean.

I'm talking specifically about the fact

that sleep and work

are phased-based,

or stage-based, events.

So sleep is about sleep phases, or stages --

some people call them different things.

There's five of them,

and in order to get to the really deep ones, the really meaningful ones,

you have to go through the early ones.

And if you're interrupted while you're going through the early ones --

if someone bumps you in bed,

or if there's a sound, or whatever happens --

you don't just pick up where you left off.

If you're interrupted and woken up,

you have to start again.

So you have to go back a few phases and start again.

And what ends up happening -- sometimes you might have days like this

where you wake up at eight in the morning, or seven in the morning,

or whenever you get up,

and you're like, man, I didn't really sleep very well.

I did the sleep thing -- I went to bed, I laid down --

but I didn't really sleep.

People say you go to sleep,

but you really don't go to sleep, you go towards sleep.

It just takes a while. You've got to go through these phases and stuff,

and if you're interrupted, you don't sleep well.

So how do we expect -- does anyone here expect someone to sleep well

if they're interrupted all night?

I don't think anyone would say yes.

Why do we expect people to work well

if they're being interrupted all day at the office?

How can we possibly expect people to do their job

if they're going to the office to be interrupted?

That doesn't really seem like it makes a lot of sense to me.

So what are these interruptions that happen at the office

that don't happen at other places?

Because in other places, you can have interruptions,

like, you can have the TV,

or you could go for a walk,

or there's a fridge downstairs,

or you've got your own couch, or whatever you want to do.

And if you talk to certain managers,

they'll tell you that they don't want their employees to work at home

because of these distractions.

They'll also say --

sometimes they'll also say,

"Well, if I can't see the person, how do I know they're working?"

which is ridiculous, of course, but that's one of the excuses that managers give.

And I'm one of these managers.

I understand. I know how this goes.

We all have to improve on this sort of thing.

But oftentimes they'll cite distractions.

"I can't let someone work at home.

They'll watch TV. They'll do this other thing."

It turns out that those aren't the things that are really distracting.

Because those are voluntary distractions.

You decide when you want to be distracted by the TV.

You decide when you want to turn something on.

You decide when you want to go downstairs or go for a walk.

At the office, most of the interruptions and distractions

that really cause people not to get work done

are involuntary.

So let's go through a couple of those.

Now, managers and bosses

will often have you think that the real distractions at work

are things like Facebook and Twitter

and YouTube and other websites,

and in fact, they'll go so far

as to actually ban these sites at work.

Some of you may work at places where you can't get to these certain sites.

I mean, is this China? What the hell is going on here?

You can't go to a website at work,

and that's the problem, that's why people aren't getting work done,

because they're going to Facebook and they're going to Twitter?

That's kind of ridiculous. It's a total decoy.

And today's Facebook and Twitter and YouTube,

these things are just modern-day smoke breaks.

No one cared about letting people take a smoke break for 15 minutes

10 years ago,

so why does everyone care about someone going to Facebook here and there,

or Twitter here and there, or YouTube here and there?

Those aren't the real problems in the office.

The real problems are what I like to call

the M&Ms,

the Managers and the Meetings.

Those are the real problems in the modern office today.

And this is why things don't get done at work --

it's because of the M&Ms.

Now what's interesting is,

if you listen to all the places that people talk about doing work --

like at home, or in a car, or on a plane,

or late at night, or early in the morning --

you don't find managers and meetings.

You find a lot of other distractions, but you don't find managers and meetings.

So these are the things that you don't find elsewhere,

but you do find at the office.

And managers are basically people

whose job it is to interrupt people.

That's pretty much what managers are for. They're for interrupting people.

They don't really do the work,

so they have to make sure everyone else is doing the work, which is an interruption.

And we have a lot of managers in the world now,