Speed trap trips many

Today’s plugged-in
workers need to know when to slow down.

CHICAGO TRIBUNE

CHICAGO — Sometimes, Jane Zweig feels the faster she works, the more she has to do.

On the road nearly nonstop since May, the telecommunications industry consultant returned to an office as crammed with projects as her schedule is with appointments.

She figures the mess is a signal she needs to make time to clear away the clutter.

“It’s really getting to me,” says the chief executive of Maryland-based Shosteck Group. “I feel like I can’t breathe.”

Pressure to get more done in less time, a hallmark of the digital era, has dogged workers at least since the Industrial Age.

Witness the 1952 “I Love Lucy” television episode in which Lucille Ball goes to work in a candy factory with her friend Ethel.

When chocolates come sailing down a conveyor belt faster than the women can wrap them, they frantically stuff the candy in their cheeks and clothes to fool their supervisor. Their ruse works too well.

“Fine, you’re doing splendidly,” the supervisor says, then turns to yell, “Speed it up a little!”

Then as now, it’s not speed that drives us crazy. It’s our inability to control how often and how fast we have to respond to the demands flying at us.

We hate being forced to wait as much as we resist being made to hurry, observes Vince Poscente, a former Olympic speed skier and author of “The Age of Speed: Learning to Thrive in a More-Faster-Now World.”

As proof he cites a billboard campaign that touted a bank’s ability to shave 18 seconds off a transaction.

The trick isn’t trying to slow things down but knowing when and how to speed them up, says Poscente, a motivational speaker who hops off his fast track for 25 minutes twice every day to meditate. Once we embrace speed, “we’re responsible for switching it off,” he says.

Monica Rohleder, a communications consultant, confesses she’s still learning the switching off part. A walking advertisement for mobile technology, she carries a laptop, a cell phone with a Bluetooth headset for voice calls and a BlackBerry for e-mail.

“I can be on the phone talking to someone and looking at my e-mail so I don’t miss a beat,” she says.

Should her phone go unanswered, a service delivers her voice mails in a single text message so she can scan them faster.

Her anywhere, anytime availability and the speed with which she reacts “definitely means my workload increases,” says the principal in California-based Signal Rock Communications.

And so do her social opportunities.

“It all melds into one,” she says. “Wherever I’m going to travel for work, I always meet up with a friend.”

Of course, something has to give. “I live on the ocean and I sometimes forget it’s there,” she concedes.

About once a month she takes a weekend to detox. “I sit on the beach, I’ll take a golf lesson, drink some great wine and watch movies at home” with a friend. she said.

Social entrepreneur John F. Connolly Jr. is another who is learning to master his predilection for going fast.

At a recent conference in Chicago he clutched his BlackBerry in his left hand while scribbling notes with his right during a speech. He figures he glances at the device about five times an hour.

“It could be an employee, a customer, it could be my wife,” explained the CEO of Philadelphia-based InspiriTec, which trains disabled workers for technology jobs.

“We’re an ‘interrupt’-driven culture,” he said. “Here comes another [e-mail]. I used to think, ‘I’ll just handle it and be done.”’

But after finding himself in a long, argumentative e-mail discussion several years ago, he decided his habit of responding immediately to every message was slowing him down.

“I said, ‘I’m going to manage my temptation.’ Speed is not always desirable. I pick up a message not to react but to reflect. Even if I’m capable of giving an immediate response, I ask, ‘Does it require one? Should I respond by e-mail or by phone, or does this require a meeting?’”

David Ormesher, CEO of Closerlook Inc., a Chicago-based strategic communications agency, says his clients appreciate an occasional reminder that “more faster” isn’t always the best solution.

“Sometimes they need a little bit of an arm around the shoulder, for us to say, ‘Let’s just slow this ship down. What really are your priorities?”’ he says. One of the downsides of delivering more work in less time is that expectations ratchet up, so Ormesher taps the brakes.

“Where in the past we might have come up with three or four solutions, clients are beginning to trust us to come up with two ideas,” he says. “We’re streamlining the process.”

He’s struck by the number of people he knows who a year ago vowed they would never buy a BlackBerry but who now carry one.

At the same time, he says, “there’s kind of a wistful longing to get off the grid.”

He unplugged completely for three weeks during a recent trip to Africa, but you don’t have to travel to get away. You can simply turn off all your gadgets and quell your inner supervisor’s voice when she hollers, “Speed it up a little!”

“You learn to walk away,” Ormesher says.