The real reasons you're working so hard...

The off switch
There's plenty of demand for new technologies that more efficiently foster collaboration, such as software that allows virtual meetings, where everyone doesn't need to be present simultaneously. "Our communication tools are woefully inadequate," says Alph Bingham, a top executive at Eli Lilly who is vice-president of e.Lilly. "We are still relying on sticking everyone in a room and hammering it out. It's untenable globally."

Another time-eater: all the meetings and e-mails required to manage details of a collaboration or partnership. "Organizations need to recognize that when you engage in collaboration, there's another level of complexity," says Bingham. Part of the solution is to hire people for a new type of position devoted to facilitating or managing networks and relationships. Lilly, for example, created a new internal group -- almost like ombudsmen -- to manage communications among Lilly scientists and myriad outside partners. "This allows the scientists to dedicate less of their time to the collaboration," says Bingham.

Adding new software and more people to reduce the cost of collaboration is great -- as long as it doesn't create even more work. To really ease the work overload -- and, not coincidentally, make corporations more nimble -- it's also essential to identify and eliminate unnecessary interactions. "Sometimes people need to remind themselves that there is an off switch -- and use it," says Paul Saffo, a director at the Institute for the Future, a think tank based in Palo Alto, Calif. "Solitude is the scarce resource in business lives -- having that time when you are disconnected and realizing that everything will go along fine without you."

To reduce time pressures -- and hike productivity -- the number of low-value interactions must be cut. "The usual assumption is that more collaboration is better," says Rob Cross, an assistant professor at the University of Virginia's McIntire School of Commerce who also runs Network Roundtable, a research group whose members include Schlumberger, Microsoft, Intel, Merck, and BP. "But it's important to ask not just where we need to build and connect but where do we need to let go?"

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By having workers fill out a 15- to 20-minute online survey, Cross can chart who people communicate with, how much time is spent preparing for which meetings, and where the bottlenecks are. "Then I ask executives: 'What decisions are you making that others can make?"' says Cross. "Are there aspects of your role that you could let go of?"

Masterfoods used this methodology to map out how its product development, packaging, and process-development staff spent their time. The results were surprising. "When we looked at the data, it turned out that it was too hard to do business internally," says Helferich, then head of Masterfoods' R&D. People had to talk to 30 or 40 other people just to get their jobs done, which took away from their time to work on new ideas. Notes Helferich: "We were high-density on task and low-density on innovation." Now Masterfoods is in the process of redesigning the workflow of the packaging group to eliminate a lot of the extraneous steps that took up time.

If you are high enough in your organization, you can simply choose when to make yourself unavailable. Bryan, one of McKinsey's top consultants, says he has given up cell phones and computers, letting others handle his communications. "I never had time to think," says Bryan. "It's amazing how much you can get done if you don't spend all your time interacting."

Many of the most overloaded managers are not yet at a level where they have the luxury of controlling their schedules or dispensing with unproductive e-mails, pesky voice mails, and interminable meetings. But in terms of reducing work overload, perhaps the biggest and most difficult step will be for corporations to give their knowledge workers more freedom over their own time. "The Industrial Age approach to management dies a pretty tough death," says Babson's Davenport. "Even today people end up being evaluated not only on how much they produce but also on how many hours they are in the office."

Of course, there's one shiny new example of where output matters more than process: the Web. Nobody cares how long it took or what time of night it was when someone wrote a blog entry -- all that's seen is the final result. Similarly, the success of open-source development projects such as Linux and Apache, the most popular Web server software, rests on the competence of the programmers involved, not on how many hours they log.

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