Managing tech overload at work

The more we innovate, the more new things we end up juggling.

I recently joined the People Managing People podcast and had a great conversation with David Rice, a senior editor there. You can listen to the podcast here (sorry about the audio issues).

Our conversation mostly focused on how to manage innovation at work, especially as the pace of change intensifies and time becomes limited—a topic I’ve written about here before and recently in the Harvard Business Review (gift link).

Here are a few snippets from our chat, with some light editing for clarity.

We love shiny new things at work.

“As humans, we fairly quickly get bored of old things. David, if you look at the stuff around you, your mic and all the tools, you’ve had them for a while—you probably don’t pay much attention to them, right? They’re just there. They exist. You’re used to them. Then when someone comes along with some shiny new mic or some new software that’s going to revolutionize the way you podcast and do other work, you’re programmed to get really excited about that.”

The risks of adding too many new things at once.

“Many inventions have improved the way we live and have improved the way that we work. But there are so many and one of the big costs in the workplace is this idea of innovation burnout, which is just too many new things, too many new initiatives, too many tools to manage. It can take a lot of the fun and joy out of learning something new. The real risk there is you go from something that can be really energizing and exciting to just another thing you now have to do.”

Tip: As you add new things to your to-do list, consider also keeping a “don’t-do” list.

Beware of the innovation paradox.

“As we encourage more [innovation], people start inventing new things and they start experimenting more. Those experiments turn into great ideas that get launched and get implemented and now we have a little bit less time and attention to focus on future experimentation and innovation. You go through that cycle again, after a little while, now you have all of these new things that you’ve implemented and launched, and no one has time to experiment and innovate. And so in a way, the culture that you’re trying to create could, in some instances, make it harder to retain that culture and sustain it.”

Tip: Subtracting something old from your workload before adding something new can help.

Some processes will be flawed. How can you fix them?

“There are going to be flaws in workflows that we implement and steps that we put into place and policies that we make people follow. We’re going to put in processes that are not going to be ideal and are going to waste people’s time and you’re sometimes not going to realize that until you’ve done it. And you can look at it and say, maybe this is not the best way to do it.

Roblox has something called ‘bureaucracy busters,’ which is this internal tool they use where anyone in the organization can submit a process that they feel is broken … I love this approach because it really opens it up and signals to the workplace that we actually don’t want you wasting your time, but we can’t see everything that you’re doing, and we can’t see all the parts of it that are broken. So we want to hear from you.”

Tip: Learn more about how to overcome process debt in my HBR piece.

Thanks for reading,

Eric