MANAGING THE MATRIX

Businesspeople can’t live without their cell phones, personal digital assistants and e-mail accounts, but they lament the way such personal technologies impinge on virtually every aspect of work and personal life.

That’s the feedback from a recent online poll of more than 2,000 local businesspeople by the Las Vegas Review-Journal and the Las Vegas Business Press.

A majority of survey participants said they got more done before the advent of PDAs, e-mail and related technologies. Others said such innovations have made them more productive.

It’s all about proportion, some respondents said.

“The convenience of immediate answers and instant communication has great advantages as well as inconveniences,” wrote survey respondent Jody Mack, director of corporate affairs of CardioVascular BioTherapeutics. “It is a balance that has to be managed.”

Added CORE Construction President Gary Siroky: “There must be a balance. E-mail is a positive means of communicating if it is treated as such. Responding to e-mail does not need to be a ‘real-time’ event but should be treated as a task and scheduled accordingly.”

That’s advice Marsha Egan, CEO of The Egan Group of Pennsylvania and eganemailsolutions.com, heartily endorses.

Too many businesspeople revert to primitive Pavlovian conditioning when it comes to e-mails, texts, cell phone messages and other forms of electronic communication. They’re like lab rats in food experiments: Give rats a treat every time they push a lever, and they soon learn to push the lever only when they’re hungry. Make the snacks intermittent and random, and the rats can’t quit tapping away. Such is the human relationship with e-mails and text messages, as people continually check in-boxes, just waiting for new messages to appear. As much as 10 percent of the population shows signs of e-mail addiction, Egan said.

Electronic distractions can impose real costs on businesses.

It takes the average worker four minutes to recover from even the shortest interruption, Egan said. If e-mails and instant messages grab employees’ attention a mere 15 times a day, that’s an hour of time lost just getting back to work.

But the local businesses who participated in the Review-Journal/Business Press survey mostly gave positive marks to technology.

The Internet and e-mail have only improved operations at WashWorks, a car-wash business in southwest Las Vegas.

Owner and survey participant Richard Olden deploys e-mail and an internal company Web site to stay in close contact with out-of-state partners in WashWorks. When Olden posts company results on the Intranet for his partners to look at, “it’s the same as them being in the next office,” he said. Via a secure site, Olden can inform partners of daily sales by store, labor hours and other key metrics by which they measure the business.

Olden also uses the Web to drum up repeat business for his stores. Regular clients can join WashWorks’ Sparkle Club, through which they receive promotional e-mails and offers for free services.

And each of WashWorks’ two locations has three computers with free Wi-Fi access, so customers can surf the Web while they’re waiting for their cars.

“The Internet is such an inexpensive technology today that it makes no sense to do anything besides give it away for free as a service to our customers,” Olden said.

Also lauding the role personal technologies play in business is survey respondent Joe Stewart, a Realtor and co-owner of the Stewart Team home-sales brokerage of Realty Executives. Stewart said he’s always embraced emerging technology — his practice launched its first Web site in 1993 — and in June, he traded in his Palm Pilot and cell phone for one device: a Treo 750 personal digital assistant. The PDA lets Stewart talk on the phone, check e-mail, log onto the Internet to read business headlines and access the real estate community’s Multiple Listing Service to view homes on the market. Better yet, his Treo allows Stewart to track in real time prospective customers eyeing his listings.

“Real estate is short-attention-span theater, so you really have to be in touch with potential clients and interested parties quickly,” Stewart said.

Survey participant Kim Purcell, chief financial officer of Trident Development, uses a PDA to stay organized and track his schedule. He appreciates the ability to communicate quickly with business associates using both phone and e-mail. Also, e-mailed documents are vastly superior in clarity to faxed copies, and they’re available immediately.

But the technologies have a flip side, Purcell said.

Some employees succumb to the temptation of 24-hour connectivity, spending too much work time on personal e-mails, text messages and phone calls to friends and family. And finalizing contracts by e-mail can make for confusion, as different parties make their changes and resend updates.

“The next thing you know, you’ve got four or five versions on your computer, and you’re not sure which one is most current,” Purcell said. “Because of the ease of sending something around, you can end up with a lot of copies, and you might not know what you’re dealing with.”

Personal-productivity expert Peggy Duncan said most high-tech trip-ups come from two simple mistakes.

First, too many professionals adopt a gadget or a software program before considering whether or how it will improve operations.

“A lot of people run out and buy the next hottest thing without figuring out if it makes sense for their processes,” said Duncan, an Atlanta author whose books include “Conquer Email Overload” and “Put Time Management to Work…Live the Life You Want.”

Duncan urges business owners to think hard about their company’s procedures, and evaluate which technologies would best serve those functions. If they spend 90 percent of their time in the office, maybe they don’t need to invest in hand-held mobile devices to check e-mail, for example.

Buying the wrong technologies is partly behind the on-call mind-set prevalent among today’s entrepreneurs, Duncan said.

“Why are you sleeping with your BlackBerry under your pillow? It’s a 9-1-1 mentality, and a lot of it comes from not having stated processes and procedures in your business,” she said. “You think only you can handle something, because your processes are in your head. You feel like you have to be available every time something beeps or rings.”

Skipping out on training is the second major tech error business managers make, Duncan said. Perhaps they think they don’t have the time or money to understand their technologies, but Duncan said not learning how a piece of equipment works can cost more in the long run.

Stewart has an alternative solution to the madness. Unless he has scheduled business to conduct with shift workers or clients stationed overseas, he simply hits his Treo’s off button at the end of the day.

Said Stewart: “It’s just a tool. It’s not your mother.”

This story first appeared in the Business Press. Jennifer Robison writes for the Business Press’ sister publication, the Las Vegas Review-Journal. She can be reached at jrobison@reviewjournal.com or 380-4512.