Poking through 11+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.
Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.
This post dates from 2013. I think it’s a safe bet that the number of half-assed things being done now vs then have increased by several orders of magnitude. The year is nearly over, so this may be a good time to take a step back and ask yourself, “am I whole-assing my life or…”
LikeHack founder Jane Smorodnikova pointed me to an excellent video about productivity on a blog called Sparring Mind that is owned and written by Gregory Ciotti, the marketing director of a Boston startup called Help Scout.
Some of what’s included
Why worrying about having “more willpower” is a fool’s game
How world class experts stay productive… and what they do differently
The science behind why better energy management = a more productive you
Big pitfalls that lead to busywork and procrastination
I especially like Ciotti’s closing line, “Multitasking is your enemy: Treat it as such. Block out unwanted distractions and as Ron Swanson would say, “Never half-ass two things, whole-ass one thing.”
Based on today’s love affair with multitasking, the number of half-assed things being done could fill the cloud.
The first article I saw that confirmed (always a nice thing) my personal belief that multitasking was the best way increase incompetency was in the WSJ in 2003, although some of the first experiments were in 1999.
A growing body of scientific research shows one of jugglers’ favorite time-saving techniques, multitasking, can actually make you less efficient and, well, stupider.
Six years later research using students at Stanford, who grew up doing multiple things simultaneously, the verdict on multitasking, was reinforced. Most interesting was the proof that the more a person multitasked in their lives the worse they did on the tests.
Multitasking is not efficient, nor does it get more work done faster. Quite the opposite. One task interferes with another, so everything takes longer because the brain loses time–and accuracy–in repeatedly shifting its effort.
Around the same time David Strayer, a professor of psychology at the University of Utah, who has been studying attention—how it works and how it doesn’t—his whole career, made a surprising discovery.
Much to his surprise, he identified a tiny group he calls “supertaskers.”
In this case tiny really means tiny—around 2% of the population.
Worse, for the 98%, practice doesn’t help, since it turns out the ability is most likely genetic.
Of course, humans being humans, people assume they are part of that 2%.
“The ninety-eight per cent of us, we deceive ourselves. And we tend to overrate our ability to multitask.” (…) The better someone thought she was, the more likely it was that her performance was well below par.
The researchers have developed an online version of the test, so if you are curious or actually think you are part of that 2% you can take the test and know for sure.
LikeHack founder Jane Smorodnikova pointed me to an excellent video about productivity on a blog called Sparring Mind that is owned and written by Gregory Ciotti, the marketing director of a Boston startup called Help Scout.
Some of what’s included
Why worrying about having “more willpower” is a fool’s game
How world class experts stay productive… and what they do differently
The science behind why better energy management = a more productive you
Big pitfalls that lead to busywork and procrastination
I especially like Ciotti’s closing line, “Multitasking is your enemy: Treat it as such. Block out unwanted distractions and as Ron Swanson would say, “Never half-ass two things, whole-ass one thing.”
Based on today’s love affair with multitasking, the number of half-assed things being done could fill the cloud.
Of course, I’m frequently told that multitasking is the only way to function and that if I were younger I would understand that, blah, blah.
Founders and startup people are especially likely to tell me my advice to focus is dinosaurian, so I’m delighted every time I read the same comments from experts, such as Y Combinator partner Sam Altman,
“For whatever reasons, many founders love to spend time on anything else—worrying about the details of corporate structures, interviewing lawyers, doing a really good job bookkeeping, etc. All of this pretending-to-run-a-company gets in the way of actually running a company.”
Results showed that heavy media multitaskers are more susceptible to interference from irrelevant environmental stimuli and from irrelevant representations in memory. This led to the surprising result that heavy media multitaskers performed worse on a test of task-switching ability, likely due to reduced ability to filter out interference from the irrelevant task set.
I’m not going to write more, because I would rather you read Altman, Stanford and my old posts and the links in them—I’m sure their opinion will carry more weight.
However, I’m doubtful it will make a difference, since most people consume stuff they don’t want to know through a “but me” filter.
Way back in 2006 I was preaching the value of unwiring and I’ve written often on the fallacy of multitasking and the resultant diminishing productivity and creativity.
A new post at HBR is titled The Magic of Doing One Thing at a Time and connects the always-on, multitasking approach to high burn-out levels in the workforce.
What we’ve lost, above all, are stopping points, finish lines and boundaries. Technology has blurred them beyond recognition. Wherever we go, our work follows us, on our digital devices, ever insistent and intrusive. It’s like an itch we can’t resist scratching, even though scratching invariably makes it worse.
Of nearly 500 comments, almost all of those I scanned were in agreement.
83% of the US population owns a cell and nearly half of them are smartphones, but there are unlikely holdouts.
Nicholas Carr, author of “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains,” argues in the book that because of the brain’s neuroplasticity, Web surfing rewires people to be more adept at perfunctory multitasking, but diminishes the ability to sustain focus and think interpretatively.
It’s not just an age thing; younger users voice similar concerns.
Jim Harig, 24, a senior evaluation analyst at Ernst & Young in Chicago… Mr. Harig said he worried about distractibility and regarded most applications as time wasters instead of productivity boosters. “I don’t want to end up falling victim to the smartphone, where I dive in and get lost for hours at a time.”
There is enormous peer pressure on both topics—multitasking has become a competitive sport (watch for the first World Multitasking Championship) as have smartphones—and peer pressure is no easier to combat as an adult than it was as a teen.
However, you do have a choice and, hopefully, your choice will reflect your long-term health and success as opposed to the short-term goal of fitting in or being cool.
Entrepreneurs face difficulties that are hard for most people to imagine, let alone understand. You can find anonymous help and connections that do understand at 7 cups of tea.
Crises never end.
$10 really does make a difference and you’ll never miss it,
I’ve always believed that the ability to multitask is 
Way back in 2006 I was preaching the 
