I, and dozens of others, have written on the negative and downright destructive effects from social media’s FOMO.

However, I hadn’t given any thought to the idea that it had invaded the workplace, too.

As if email [at work] wasn’t bad enough at cultivating FOMO, we now have a new generation of real-time tools like chat to stoke it. Yet another thing that asks for your continuous partial attention all day on the premise that you can’t miss out.

FOMO is just as detrimental at work as it is personally. It distracts, interrupts conversations, and destroys focus.

Basecamp noticed and not only created a solution, but also gave it a catchy, sharable name.

People should be missing out! Most people should miss out on most things most of the time. That’s what we try to encourage at my company, Basecamp. JOMO! The joy of missing out.

It’s JOMO that lets you turn off the firehose of information and chatter and interruptions to actually get the right shit done. It’s JOMO that lets you catch up on what happened today as a single summary email tomorrow morning rather than with a drip-drip-drip feed throughout the day.

Once again, Basecamp hits a homerun. (Two previous posts, here and here, talk about others.)

If you’re impressed with Basecamp’s ideas, you’ll not only enjoy It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work, by Basecamp co-founders Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, you’ll also find solutions you can use.

Image credit: Basecamp

I wrote on this a bit last week.

When it comes to open floor plans you have the ability to break concentration pretty quickly.

Maybe you ask a work-related question, or you see someone walk by who catches your attention, or it could be the other meeting occurring five feet away that draws your attention.

All in all, it can add up to a loud and unproductive environment.

That said, there is another issue at hand: the collective focus of our country.

I have political leanings (most folks do), but I don’t address them in this forum.

However, I have found it is very difficult to focus with the hyper-political environment we are in right now.

The latest on Trump, Supreme Court nominees, and international trade dominate the conversations. Even at work, I have found it can be a minefield to even poke into certain topics. How do we overcome this?

One thing I have started doing is actually turning off the news and not keeping up with every little change to the topics of the day; it can be a bit freeing. At the same time, I am not in a position where I can be completely ignorant of what is happening.

I have also found that there is common ground among my co-workers on how divisive it has all become.

And it is a lot harder to push your politics on someone when they are standing right in front of you. The shield of anonymity is gone.

I have found that reading negative press also has the added effect of making me less productive.

I focus on the negative and it goes into my head. What good is all that?

So maybe next week we can focus on the positive and move forward?

Most of us get presidential alerts on our phone now, but we can also turn them off.

Image credit: VirtualWolf

Why in the world do so many people choose to run at 60% efficiency?

“Not me,” I hear you saying.

Yes, you.

It’s the price you pay for enabling ‘notifications’ on your phone.

Your phone sitting there, constantly lighting up throughout the day creates this pattern in the brain scientists call “switch cost.”

It essentially means when there is an interruption, such as a notification, we switch our attention away from the task, then have to return afterwards — which is costly in terms of brain power, as well as time.

There are a finite number of hours in the day and we plan in an effort to spend them wisely, so it makes sense that we should plan how to spend our daily allotment of brain power/energy just as wisely.

Considering the toll, notifications doesn’t seem to fall in the wise column.

“We think it interrupts our efficiency with our brains, by about 40%,” Scott Bea, a psychologist at Cleveland Clinic told CBS. “Our nose is always getting off the grindstone, then we have to reorient ourselves.”

Beyond reducing effectiveness, notifications near constant interruptions directly effects our brains.

According to a study, presented at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America last November, the interruptions from alerts to your smartphone could be altering your brain chemistry. (…) Constantly waiting for the next notification can put you on edge, meaning when it comes, your body releases cortisol, causing you heart rate to jump.

Even if you scoff at the addictive and brain-altering effects of notifications, do you really want to stake your career progression/success on functioning at 60% efficiency?

After all, it is your choice.

Check out some of the other posts/links about the myth of multitasking and its negative effects.

Image credit: Erik Pitti

I am reading a book right now called “Think and Grow Rich” by Napoleon Hill. The book was written in 1937 and has stood the test of time. The premise of it is simple. The author spent time with the titans of his time and observed what separated those that amassed great wealth from those that didn’t. I am still reading the book, but what it boils down to is not education, physical abilities, or even intelligence that will grant you success.

It’s mindset and being able to focus your energies towards a goal without stopping.

I am not sure how I stumbled across the book, but I figure if a book from the 1930’s was still being discussed, I should read it.

In my own life I want to attain a certain amount of wealth, but not for wealth alone. In fact, I find the single minded pursuit of money to have an emptiness to it. However, I have found that those who create wealth in a just way can also create an ecosystem around them that can be almost self-sustaining.

Mentorship can be offered to others. Ideas that require capital can be pursued. Innovations can be perfected and causes can be embraced.

If you look at a man like Bill Gates you see a savvy businessman that has spawned an industry and can now use his great wealth to promote positive actions around the world. However, he would never be in that position if he had not been single-minded with his company in the beginning.

I doubt myself constantly or tell myself no when I should say yes.

Abundance comes not from being timid, but by being bold and honest with what you want.

Think of the possibilities you could pursue should you truly embrace who you are. It would be better for everyone!

And without making this seem like a rah rah post about positive thoughts, consider the fact that we have nothing to lose by pursing a better version of ourselves.

I am still working on the book, but I encourage you to try it. Is it going to make you think in a new way? Perhaps, but that can be a positive. The author has some insight and he is genuine with his writing.

What would you do with abundance?

Image credit: Good Reads

It’s amazing to me, but looking back over a decade of writing I find posts that still impress, with information that is as useful now as when it was written. Golden Oldies is a collection of what I consider some of the best posts during that time.

The idea of managers as coaches responsible for encouraging and facilitating their people’s professional development has grown into a major movement. One question remains the same.  Read other Golden Oldies here

How much management/coaching is too much?

I hear that question a lot.

Most managers want to do a good job and are looking for ways to improve.

But, as one commented recently, if you do everything recommended by the experts you would use so much of each person’s time that productivity would tumble and even the best coaching would have a negative impact.

Which is why I say that management and coffee are similar.

In the right amount coffee is good for your brain and may help you live longer.

The right amount of management/coaching is good for the brain in that it provides challenges that foster growth; it also lowers frustration and stress, which enhances mental and physical health.

According to the research, the “right” amount of coffee is around 20 ounces a day, i.e., one venti-size Starbucks.

That equates to the most effective management/coaching, which provides all the information needed to do the job at one time (not more nor less) and then gets out of the way while staying accessible if needed.

Many of the coffee-fueled are more likely to drink three to five ventis a day, which is detrimental to health and longevity.

A comparable amount of management/coaching is detrimental to health, productivity and retention.

But if you’re still not sure how much coaching is best for of your people, you might resort to an old fashioned approach and discuss it with each one directly — face-to-face.

Flickr image credit: Kurtis Garbutt

A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here

I’ve always believed that the ability to multitask is destructive, a crock or, at best, wishful thinking, as I’ve said more than once.

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.”

And recent research from Stanford University on the impact of heavy media consumption.

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.

Image credit: HikingArtist

Ask most people if they hear people or listen to them and they’ll say they listen.

But if you are checking email, doing stuff on your smart phone; thinking about dinner, plotting a date with the hot guy/gal you chatted with while getting your morning coffee, listening to the conversation at the next table or any of a myriad of other things then you aren’t listening.

The difference between the sense of hearing and the skill of listening is attention.

Attention means you focus on the person talking.

Focus involves your eyes, ears and mind,

Focus does not include thinking about and formulating your reply based on the first part of what is said.

This is especially important if you are a boss.

Think of listening as an investment in your people that carries a high return.

Your ROI comes in the form of improved productivity, increased innovation and greater loyalty.

And the only cost is a little self-discipline.

What a deal.

Flickr image credit: Rich Anderson

No, not the buzz of social media, but the buzz in open office environments.
These days companies spend both time and money creating and managing the buzz of social networks—more every year—with varying degrees of success.

But only the most perceptive are recognizing the need to manage the noise level, especially of conversations, whether on cell phones or between colleagues, in open office environments.

“The noisemakers aren’t so bothered by the lack of privacy, but most people are not happy, and designers are finally starting to pay attention to the problem.” –John Goins

Studies have proved over and over that human brains can’t multitask and that doing so reduces competency on all tasks; of even more concern is reduced productivity.

Researchers at Finland’s Institute of Occupational Health have studied precisely how far those conversations carry and analyzed their effect on the unwilling listener: a decline of 5 percent to 10 percent on the performance of cognitive tasks requiring efficient use of short-term memory, like reading, writing and other forms of creative work.

Most people actually tune out conversation-blocking background noise like music for focus-intensive work such as writing, but conversations are a different matter.

Noise is not conducive to creativity.

“Noise is the most serious problem in the open-plan office, and speech is the most disturbing type of sound because it is directly understood in the brain’s working memory,” said Valtteri Hongisto, an acoustician at the institute. He found that workers were more satisfied and performed better at cognitive tasks when speech sounds were masked by a background noise of a gently burbling brook.

Autodesk got the message and installed what is known as a pink-noise system in its Massachusetts offices.

Pink-noise provides a soft whooshing over loudspeakers that sounds like a ventilation system but is specially formulated to match the frequencies of human voices.

To test its validity they turned it off after three months and the complaints poured in.

“We were surprised at how many complaints we got,” said Charles Rechtsteiner, Autodesk’s facilities manager. “People weren’t sure what was different, but they knew something was wrong. They were being distracted by conversations 60 feet away. When the system’s on, speech becomes unintelligible at a distance of about 20 feet.”

Whether your company recognizes the problem or not, there are many things that you can do in your area to avoid noise-related productivity loss.

The first is to make sure that you are not part of the problem, because you will change no one else’s actions with a do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do approach.

Next, talk to your team; find the problems and work together to alleviate them as opposed to assigning blame to a few gabby colleagues.

Flickr image credit: debaird™

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