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.
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.”
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?
A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read allIf the Shoe Fits posts here.
When I was young there was a riddle making the rounds (it probably still is) that went like this.
Railroad crossing look out for the cars, can you spell it without any rs?
You could spend a lifetime puzzling over how to spell ‘railroad crossing’ without an r.
Or you could spend just a few seconds focusing and thinking about what was actually said (or rereading it if written), instead of reacting to the overall idea.
There is constant chatter about how fast you must go to keep up with today’s world, so who has time to focus/think?
Of course, if you listen mindfully, instead of multitasking, or read carefully, instead of scanning, you wouldn’t have to go back and do it over.
The people who have no trouble with riddles like this one are literalists.
They respond to exactly what they hear/see because you can’t be a literalist without being mindful. The two go hand-in-hand.
Why should this matter to you?
Because your your instructions need to work for both, as the following two examples, one conversational and one written, graphically show.
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.
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 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.
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 have a lot on their minds; they’re famous for multitasking; they’re usually shorthanded; they wear many hats and do whatever is necessary to turn their vision into a reality.
Few admit it, but with all this action stuff is bound to slip through the cracks now and then.
The trick is to be sure that what slips isn’t critical.
Of course, it still happens—even to big companies with lots of people to focus on the details.
Stuff slips because everyone thinks it’s in someone else’s job description or because it’s so basic and so important that there’s a subconscious assumption that it’s been taken care of.
Stuff such as domain registration.
Hard to believe, but domain lapse* seems to happen to everybody from super-hot startups, Foursquare in 2010, to government, New Jersey Transit in 2011.
An early casualty was Hotmail in 1999, while Disney’s Club Penguin was just last week.
The Washington Post and Gawker made 2004 the year for both old and new media to slip.
There’s a simple, low-tech solution to avoiding critical slips; it won’t stop them all slips, but it will stop critical.
It’s called a whiteboard, but the trick is not to use dry erase pens.
Instead use a permanent marker and list nothing on it except critical items, such as domain renewal dates.
Identifying what goes on the board is simple, too.
“Critical stuff” encompasses those things without which there is no company.
Unlike many people I like slow. I don’t like my days jamb-packed, I don’t over-book myself and am very good at saying no when necessary. I enjoy conversation and have found that real communications can’t be rushed.
In short, I believe as Gandhi did when he said, “There is more to life than simply increasing its speed.”
Computers have sped everything up, but as common wisdom says, “All computers wait at the same speed.”
I also chuckle at David Ferrier’s view of the technology, “Computer: a million morons working at the speed of light.”
Two thoughts from Edward R. Murrow are worth sharing. The first is, “The newest computer can merely compound, at speed, the oldest problem in the relations between human beings, and in the end the communicator will be confronted with the old problem, of what to say and how to say it.”
Sadly, the old problem is often solved as it always has been, by saying whatever comes to mind without consideration for its clarity or even its veracity. Murrow had something to say about that, too, “The speed of communications is wondrous to behold. It is also true that speed can multiply the distribution of information that we know to be untrue.”
Isaac Asimov said “I am not a speed reader. I am a speed understander,” but that’s only true for those who take the time to actually listen. These days most folks are so busy multitasking that I doubt they listen with more than 20% of their mind.
Finally, listen and take heed of a very wise woman (not me).
Maya Angelou said, “Since time is the one immaterial object which we cannot influence–neither speed up nor slow down, add to nor diminish–it is an imponderably valuable gift.”
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,
When I was young there was a riddle making the rounds (it probably still is) that went like this.
and
Way back in 2006 I was preaching the 
Entrepreneurs have a lot on their minds; they’re famous for multitasking; they’re usually shorthanded; they wear many hats and do whatever is necessary to turn their vision into a reality.
Unlike many people I like slow. I don’t like my days jamb-packed, I don’t over-book myself and am very good at saying no when necessary. I enjoy conversation and have found that real communications can’t be rushed.
