“Pancake people – spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button”.
Psychologist and behavioral neuroscientist Daniel Levitin, author of the upcoming book The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload, recommends retraining your brain.
“Our brains are equipped to deal with the world the way it was many thousands of years ago when we were hunter-gatherers. Back then the amount of information that was coming at us was much less and it came at us much more slowly.”
“I deleted my Facebook account completely. I found it was just overwhelming me. I’m only on Twitter, I’m on SalesforceOne, which is my internal one for work, I’m on email, and that’s it. And I’m limited to that. I’m trying not to take on more stuff. I was with a friend this weekend, he’s got his Twitter, his Facebook, he has his Snapchat, he’s got all these – too much.”
Of course, part of the overload is work-related, but it’s amazing how much is pure trivia driven by FoMO and/or the need to impress by sounding knowledgeable about a twist in Game of Thrones.
You are the only person who can evaluate just how necessary your various information streams are sooner rather than later.
Because even the smallest stream adds to the river in which it is oh, so easy to drown.
Then you need gather your courage, follow Benioff’s lead and shut down the unnecessary streams.
If you’re old enough, like me, you remember when open offices for knowledge workers/professionals, i.e., cubicles, happened.
I dodged that bullet in 1980 when my company moved into new space and I got a private office, but only because of my hearing.
In those days, recruiters spent the day on the phone and, even with an amplifier, I needed quiet to hear my clients and candidates.
Everybody complained; nobody liked the bullpen/open office concept. It did not increase productivity.
Originally, the idea that noise equals energy was sold by restaurant designers.
Trendy places started using smaller tables and packing them more closely together. They eliminated sound absorbing items, such as carpeting, and adding more hard surfaces and louder music, which forced customers to talk louder, thus upping the decibel level even more.
The myth that eliminating walls boosted collaboration and creativity was sold by consultants, architects and office designers and eagerly bought into by management, primarily because it saved money — it’s a lot cheaper to build out no-wall office space.
And it became almost holy writ when discussing Millennials.
More than half of the employees complained about noise. The researchers found that Millennials were especially likely to voice concern about rising decibels, and to wear headphones to drown out the sound or leave their desks in search of quieter corners. Among the supervisors, 69 percent reported that their spaces had been laid out with noise reduction in mind; 64 percent had engineered the workplace to mute noise intruding from outside of the office, too.
After all, meaning is not made of lone facts, lone people, or lone disciplines, nor is it found in the valuing of the objective over the subjective. Rather, meaning comes by way of knitting together a bigger picture, filled with color and texture, and meant to be felt and understood. We most fully understand what we can internalize—that which becomes part of us. The importance of specializing can’t be discarded, but working only within one discipline and strictly adhering to its rules is likely only to generate one kind of work, one kind of result. (…)
Deep time is like deep water: We are constantly brought back to the surface, pulled by the wants and needs of the moment. But like exercising any sort of muscle, the more we access deep time, the more easily accessible it becomes, and the more likely we are to engage in long-term thinking. The more we embrace long-term thinking, the more ethical our decision-making becomes.
Her concept of deep time connected in my mind to HBS’ Jim Heskett’s discussion of deep thinking years ago — especially the comments. (Both are well worth reading.)
Do you notice the connection?
Both embrace silence sans distractions.
What happens when you shut off and shut out the noise of the modern world?
First comes fear; fear of the unknown that is yourself.
The fear fades as self-knowledge grows.
As it fades you see a spark; a spark that grows until it is a steady fire fueled by your own creativity.
A fire that warms you and from which you draw inspiration and ideas.
And, over the course of your life’s short version of deep time, wisdom.
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A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read allIf the Shoe Fits posts here
Startup life, especially for founders, is notoriously fast-paced, with thinking time devoted to product development, funding, growth, funding, user acquisition, funding, hiring, funding, etc.
Add to that the need/desire to interact with family and friends, compulsion to keep up with social media and daily chores, such as eating, sleeping, bathing, etc. and many will say that carving out time for quiet reflection is a nonstarter.
That said, no thinking entrepreneur questions the enormous value of attending Steve Blanks annual Lean LaunchPad class — since it offers far more than any accelerator.
It’s the difference between buying fish and learning to fish — the latter provides a lifetime of value, while the former is short-lived.
Blank and his cohorts added a week to the course this year and the reason is of paramount importance — even to those not in the startup world.
This year we made a small but substantive addition to way we teach the class, adding a week for reflection. The results have made the class massively better. (…)
We realized that we had been so focused in packing content and work into the class, we failed to give the students time to step back and think about what they actually learned.
So this year we made a change. We turned the next to last week of the class into a reflection week. Our goal—to have the students extract the insights and meaning from the work they had done in the previous seven weeks.
Reflection — (in this context) a fixing of the thoughts on something; careful consideration
Back in 2011William W. George, Senior Fellow at Harvard Business School, found that making time for self-reflection was critical for anyone aspiring to a leadership role.
Before anyone takes on a leadership role, they should ask themselves, “Why do I want to lead?” and “What’s the purpose of my leadership?”
The kind of thinking/reflecting recommended by both Blank and George can’t be done while scanning email, texting, listening to music or any of the myriad of distractions that constantly bombard you.
You need to set aside the time, turn off your devices and give yourself time to reflect and even do some deep thinking.
A growing body of neuroscience research has begun to reveal the exact ways in which information age technologies cut against the natural grain of the human mind. Our understanding of all kinds of information is shaped by our physical interaction with that information. Move from paper to screen, and your brain loses valuable “topographical” markers for memory and insight.
Although screens have their strengths in presenting information — they are, for example, good at encouraging browsing — they are lousy at helping us absorb, process, and retain information from a focused source. And good old handwriting, though far slower for most of us than typing, better deepens conceptual understanding versus taking notes on a computer — even when the computer user works without any internet or social media distractions.
In short, when you want to improve how well you remember, understand, and make sense of crucial information about your organization, sometimes it’s best to put down the tablet and pick up a pencil.
The work described was done by the Drucker Institute and is easy to try with your people.
The great news if you want to try unplugging is that the basic techniques are simple and free. Here’s an Un/Workshop-style exercise you can try on your own time, with your own team, in just a half-hour: Including yourself, get six or more of your colleagues together. Divide yourselves into two or more small groups. Give each group one piece of paper with a single question printed on it: Who is our customer?
Depending how young your team is you may incur some minor costs — like the need to shop for paper and pencils and possibly explain how to use them.
Everyone I know use smartphones; they are on Facebook; most are active on multiple social media platforms; they shop online and live on Google offerings.
And they tease me unmercifully and call me a ‘privacy nut’ (emphasis on nut) because I don’t indulge.
They find it hilarious that I see little difference between the Feds tracking us and Google scanning mail or Facebook manipulating its newsfeed.
But it turns out the main difference between me and 80-90% of the population is that I’ve already rebelled by choosing not to participate.
And nearly everyone who was asked said that they have now lost the ability to control their own data online, with 91% either agreeing, or strongly agreeing, they can’t control how companies collect and use their personal information, while 88% said they thought that it would be hard to remove inaccurate information from the Internet. (…) social media users have a lot of concern about these things. 80% said they had some concerns about third parties, such as advertisers, getting their data, while 70% said that they had concerns about the government accessing their data. And 81% said they don’t feel secure sharing information on social networks and 64% of those surveyed also said that they want the government to do more to regulate advertising.
I wouldn’t hold my breath.
We all know that Congress will never do anything, let alone provide the kind of privacy protection that Europeans enjoy and Google kicked Disconnect out of the Android app shop.
But the worms may turn, so perhaps, as opposed to being a trailing-end holdout, I’m on the bleeding edge of a new trend.
When you’re ridding a comet of popularity and constantly need to release a new, better version does it make sense to take a step back and garner outside to better understand why your product is hot?
Or are you confident enough in your vision that you feel it’s unnecessary?
Would it surprise you to know that the success of the iPhone was due to the very feature Steve Jobs belittled in his competitors?
People became blackberry addicts because they could do more on the larger screen.
The iPhone’s screen was substantially larger than Nokia.
Can you even imagine surfing the Net, watching videos or streaming a movie to a phone with a screen like these?
In hindsight, it’s not weird that Jobs might have been wrong about consumer preference for screen sizes in the four years following his death. Rather, it’s weird that he didn’t acknowledge that the iPhone’s (relatively) big screen size was actually driving its popularity while he was alive.
The iPhone is arguably one of Jobs’ greatest hits, yet he never really understood why—because the ‘why’ clashed with his vision.
To acknowledge something you need to be aware of it.
And no matter how good you are at seeing around corners, you may need to modify your own vision to respond accurately to what your market craves.
“They haven’t used it,” he told me. “We limit how much technology our kids use at home.”
Jobs wasn’t alone.
Since then, I’ve met a number of technology chief executives and venture capitalists who say similar things: they strictly limit their children’s screen time, often banning all gadgets on school nights, and allocating ascetic time limits on weekends.
Chris Anderson, the former editor of Wired and now chief executive of 3D Robotics, Alex Constantinople, the chief executive of the OutCast Agency, Evan Williams, a founder of Blogger, Twitter and Medium and Lesley Gold, founder and chief executive of the SutherlandGold Group all limit or say no to technology for their kids.
“That’s because we have seen the dangers of technology firsthand. I’ve seen it in myself, I don’t want to see that happen to my kids.” –Chris Anderson
Limited or outright banned, technology is handled differently by those in tech when it comes to their kids.
Although some non-tech parents I know give smartphones to children as young as 8, many who work in tech wait until their child is 14. While these teenagers can make calls and text, they are not given a data plan until 16. But there is one rule that is universal among the tech parents I polled.
“This is rule No. 1: There are no screens in the bedroom. Period. Ever,” Mr. Anderson said.
The blue light from personal electronic devices has also been linked to serious physical and mental health problems.
(My sister’s doctor warned her months ago, but it took the article to make her stop.)
What the tech world sees is no different from what other people see on the news, but they pay more attention.
Not that any of this will change the ads or overall marketing of tech—it will keep targeting kids—hook them early they’re yours for life—and encouraging people of all ages to use their screens when it’s dark.
So much for the vaunted tech values of authenticity and transparency.
Actually, taking a step back, tech’s attitude seems more in tune with politicians’ attitude—more of a do as I say, not as I do approach.
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Startup life, especially for founders, is notoriously fast-paced, with thinking time devoted to product development, funding, growth, funding, user acquisition, funding, hiring, funding, etc.
What makes a hit a hit?
