The More You Multitask, the Worse You Get at It
From an article I’ve been reading on leadership and solitude:
That’s the first half of the lecture: the idea that true leadership means being able to think for yourself and act on your convictions. But how do you learn to do that? How do you learn to think? Let’s start with how you don’t learn to think. A study by a team of researchers at Stanford came out a couple of months ago. The investigators wanted to figure out how today’s college students were able to multitask so much more effectively than adults. How do they manage to do it, the researchers asked? The answer, they discovered—and this is by no means what they expected—is that they don’t. The enhanced cognitive abilities the investigators expected to find, the mental faculties that enable people to multitask effectively, were simply not there. In other words, people do not multitask effectively. And here’s the really surprising finding: the more people multitask, the worse they are, not just at other mental abilities, but at multitasking itself.
One thing that made the study different from others is that the researchers didn’t test people’s cognitive functions while they were multitasking. They separated the subject group into high multitaskers and low multitaskers and used a different set of tests to measure the kinds of cognitive abilities involved in multitasking. They found that in every case the high multitaskers scored worse. They were worse at distinguishing between relevant and irrelevant information and ignoring the latter. In other words, they were more distractible. They were worse at what you might call “mental filing”: keeping information in the right conceptual boxes and being able to retrieve it quickly. In other words, their minds were more disorganized. And they were even worse at the very thing that defines multitasking itself: switching between tasks.
Multitasking, in short, is not only not thinking, it impairs your ability to think. Thinking means concentrating on one thing long enough to develop an idea about it. Not learning other people’s ideas, or memorizing a body of information, however much those may sometimes be useful. Developing your own ideas. In short, thinking for yourself. You simply cannot do that in bursts of 20 seconds at a time, constantly interrupted by Facebook messages or Twitter tweets, or fiddling with your iPod, or watching something on YouTube.
Remember: Everything that Crosses Your Email (and Desk) Falls into One of Three Categories
The three categories are:
- Trash
- Fileables
- Action items
Every email or piece of paper is either an action item (to be done or delegated), information, or trash.
Turn it into a Question
Here’s another approach to problem solving: When you have a problem, turn it into a question. Write it down on a document or sheet of paper, and then think through it on paper. Define the problem first, and probe it deeply. Ask “what is the problem?” and then “what else could be the problem?” Then do the same to identify causes, and then solutions.
The Concept of the Breakout
When it comes to solving complex problems where we don’t seem to be making any headway, an approach called “the breakout” can be helpful. I came across this in a Harvard Business Review article a few years ago.
Here’s the summary of the concept: “By bringing the brain to the height of activity and then suddenly moving it into a passive, relaxed state, it’s possible to stimulate much higher neurological performance than would otherwise be the case. Over time, subjects who learn to do this as a matter of course perform at consistently higher levels.”
And here are the key steps:
- Struggle mightily with the thorny problem.
- Walk away from the problem at the top of the curve (when you stop feeling productive and start feeling stressed) and do something utterly different that produces the relaxation response.
- The actual breakout–sudden insight comes. A sense of well-being and relaxation brings an unexpected insight or higher level of performance.
- Return to the new normal state within which the sense of self-confidence continues.
Using Jott and Evernote Together
Lifehacker has a good post on how you can use Jott and Evernote together.
Jott is a transcription service. So using the iPhone app, you can use your voice to leave yourself a note, and Jott automatically transcribes it.
These notes need to be processed just like your in box — they are really another in box, in fact. When processing them, the less than two-minute actions should be done right away. Longer than two-minute actions should be put on a list.
But what about the non-actionable stuff you just want to remember? For example, there are a few key things after a meeting that you want to write down for reference, but they aren’t necessarily actionable. That’s where Evernote can be useful. Evernote is basically an electronic notebook, which allows you to group your notes into notebooks, tag them, and sort them by title, date, etc.
The way to use Jott and Evernote together is to email those “reference”-type jotts to your Evernote account. Jott will have already transcribed it, so it saves you that work. Then, once in Evernote, you can title the note, tag it, and put it into the notebook you want. The article shows you how to do this.
Do Smart Phones Hurt Productivity?
Someone recently argued that they do, and then Derek Johnson responded in the Atlantic that they do not.
It’s an interesting article. I just want to say one thing. The “yes the increase productivity” person notes at a couple points:
I suppose I don’t see how spending more time on email is necessarily unproductive, or even sub-optimally productive. Again, if I’m on the subway listening to Coldplay and staring at the floor, I’m accomplishing nothing of particular use for my company.
I would disagree that staring at the floor, listening to Coldplay (or doing nothing at all) is unproductive. I think that it is the crowding out of this type of time that is the biggest problem.
I wouldn’t say that’s a reason to never check email or Twitter during those in-between-times. But we do take a productivity hit from the lack of in-between thinking time and the mental change of gears it involves.
The 11 Categories of Churchill’s Paperwork
Often, some of the best ideas come from just hearing how other people do things. So I found it illuminating to read about the categories that Churchill divided his incoming paperwork into in Churchill on Leadership.
Seeing this illustrates how it can be helpful to pre-sort things before tackling them (whether electronic or physical). Here are his categories:
- Top of the box (most important or urgent)
- Foreign office telegrams
- Service telegrams
- Periodical returns (regular reports he had requested)
- Parliamentary questions
- For signature
- To see
- General Ismay (reports from chief of staff)
- Answers other (other people besides Ismay)
- Ecclesiastical
- Weekend (low priority items to get to on the weekend)
Fast Company on Conquering Your Email Inbox
A short, quick overview of some of the concepts.
The Checklist Manifesto
Tim Challies recently reviewed Atul Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right over at 10 Million Words.
It’s interesting to note the subtitle: “how to get things right.” It’s important to be Getting Things Done, and it’s also important to be getting things done right.
Gawande’s book mostly looks at the field of medicine, but the point he makes shows the usefulness of checklists in all areas. Checklists do not necessarily stem from an attempt to get everything buttoned up for its own sake and don’t have to have the effect of stifling action. They can increase true effectiveness — and be pretty cool and interesting.
Here’s Challies’ first paragraph:
I’ve heard Atul Gawande referred to as “The Malcolm Gladwell of Doctors.” I suppose others have noticed what it took me all of two chapters to realize about this book–that there are clear similarities in writing style, in form, even in substance between Gawande and Gladwell. Gawande crafts his arguments much the way Gladwell does and uses references in much the same way. Overall it makes for enjoyable reading. Like Gladwell, he makes information interesting that, by rights, ought to be boring.
The review is relatively short, and it’s definitely worth reading the whole thing.
(Also, here’s a post I did on checklists and Gawande a few months ago.)
MindTools on Effective Scheduling
MindTools is a helpful site in general. Here’s their article on effective scheduling.
Increase Your Email Productivity 500%
Good thoughts from Josh Sowin.
Unrealized Projects
This is encouraging, from Seth Godin.
If You Take a Bottom Up Approach to Productivity, Will You Ever Make it to the Top?
There are two main ways to put in place an approach for staying on top of things. First, you can start with the “runway” level — all the actions and stuff that lies right before you. Second, you can start at the top levels of mission, values, and goals.
The difficulty with the top down approach is that all of the things at the runway can easily keep bugging you and make it hard for you to see at that level.
But starting at the bottom is worse. If you tell yourself that getting all of your runway actions in order will allow you to work on up to the level of roles, goals, values, and mission, you’ll never make it.
It’s like a few months ago when I was jogging through a field of grasshoppers. When I went faster, there were just more grasshoppers to jump out.
That’s what happens if you focus on the runway level of actions and the stuff you need to process and try to work on up from there. The runway-level stuff will just multiply, and you’ll never rise much above it.
The best solution is to take a both/and approach. You have to deal with the stuff right before you, of course, and that will in turn provide good illumination on the nature of your roles and goals. But if you start there, don’t stay there too long. Go up to the higher levels and work down so that you will have your priorities defined, which will enable you to cut out a bunch of that stuff that’s been cluttering the runway anyway.
The Three-Fold Method for Evaluating Daily Work
David Allen defines three different types of “work” that we do when doing our work:
- Doing predefined work
- Doing work as it shows up
- Defining your work
Many people get caught up in number 2, and let 1 and 3 slide.
He then notes:
Your ability to deal with surprise is your competitive edge. But at a certain point, if you’re not catching up and getting things under control, staying busy with only the work at hand will undermine your effectiveness. In order to know whether you should stop doing something and start dong something else, you need to have a good sense of what your job requires and how that fits into the other contexts of your life.
The Proverbs 16 Planner
The Resurgence has a helpful post on the importance of planning. There are three types of people when it comes to planning: the non-planner, the solo planner who leaves God out of the picture, and the Proverbs 16 planner who makes plans in dependence on God.
A Day for Things You Don’t Like
All jobs have some things about them that you don’t like. Your primary response to this should be to shape your role in a way that minimizes these things. The reason is that the things you don’t like doing take time (and energy) away from doing things that lie within your strengths.
If you let this build up too much, it will render you ineffective. As Marcus Buckingham argues in his book The One Thing You Need to Know: … About Great Managing, Great Leading, and Sustained Individual Success, the most effective people over a long period of time identify the things they don’t like doing, and stop doing them.
But you can’t achieve a utopia where there is literally nothing you don’t like doing. So what do you do about those things?
I’ve found that the things that I don’t like doing interfere more with the things I’m good at if they are spread throughout the week. This makes it so that I’m frequently shifting gears between things I’m good at and things I’m not, making for a draining day.
So my solution is that I’ve now defined a day for everything that I don’t like doing. Whenever something comes my way in an email or from anywhere that is important for me to do and which I can’t eliminate, but it drains me, I put it in a bucket for a certain day. (I’m not going to say what day that is!) Then, it is off my mind. When that day comes, I plow through those things and get them off my plate.
This keeps the other days much more free to do the things that energize me, without having to switch gears so much. Yet I still know that the “not enjoyable, but must be done” things will still get done, since they have a day assigned.
In addition to making my other days more effective, I anticipate that this will have two other positive effects.
First, it gives me a gauge for knowing, for real, how much of this stuff there is. By saying “all the stuff that I don’t like doing has to fit into such and such day,” I have a systemic incentive to keep that stuff to a minimum (rather than merely an intention, which always ends up getting over-ridden). When you let those things be scattered over the whole week, it’s like not having a fuel gauge in your car. You never know how much fuel you are really using. This gives me a gauge, with the result that I can more effectively seek to minimize these things.
Second, I hypothesize that I will find out that I actually do like doing many of these things that I currently don’t like doing. It might be the case that the precise reason that I don’t like doing most of them is that they simply aren’t a good mix with the other tasks that I like to do. But if they were all grouped into a specific block of time, where I didn’t have to switch gears between these things and other things, I might find that I actually like them.
Or, perhaps better, I will get a much more accurate idea of what I really don’t like doing, so that I can be more effective at ultimately cutting more of those things out for good.
My Approach to Blogging
This is a guest post by Zach Nielsen of Take Your Vitamin Z (a blog which I highly recommend). Zach’s post gives a good “behind the scenes” view of blogging and how to be productive in it.
Some people have inquired about my method for blogging. How do I approach it? How much time does it take? Do I make much money from it? How does it all work? Here is my response.
The number one catalyst for my blog is very simple: Google Reader. I subscribe to over a hundred and fifty different blogs via Google Reader and most of those posts form the content of my posts on Take Your Vitamin Z. Google Reader makes my blogging way less time consuming than if I was bookmarking all those blog sites. If you read a lot of blogs and don’t use RSS yet, you are simply wasting a lot of time. The idea is not complicated. It’s just like checking your email, except for blogs. All your favorite blogs can be read on one internet page. Google Reader updates whenever a blog that I subscribe to updates. If I am going directly to one of the many blog sites that I like it may or may not have updated, but with Google Reader (or any other RSS feed provider) I have the freedom to only be notified when those blogs that I like update. This makes my blog reading much faster and efficient.
In terms of how I decide what to post, it’s pretty simple as well. I just look for things that I find to be interesting. This is how my blog has been all along. If I find it interesting then I’ll post it. This usually means that the topics include Christian theology, music, art, some sports, culture, adoption, abortion, leadership, short essays that I choose to write on various topics, and other random things that I find amusing.
It seems that there are other people out there who resonate with the same things that I do and find my blog worth reading, but it is also important to note that I have been blogging at least 5 days a week for almost four years in a row. Most people don’t understand that it times a huge commitment over a long period of time to have a blog that might be consistently read. Guys that know way more about blogging than I do always say that the key to a good blog is great content and consistency over a long period of time.
When I first started my blog I thought I would write long essays everyday that would be full of life changing wisdom. I found out after day two that day one’s post wasn’t all that life changing and the well was dry for day two. Thus, taking my cue from my college roommate, Justin Taylor, I mainly post things that other people have written. Those folks can usually say it better than I can anyway and I’ll bless way more people if my blog is more than just what stems from my own reflections. Also, I simply don’t have time to craft my own short essays everyday. Even if I did have that much to say, I wouldn’t be able to justify it in light of the fact that I have a wife, four kids, a busy church job, jazz gigs on the weekend, and am planting a church in Madison, WI in 2010.
I usually do most of my posting in the morning. Google Reader fills up during the night and in the morning there are usually 50-100 items for me to looks through. I can look through these very quickly and if I see something that is of interest I can copy the text, copy a photo, write some short interactions with it, etc. in a matter of minutes. On Blogger (my blogging platform) you can schedule what time your posts go live on the web so at times I’ll schedule four posts, an hour apart, but do it all at once. I often check Google Reader through the day but this usually only takes 1-10 minutes since there usually are fewer items to sort through.
I have started to make a bit of an income from blogging. It’s nothing that I could support my family with, but it is a nice extra bonus every month. This comes through two various streams of income, 1) Amazon.com, and 2) paying advertisers. The Amazon.com program is rather remarkable. All you have to do is click on any Amazon link that I provide anywhere on my site and then buy whatever you want (not necessarily the product that you first clicked on) and I’ll get a small commission. This extra income is a great way for us to save money for our church plant in Madison, WI, so if any of you out there would be willing to remember to click through my site when you buy on Amazon it would be a blessing for us. All you have to do is go to my blog first and then click on an Amazon link in the right sidebar under “sponsors” or any Amazon link in my posts.
In my life, this whole blogging thing has taken on a bit of a life of it’s own, beyond what I ever thought it would, but I enjoy it quite a bit. If you are interested, I have posted some other reflections here on why I have a blog.
9 Ways to Use Evernote
Here’s a post on how one person uses Evernote to manage just about everything. I use Evernote as well, but slightly differently; I’ll post on that down the road if I can. This article is a helpful overview of what you can do with Evernote.
Why Most People Don’t Keep Their New Year’s Resolutions–And How to Keep Yours
Most people don’t keep their new year’s resolutions because they don’t translate them into their schedule.
It’s that simple.
If you make a resolution, but don’t plan time to actually accomplish it, it usually won’t happen. It won’t happen because it remains merely an intention. And intentions that aren’t specifically translated to “actionable zones” tend to be treated by your mind as “nice to do, but not necessary to do” items.
The result is a hit-and-miss approach. Some days you remember and follow through, and others you don’t.
Think of an Olympic athlete. They don’t simply say “my goal is to win the gold medal.” Instead, they adhere to a workout schedule. Without that concrete mechanism of action, the goal would simply be wishful thinking.
Now, what about those more intangible aims such as “lose 10 pounds”? How do you schedule that? Obviously you can schedule the exercise portion of that goal. But what about the “eating less” portion? Speaking from experience, it’s easy to get to the dinner table and forget (or deliberately neglect?) all intentions of eating healthy.
This is where reviewing your goals comes in. Mindsets that need to be more or less continuous (like “eat less”) tend to be kept in mind through regular review until they become second nature. The weekly review helps accomplish this; for things that tend to fall out of mind easily (like “eat less”), just pausing at the beginning of your work day to remember your aims can be helpful.
Which leads to one last thing: you have to keep your number of resolutions small. It’s not possible to create actionable mechanisms for or keep in mind a large number of new (or renewed) aims.
If you find it helpful to make new year’s resolutions (and they are a good thing — see John Piper’s article on resolutions, as well as his article on what to do when you fail), make just a few that really count, and then create simple, actionable mechanisms to make them happen.
The Decade Review
At the end of a year, it’s always good to reflect on major happenings, accomplishments, and lessons learned. At the end of a decade, it’s good to do this reflection for the whole decade.
So, that is my recommendation for you today. It doesn’t have to take long. Create a Word document, call it “Decade Review” or something, and take maybe thirty minutes to jot down whatever comes to mind in these three areas:
- Stand-out events, happenings, and accomplishments over the last ten years.
- Lessons learned.
- Course corrections and key items of focus for the next set of years.
Create three a heading in the document for each of these things; maybe call them “Happenings and Accomplishments,” “Lessons Learned,” and “Focus Items Going Forward.”
It doesn’t have to be fancy or detailed. Mostly, the usefulness of this comes simply from the act of taking some time to reflect. You can really do this any time, but the end of a decade is a good milestone that serves as a catalyst.
Advice for the Next Decade
Friday is the first day not just of a new year, but of a new decade. It makes sense to do some reflection in light of this, and to make some changes.
To help serve your efforts, I’m going to recommend one simple change for the next decade: Create one new, recurring routine in an area of high impact.
The way to make sure you actually stick to this routine is to set aside time for it. Which means: Create an appointment on your calendar for this routine and set it to repeat every week or every day. Then, keep the appointment.
After one year — let alone ten — you will see remarkable results.
Some obvious examples here might be prayer and Bible study, if you have a hard time being as consistent as you want. Another example could be weekly time for writing, or weekly (or daily) time for reading.
The time you allocate need not be extensive. The real impact in this comes from consistency over time, rather than quantity in the moment. Reading for half an hour each night, consistently, over the course of a year would yield significant returns. So would spending two hours every Saturday morning writing on important issues in your field, or in any area of interest. Or taking each of your kids out for one-on-one time once a month.
As it has been often said, “small things, done consistently over time, make a big impact.”
Now, for those who want to go a bit deeper, here’s a twist: this can work against us, as well — even in the case of good routines. When the good things we do consistently over time take time away from doing better things consistently over time, they diminish our effectiveness.
Hence, for those interested in taking things to the “advanced” level, a corollary to my advice here is to also identify one routine you can stop doing, or reduce, in order to make room for this more important routine.
The significance of both sides here — the impact of doing small things consistently, and the need to make sure that these small things are the best use of our time — has stood out to me even more of late as I’ve looked back on one particular routine of my own that I’m changing up.
Back in 1999, at the beginning of this decade, I started tracking our finances in Quicken. Eventually this turned into a routine of managing our finances and tracking our budget every Saturday morning. A few years later I read David Allen, and this time naturally expanded to include processing my inbox (personal, not work) and doing other household, administrative, and “getting things done” maintenance stuff.
The result is that I became quite good at dispatching with my workflow, and our credit score went off the charts. And those are things that I don’t want to lose ground on. But I wonder if, at the same time, this has crowded out some more important things I could have been doing in that time slot.
In one sense, this type of routine is driven by necessity and is quite efficient — you have to deal with both workflow and finances, and it makes a ton of sense to have a regular routine for dispatching these things. That is not something that should change.
But, I’m changing up this routine a bit to reflect more fully the fact that these things are not close to the “impact line” (for lack of a better term). They are essential, but they are supporting disciplines. You do need to spend time on them, but you want to keep it to a minimum.
The world of work provides a good example here. If you work at a for-profit, you want as much of your time as possible to be spent on tasks that are close to the revenue line. Likewise, in life you want as much of your time as possible to be spent on tasks that are close to the impact line.
Now, managing my workflow and keeping up with the finances hasn’t been taking a ton of time on my Saturday mornings (except when I have to skip a few weeks in a row!). But I still think to myself “if these tasks became so easy and basic simply by doing them consistently, how much progress would I have made if I had devoted some of that time each week to making progress on some additional things that were of greater impact?” I’ve already designated that time for work-type stuff (on the personal front), so why not redouble my efforts to preserve the bulk of that time for higher impact things?
I’d rather spend time getting some extra writing done, or staying in touch with a few more people, than becoming flawless at keeping up with my inbox. Not that you have to ultimately choose — I am not advocating that we not keep up with our workflow. Not keeping up with your workflow is like not taking out the trash — it will end up just getting in the way and mucking everything up. Part of my point, as always, is that we need to be as efficient as we can at our workflow processes so that we can spend as much time as possible on what is most important.
But my fuller point here is that what you actually schedule will have more impact than what you simply intend. This works on both fronts. First, it means that if you simply create a recurring appointment to do something of great importance, you will find great results over time. And second, it means that you need to make sure that the routines you create really advance your most important priorities, rather than simply things that are good but not best.
Therefore, be intentional in leveraging the fact that small things, done consistently over time, have a large impact. Create a new routine in an area of high impact for the new decade and, if necessary, reduce or eliminate something else to make room for it.
The Biggest Problem New Managers Face in Managing Their Time
I think this answer is relatively on target, from the book :Managing Time: Expert Solutions to Everyday Challenges (Pocket Mentor):
You cannot successfully manage your time if you don’t know how you should be spending it. The biggest problem new managers face is understanding their goals and priorities. They are not really sure what they should be doing.
Because of this uncertainty, new managers often spend time working on the wrong things or let others pull them into activities that aren’t directly tied to their priorities and goals. To better understand how you should be spending your time, work with your supervisor to clarify expectations and responsibilities.
At the same time, start to get a handle on how long your new responsibilities take so you can better estimate and plan your time as you grow in your new role.
The Necessity of Taking Time to Reflect and Unplug
In one sentence:
“When your brain is always engaged, your best and brightest solutions are not likely to emerge.”
And this only gets at the productivity benefits of unplugging — let alone the intrinsic value of a change of pace and time for reflection.
Both Work Distractions and Productivity are on the Rise
We talk a lot about distractions, but it is helpful to realize that overall productivity is actually up from what it was 30 years ago. This is from the book The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Getting Things Done:
Without offering an involved and wearisome discussion about rising productivity levels, let me simply say that today’s career professional, frittering and all, could beat the pants off of yesteryear’s career professional in terms of getting things done.
Today, workers in all types of organizations, including government, non-profit sector groups, health care, and education as well as private industry, devote a slightly higher percentage of their time to the tasks and responsibilities for which they actually were hired, and they have advanced tools that aid them in ways that the workforce ancestry could hardly imagine.
Although I wasn’t around thirty years ago (at least in the workforce), it seems to me that in spite of all the complications and information overload of the modern work environment, people do indeed get a lot done.
There’s still a lot of improvement that we can make, and our execution could become a lot smoother and more fulfilling, but the current work environment has a lot of good news. It’s worth keeping in focus that we don’t have before us simply (or even mainly) challenges to overcome (although there are a lot of those), but rather opportunities to capitalize on.
Two Methods of Motivation
The Now Habit does a good job of articulating the two methods of motivation we often use (on ourselves and others) when it comes to challenging tasks.
Push Method
The first is the “push method.” This method is “designed to stimulate action through fear of punishment.” It is not as though this method is always inappropriate; but in general “the ‘push method’ of management assumes that humans are basically lazy and that scaring the heck out of them will create motivation.”
Pull Method
The second is the “pull method.” This method, on the other hand, “assumes that we are naturally inquisitive, and if we are properly rewarded for our efforts we can persevere with even the most difficult of tasks.” (I would clarify that by “reward” here we should include both intrinsic and extrinsic dimensions.)
Examples
Here’s an example of the push method. This example is why I’m writing this post — I find it pretty funny:
“This freshman class had better learn now that you’re in for a lot of hard work. By the end of the semester you’ll have read this entire shelf of books; and by the time you graduate, this entire wall of books.”
Scary, but not very motivating — and I like to read! Here’s an example of the pull method:
“Imagine that, as you read one chapter of your textbook, you place it on this empty shelf. Chapter by chapter and book by book, you’ll be filling this entire shelf by the end of your first semester. By the time you graduate you’ll have read enough books to fill the shelves on this entire wall.”
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