Gina Trapani, founding editor of Lifehacker, has a recent column in Fast Company on multitasking.
ESV on iPhone Now Available
From the Crossway blog:
For the first time, read the ESV Bible on your iPhone or iPod Touch, with or without an internet connection — for free. Record your own notes, highlight verses, save favorites, and share with friends. Please take a look at the ESV App and tell us what you think.
How Magazines Will be Transformed
Wired has a very good video showing how their magazine will operate on the iPad. This finally seems to provide an electronic experience that is overall better and easier than reading the printed version:
Josh Sowin rightly observes: “This is really exciting from a design & reading standpoint. It will be the experience of reading a magazine, but with the interactivity of the web. It’s going to be a really fun decade.”
(HT: Josh Sowin)
5 Reasons Companies Should Not Block Access to Social Networks
A good, brief article in Advertising Age that argues that “collaboration can increase productivity and resistance is futile.” The five points are:
- Resistance is futile
- Don’t assume people won’t find other ways to waste time
- Social networks can actually make workers more productive
- You’ll miss great ideas
- Employees are much more trustworthy than companies think
Point five is absolutely critical — employees can be trusted. And trusting employees leads to higher performance. She adds: “If you can’t trust your employees, you have one of two problems: You are hiring the wrong people or you are not properly training the people you hire.”
Also, I think that point five overcomes point two — if you hire good people, they won’t waste time. Or, perhaps better, they will only waste time when doing so will lead to greater productivity overall.
Advice for Every Airline, Except Southwest and Perhaps One or Two Others
John Calvin on the Common Good
“It is an error to think that those who flee worldly affairs and engage in contemplation are leading an angelic life… We know that men were created to busy themselves with labor and that no sacrifice is more pleasing to God than when each one attends to his calling and studies well to live for the common good.” John Calvin
Getting Things Done Quick Review and Summary
Drew Buell has posted a good, brief review of Getting Things Done, which summarizes the system into four very good points.
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.
Thomas Edison: Solving the Problem is the Easy Part
A good post with a letter from Thomas Edison to a young engineer in his company, from the new blog Online MBA.
Creators vs. Reactors
A good word from Jim Collins, written during the economic recession of 2001-2002 but always applicable (and to many arenas of life), on being one who creates rather than one who merely reacts:
Here’s the essential truth of our current situation: The real problem has stayed the same, regardless of the direction of the market. First we went through a spiraling-up phase, and people lost their bearings as they got caught up in the great melee of opportunity. Now we’re in a downward spiral, and people have lost their bearings in a scramble of uncertainty. It’s the exact same pattern in reverse: people merely reacting to circumstances, rather than doing anything fundamentally creative.
The distinction isn’t between a market that’s going up and a market that’s going down. It’s between people who are fundamentally creators and people who are only reactors, who take their cues from the outside world.
If you did a word search across my research materials on the greatest company builders of the past 100 years, you would find almost no mention of “competitive strategy.” Not that those builders had no strategy; they clearly did. But they did not craft their strategies principally in reaction to the competitive landscape or in response to external conditions and shocks. Without question, they kept a wary eye on the brutal facts.The fundamental drive to transform and build their companies was internal and creative. It didn’t matter whether they faced a crisis (as did Thomas J. Watson Sr. at IBM, who never resorted to layoffs in the Great Depression) or whether they faced calm (as did Walt Disney when he conceived of Disneyland). The leaders who built enduring great companies showed a creative inside-out approach rather than a reactive outside-in approach. In contrast, the mediocre company leaders displayed a pattern of lurching and thrashing, running about in frantic reaction to threats and opportunities.
If I could bring all of my students back into the classroom, I would remind them of David Packard’s admonition that in the long run, “more companies die of indigestion than starvation.” If a company focuses on making creative contributions that fall in the middle of three intersecting circles—what it is passionate about, what it can be the best in the world at, and what best drives a sustained profitable economic engine—then growth will likely follow.