Category Archives: My Brain

That’s obvious – isn’t it?

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One of the lessons that I am learning in my meaningful conversations is that the obvious isn’t perhaps so obvious.

Today I noticed these instructions on my deodorant. They’re obvious – aren’t they?

We all have a wealth of experience that defines how we see things, influences how we interact with things, defines our perspective and gives us the framework for what we regard as obvious.

I’ve been using spray cans most of my life, so of course it’s obvious what to do.

I’ve been driving in the UK for nearly 20 years, so of course it’s obvious that I drive on the left.

I’ve been to airports hundreds of times, so of course it’s obvious what I can, and can’t put into my hand luggage.

The amazing thing is, there are hundreds of things that are obvious to me, that are not obvious to anyone other than me.

Having discussions with people changes my framework of obviousness. It sometimes extends the things I regard as obvious and sometimes it makes me realise that I’m one of the few people that think something is obvious.

It’s only common sense after all .

Why Poor Performance is such a Productivity Killer

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Jimmy, Grandad and Grandma go to CornwallI am struggling with a system today that is going slow. It’s nothing unusual this particular system is always slow, or at least I perceive it to be slow. In other words, it works slower that I would like it to – but worse than that, it works slower than my attention can sustain.

I’m now multi-tasking – I’m writing this in the seconds in-between this particular system responding. I’ve lost attention on my primary task, which is to interact with the slow system and I’ve moved onto a secondary task; writing this blog.

Everyone should know that multi-tasking is not the most efficient way of doing anything, but I’ve fallen into the trap and my attention has now completely gone. It happens like this:

  • Interact with system – click.
  • Wait a few seconds.
  • Interact with system again – click.
  • Wait a few seconds – get bored, check Twitter.
  • System is now waiting for me to finish on Twitter.
  • Interact with system again – click.
  • Wait for no seconds – already expect a delay, check FeedDemon for updates, see an interesting one, read it.
  • System is now waiting for me to finish on FeedDemon.
  • I notice system has come back – take a few seconds to remember what the next step was.
  • Interact with system again – click.
  • Wait for no seconds again, start to write post, also try to keep an eye on the system coming back but I’m not very good at it. Now only writing blog post because I can do that without any waits or interruptions. Not doing blog writing particularly well either.
  • Look back at the system after several minutes, notice that it has come back. It’s probably been waiting for minutes but my attention is completely gone.
  • Realise that I’m not doing what I should be doing so agree with myself that I am going to go and finish the primary thing that I should be doing. Struggle to focus on it because my mind has got into a groove on the blog post.
  • Give up and go back to the post. Think that if I get it finished I will be able to refocus on the job at hand.

This type of attention conflict is completely destructive to my productivity. I don’t get any of the tasks done and feel guilty for loosing focus on the things I should be doing. In many ways it would be better that the system was unavailable than running slow. I’d rather focus on one thing and be completing that than trying to do multiple things poorly but it’s just not engaging enough to keep my attention.

Working, as I do, in IT service design and management most customers primarily contract in terms of availability. The system must be available all of the time. If the impact of performance can be even more damaging than lack of availability – perhaps we are measuring the wrong thing?

Perhaps I just have a very short attention?

Why do I blog? Memory Management

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Jimmy and Grandad got to Tarn HowesOne of the questions that I get asked from time to time is “why do you write a blog?” it’s a fair question – writing takes time and energy, so why bother? There are a number of answers to this question and today I’m only going to deal with one of them – memory management.

“Memory is a child walking along a seashore.  You never can tell what small pebble it will pick up and store away among its treasured things.” Pierce Harris, Atlanta Journal

I’m over 40 now and my memory is not what it used to be. This isn’t some kind of misinformed modesty statement, your brain starts to loose connections from your 20′s onwards, and my brain is going through the same natural cycle. I’m trying to do things to protect what I have, but I can only slow it down. I’m also learning a whole set of management techniques to mitigate for this loss. Learning them early seems like the best way of making sure that they are embedded within my working practice before I really need them.

One of the most powerful ways of managing memory is to write. Once something has been written the brain seems to archive the information and only remembers a pointer to the information. The challenge is then to have a really good pointer or search system available. That’s where the blog comes in.

What I write on the blog naturally gets a pointer, that’s the way that blogs works. Adding tags makes for even more pointers. What’s more it also gets full text search so if my brain pointers aren’t quite correct I can still find what I want. I can then let my brain archive the information without having to worry about finding it again.

Sometimes I’ll meet someone who reads my blog and they’ll make a comment about something I have written and I’ll be surprised by what they have read. I’ve already archived it but it’s fresh and new to them. It sometimes takes me a few seconds to remember what it is they are talking about.

Off now to forget this information.

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The Power of the List

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Jimmy, Grandad and Grandma go to CornwallI’ve been wondering whether one of the most powerful things that separates the humans from the animals is the simple list.

It’s easy to tell when I am focused – I have a set of lists and I am working my way through them. It’s just as easy to tell when I am out of control – I have no list.

There are many, many personal and professional management systems that at their basic level are systems of lists.

I love the interaction of twitter – which is basically a dynamic list.

I’ve also noticed that if you want a really popular blog post you write a Top 10 list or similar.

Lists are everywhere.

The human skill is handling and manipulating the list.

I wonder if there are any exercises that I could do to make my brain better at handling lists?

Email and Slot Machines

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Jimmy, Grandad and Grandma go to CornwallYesterday I was staying in a hotel and was given a complimentary newspaper – the Guardian. An article on email addiction caught my eye:

Dr Tom Stafford, a lecturer at the University of Sheffield and co-author of the book Mind Hacks, believes that the same fundamental learning mechanisms that drive gambling addicts are also at work in email users. “Both slot machines and email follow something called a ‘variable interval reinforcement schedule’,” he says, “which has been established as the way to train in the strongest habits. This means that rather than reward an action every time it is performed, you reward it sometimes, but not in a predictable way. So with email, usually when I check it there is nothing interesting, but every so often there’s something wonderful – an invite out, or maybe some juicy gossip – and I get a reward.” This is enough to make it difficult for us to resist checking email, even when we’ve only just looked.

That’s right – email addiction is just like gambling addiction.

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My Tools: The Off Switch

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Jimmy and Grandma have a day outI’m told that I live in an always-on world, and there are many times when it feels that way. Like many of you I have a tool available to me that keeps me in control of the times that I am available. It’s an invaluable tool and it’s called the off-switch.

Most of the devices I have include an off-switch, even if they don’t I am still in control of the power supply. I have the power to unplug, or to remove the battery.

The off-switch is very good for your brain. As we are approaching the season of holidays and vacations now is the time that you should employ this tool as often as possible and preferably for an extended period.

Here’s my guide to the off switch:

  • On OffOn my laptop it’s the small silver button just above the F9 key.
  • On my desktop it’s the larger silver button on the front towards the rear.
  • On my blackberry it’s a silver button on the top left of the device.

Go on, you can do it.

My Brain: Habits

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Easedale TarnIt’s been a while since I’ve written anything in the “my brain” series. It’s not because I’ve not been thinking about it, but more to do with the path of assimilation that I set myself.

Recently I have been thinking about habits and how we change them, or develop new ones. I’ve got a number of bad habits that mean I am generally overweight and unfit, I’m also too busy and drink too much coffee.

I’ve been trying to decide whether it is best to focus on breaking these habits or to build new ones that supplant the old ones.

Today I came across this article in the New York Times entitled: Can You Become a Creature of New Habits?

I’m not sure it answers the question I’ve been trying to answer, but it says some interesting things. In particular it talks about being in a position of “stretch”:

Comfort is the realm of existing habit. Stress occurs when a challenge is so far beyond current experience as to be overwhelming. It’s that stretch zone in the middle — activities that feel a bit awkward and unfamiliar — where true change occurs.

Although, in my current over-weight circumstance I quite liked the following piece of news:

“Getting into the stretch zone is good for you,” Ms. Ryan says in “This Year I Will… .” “It helps keep your brain healthy. It turns out that unless we continue to learn new things, which challenges our brains to create new pathways, they literally begin to atrophy, which may result in dementia, Alzheimer’s and other brain diseases. Continuously stretching ourselves will even help us lose weight, according to one study. Researchers who asked folks to do something different every day — listen to a new radio station, for instance — found that they lost and kept off weight. No one is sure why, but scientists speculate that getting out of routines makes us more aware in general.”

This leads me back to where I started this journey.

Recently I have been trying to stretch myself with a new set of crosswords, it’s quite depressing moving from a situation where you are used to completing a crossword to one where you can only complete half of it without help. If it was easy it wouldn’t be a stretch.

Personally I think I spend more time in the “stress” zone than the “stretch” zone but hopefully I am coming out of the other side of it a bit. This week I have done an excessively long week and my brain is definitely feeling the strain. So I’m going to try and use this weekend to rest my brain, because that is important too.

Older Users Take Longer – 0.8% Longer per Year.

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Wordworth DaffodilsWhile I spend my last few hours as a thirty-something I was delighted to read a piece by Jakob Neilsen worryingly titled “Middle-Aged Users’ Declining Web Performance“:

Between the ages of 25 and 60, the time users need to complete website tasks increases by 0.8% per year.

In other words, a 40-year-old user will take 8% longer than a 30-year-old user to accomplish the same task. And a 50-year-old user will require an additional 8% more time. (Mathematically inclined readers will note that this increase is linear, not exponential.)

But it’s not apparently all bad:

Does this mean that people in their 40s or 50s can’t do their jobs? Not at all. There are many other ways in which people get better with age.

Individual differences swamp the tiny age-related difference in the 25- to 60-year-old group. Users are extraordinarily variable in their use of websites and intranets.

I have a 5-5-5 rule for task times while using websites: Across a broad range of studies, our data shows that

  • the slowest 5% of users are
  • about 5 times as slow
  • as the fastest 5% of users,

meaning that the slowest users need 400% more time to perform the same tasks. The 0.8% difference caused by each year of aging pales in comparison.

So, a fast 50-year-old will beat a slow 30-year-old every day — by several hundred percent.

Hopefully, I’m not one of the people in the slowest 5% :-) Time to refocus my efforts on “My Brain“.

(No this is not an April Fool)

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“Multitasking is dumbing us down and driving us crazy”

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Jimmy and Grandad watch Mr. BenAttention deficit and the impacts of multi-tasking have been themes on this blog for a while now. It all started with me thinking about whether it is possible to have a “strong” brain, and whether it was possible to do things to exercise your brain and make it “stronger”. Along the way I came across the issue of attention deficit trait and the impact of multi-tasking.

Walter Kirn has written a fascinating article on the impact of multi-tasking. It starts with this bold statement:

Neuroscience is confirming what we all suspect: Multitasking is dumbing us down and driving us crazy. One man’s odyssey through the nightmare of infinite connectivity.

It even gives some wonderful statistics on the impact:

Six hundred and fifty billion dollars. That’s what we might call our National Attention Deficit, according to Jonathan B. Spira, who’s the chief analyst at a business- research firm called Basex and has estimated the per annum cost to the economy of multitasking-induced disruptions. (He obtained the figure by surveying office workers across the country, who reported that some 28 percent of their time was wasted dealing with multitasking- related transitions and interruptions.)

But the real joy in this article is the story that surrounds all of the information, and for that, you need to read the article.

One of the reasons I am writing this post is that I had planned to work from home today because I need to get my head around some thing. Working from home normally allows me to blank out everything and focus in on the core task. Unfortunately my neighbour has started some building work today and the trucks keep reversing up the cul-de-sac with those annoying reversing warnings blaring away. However much I try to focus in on the important thing, the distractions keep coming, and you can only turn the quiet music up so load. There’s no point in me trying to get my head around the task that is ahead of me because I will just get distracted, try to regain my thought, get distracted, get frustrated, and on and on.

If this post comes to you as an interruption – sorry, but it’s really your fault for not turning off the notification on whatever reader you are using. You are allowed to turn things off you know.

(Jimmy and Grandad are watching Mr. Benn at the National Media Museum in Bradford. One of the attractions of the museum is to be able to go into one section, choose a programme from the archives and show your kids what television was like when you were a kid. We were all surprised how slow Mr. Benn was. Another sign of the impact we are having on our brains.)

Learning Agility – Be Curious

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ParaglidingFollowing on from yesterday’s post on Learning Agility I was interested to find an article by Bill Gates on the BBC today about “The skills you need to succeed“:

Software innovation, like almost every other kind of innovation, requires the ability to collaborate and share ideas with other people, and to sit down and talk with customers and get their feedback and understand their needs.

I also place a high value on having a passion for ongoing learning. When I was pretty young, I picked up the habit of reading lots of books.

It’s great to read widely about a broad range of subjects. Of course today, it’s far easier to go online and find information about any topic that interests you.

Having that kind of curiosity about the world helps anyone succeed, no matter what kind of work they decide to pursue.

It’s very easy to become one dimensional, curiosity is a great way of becoming and staying multi-dimensional.