Category: Innovation

Focus on one thing – it's much better for you

I sit in an open plan office and look around. There are many people sat with headphones on participating in one or other of the constant stream of teleconferences. They’re all sat in front of a screen browsing around, replying to emails, participating in instant message chats. They’re all multitasking. They’re all telling themselves that the call doesn’t require their full attention so they can use some of their attention on some other worthwhile distraction. I’ve done exactly that for many years but the reality is that it’s exhausting, unproductive and ultimately destructive. The call suffers, the worthwhile distraction suffers, we suffer.

RydalI’ve talked about multi-tasking before:

Tony Schwartz recently wrote an article for the Harvard Business Review titled The Magic of Doing One Thing at a Time.

Tell the truth: Do you answer email during conference calls (and sometimes even during calls with one other person)? Do you bring your laptop to meetings and then pretend you’re taking notes while you surf the net? Do you eat lunch at your desk? Do you make calls while you’re driving, and even send the occasional text, even though you know you shouldn’t?

The biggest cost — assuming you don’t crash — is to your productivity. In part, that’s a simple consequence of splitting your attention, so that you’re partially engaged in multiple activities but rarely fully engaged in any one. In part, it’s because when you switch away from a primary task to do something else, you’re increasing the time it takes to finish that task by an average of 25 per cent.

But most insidiously, it’s because if you’re always doing something, you’re relentlessly burning down your available reservoir of energy over the course of every day, so you have less available with every passing hour.

Tony also links to this video from Stanford University which demonstrates what we do to ourselves when we do multitask:

Media Multitaskers Pay Mental Price

(A short break in writing because I was interrupted by an Instant Message from a colleague, which took me through to the start of a call into which I tried to be focussed, for once, without worthwhile distractions. It would be ironic to write a blog post on the dangers of multitasking while multitasking.)

I see myself multitasking all of the time, I’ve certainly not got this one cracked, but one thing I am certain of, I need to spend much more time on one task and far less time flitting between activities. It’s very easy to fill your life with worthless frittering, but that’s draining, unfulfilling and destructive. There are all sorts of pressures to dance from one thing to the next, but the primary challenge is with my own resolve. I suspect I’m like many people, I know that this way of working isn’t good for me, I could do something to resolve it, but choosing to leave things as they are feels like an easier route. In 12 step groups they call this denial and you have to overcome that before you can get too much further.

It’s time to move out of denial, anyone else coming with me?

PowerPoint, the Bullet Points and the Story

Does the bullet point enhance the story, or destroy the story – the choice is yours.

Many things are best communicated through humour and Rowan Manahan has a great way of communicating the absurdity of much of what I see every day.

Rowan Manahan at Ignite #6

I’m not one of those PowerPoint bashers who blame the tool for the things that people create with it. People need much more help than they currently get with presentation skills. In the hands of a good presenter the tool can make the experience wonderful. I sat in a breakfast session on Saturday morning where a friend amazed us with an overview of the sun. It might not sound like the most exciting subject, but believe me, we were all transfixed. The experience simply wouldn’t have been the same without the wonderful videos and picture, there wasn’t a bullet point in sight. The point that people miss time and time again was that the presentation was complementary to the story, enhancing our experience.

(I suspect my friend wasn’t using PowerPoint, but using Keynote instead, the point still applies though. I’ve seen some pretty dreadful Keynote presentation too)

Nano Workouts – Conference Call Push-ups

Following on from the thought that sitting is killing us I’ve been thinking about the different ways that I can counteract my personal inactivity.

While doing some research (sitting down) I came across a site called Nano Workout which produces regular pictures of exercise ideas for the office or home.

Today’s idea is Conference Call Push-ups:

I can’t see myself doing this in the office, at home maybe, but not in the office. The culture is such that this would be regarded as a totally mad thing to do, but perhaps that will change. Once upon a time it was regarded as acceptable to smoke in the office, now it’s illegal. I regularly walk around while on a conference call, so perhaps push-ups aren’t too mad an idea.

Sorting out sitting – before it kills me

There have been a number of articles in recent days about the dangers of sitting for long periods of the day, dangers that are serious and include a higher risk of death.

Global RainbowI, like many workers, spend much of my time sitting. If I’m working at home – I’m sitting at a desk. If I’m in the office – I’m sitting at a desk. If I’m in a meeting – I’m sitting at a table. Sitting, sitting, sitting. I’ve written before about my experiences with tension headaches which are primarily caused by issues of posture – posture while sitting. While these headaches are mostly under control, I’ve not yet managed to change my lifestyle sufficiently for me to remove all medicinal support, so sitting is still a problem.

Tom Ferris has a great post summarising the emerging evidence that inactivity, and sitting specifically, is a problem, but also what one organisation did to combat the problem.

Recent research suggests that those who sit from 9-5 (more than 6 hours daily) and exercise regularly are more likely to have heart disease than those who sit less than 3 hours per day and don’t “exercise” at all.

It’s a great shopping list of ideas including:

  • Standing desks
  • Exercise balls
  • Balance cushions
  • Monitors stands
  • Ergonomic keyboard
  • Ergonomic mice
  • Hand grippers
  • Wobble boards
  • Pedometers
  • Shoe options
  • Conference room and meeting configurations
  • Office layout
  • Food and snacks

The important point for me is that good office configurations have a direct payback in terms of productivity. We’ve known this for a long time, and yet many organisations continue to build facilities that have barely changed since the advent of the Personal Computer.

A small number of offices across the country have slowly begun to endorse the idea of exercising during work (e.g. walking on a treadmill while doing your job at Mutual of Omaha). Besides the obvious fitness benefits, exercise also increases productivity (according to research done by the Vermont Board of Education — PDF download).

Most surprising of all, remaking the workplace into a healthy, exercise-supportive environment has a cost benefit. Many of the design changes we have implemented cost little or nothing.

But it’s not just about gadgets, it’s also about culture. There are limits to what I can personally influence, especially in the office, but even then I don’t do what I know is good for me. It’s a change I am having to learn to make though. Which reminds me, I haven’t done my stretches yet today and perhaps it’s time to order an exercise ball.

We haven't quite figured out filtering yet

The other day I wrote about information filtering – "There’s no such thing as information overload only failure to filter”. This post was linked to by The Social Organisation who makes some really interesting points about filtering and the hoarding instinct:

FormbyA few years ago I wrote a post about scarcity and abundance and I still think this is the fundamental issue at play with information. Humans are driven to hoard because our impulses were built for an environment of scarcity. We are worried that if we don’t read everything – particularly if passed on through trusted social connections – we might miss something important and that makes us anxious. We mistake the available and accessible for the valuable.

I’ve never been much of a hoarder but I only have to look out across my back garden to see a house where someone clearly has huge issues with hoarding, and you don’t have to walk around many offices to realise that lots of people have similar issues when it comes to folders of paper. That’s all before we deluge people with electronic information.

While I was writing the post I was reminded of a cartoon which I couldn’t find at the time, but came across it again today:

From Bonkers World

"There's no such thing as information overload only failure to filter"

In a recent article John Gaudiin from Cisco recounts how, at a conference one of the attendees half jokingly said:

"There’s no such thing as information overload only failure to filter."

LindisfarneI’ve heard this view before, and probably used it in a few situations myself. I am an avid filterer myself. Of the hundreds of emails I receive every day the number that make it to my inbox is quite small, but I also think that it’s an overly simplistic view.

One of the problems I have is that this statement places all of the responsibility on the person receiving the information and the systems transporting it. It places no responsibility with the person or system sending the information.

I can filter all sorts of things if people or groups of people behave consistently, and the technology can do the same. The problem comes because people are not consistent, and groups of people are even less consistent.

Taking email as an example, it can be categorised in all sorts of ways, but the category is set by the person sending the information and their view of the category is probably different to mine. Just because an email is marked as urgent doesn’t mean that it becomes urgent to me, my idea of urgent and theirs are rarely the same. If I’m added as a cc: doesn’t mean I can always ignore it because sometimes I should really be at the heart of the activity. In some ways categorisation makes it worse, because people believe they are communicating something that I’m likely to ignore.

The other challenge with filtering is that it’s secret. The person who has sent me some information has now knowledge of whether I have let the information onto my field of vision or not. There is only room for a certain number of players on the pitch so a lot of people have to be happy to be a spectator, but current filtering systems don’t even tell people whether they’ve made it into the team, the reserves, a spectator or have already been ejected from the park.

The final challenge with current filtering systems is the scope of context. Current filtering systems work within their context (email, IM, etc.) they understand very little about each other’s context. They definitely don’t collect all of the context – voice is an obvious omission. The email system has no way of knowing that someone has phoned me to tell me to look out for an important or urgent email, if it did I would want it to tell me.

That leaves me in the situation where the ultimate filter has to be my eyeballs.

My approach to filtering is a version of the zero inbox approach. It’s only going to get worked on if it’s in my diary or it’s in my ‘to action’ folder. It only gets into my ‘to action’ folder if it’s not been deleted by a filter, or I’ve moved it there from one of my other filter folders like ‘newsletters’, ‘expenses system’ or ‘travel system’ which is highly unlikely, or if I’ve personally filtered it in there from what remains of what remains in my inbox. At some point in every day my inbox is empty. By using different automatic filter folders I am able to apply a different approach to reading in the different folders. In the ‘expenses system’ folder I’m only looking for one thing and that’s the ‘rejected’ word, everything else is noise. In the ‘newsletters’ folder I filter on title, if the title isn’t very interesting it gets deleted.

I don’t filter on individuals although I have seriously considered putting some people into a ‘too chatty’ filter to let me filter them separately.

While filtering items I also operate a 30 second rule, if I can respond completely in 30 seconds I will. The important thing is that I can respond completely if I’m not sure about something or I only have half the answer it goes into the ‘to action’ folder. I don’t send ‘I’ll get back to you tomorrow’ type emails, because I don’t see any value in them and they just annoy me when people send them to me.

Most of the time this works very well for me and I rarely feel completely overloaded.

My filter regime for other systems isn’t anything like as sophisticated primarily because the technology isn’t yet there.

Do you get that overloaded feeling or is your filter system working?

David Allen: "It's really cools stuff, but there's as much frustration with it now…"

In this short video from Bloomberg Dave Allen talks about technology and productivity.

Bamburgh SunsetI know a number of people who blame technology for all sorts of problems, but Dave Allen has a different take:

The medium itself is neither good nor bad – it’s neutral.

It’s a message that many of us need to hear, to a certain extent, it’s not email that’s the problem, it’s how we use it. I say ‘to a certain extent’ because my own view is that email, as an example, is only neutral in the same way that alcohol is neutral. That might sound like quite a strong comparison to make, but the parallels that I am trying to draw out are these. Alcohol might be neutral until used, but it’s effect on people, once used, differs dramatically, and people aren’t always in control of their response.  The same is true with email, and other technology media. Also, like alcohol, the effects aren’t always immediately evident and for the technology media we are a long way from understanding all of the impacts.

We need to do a much better job of helping people to understand what the impacts of their actions are when they use email, for instance, and to use it far more responsibly.

Things are changing and Dave Allen highlights this in the interview:

It’s all really cools stuff but there’s as much frustrations with it now as there is "wow this is neat".

The GTD methods that Dave Allen teaches, and other similar methodologies, are becoming very important.

The other day I read an interesting article when someone was paralleling the emerging Productivity Industry with the Diet Industry. It’s a similar parallel. (Annoyingly, for some reason, I didn’t bookmark it and now can’t find it.)

http://player.ooyala.com/player.js?height=360&embedCode=91dmJqMzoH5fkdyt241J-lK2Kn_amZaL&deepLinkEmbedCode=91dmJqMzoH5fkdyt241J-lK2Kn_amZaL&width=560

Turn off your smart-phone: Reduce stress

I’ve believed for some time that many of us are causing ourselves harm by the way we are constantly connected, and also constantly working.

RydalA new report by The British Psychological Society says that we need to be turning off our smart phones to reduce our stress:

The study established the existence of a helpful-stressful cycle; it found that a device is typically acquired to help an individual manage their work load. However, once the individual starts to use their smart phone the work load management benefits are displaced by the pressure to keep abreast with their new expanded virtual social life. The more an individual becomes stressed and worried the more compulsive behaviours such as checking will occur.

Richard Balding advises organisations to consider this problem seriously:

“Smart phone use is increasing at a rapid rate and we are likely to see an associated increase in stress from social networking. Organisations will not flourish if their employees are stressed, irrespective of the source of stress, so it is in their interest to encourage their employees to switch their phones off; cut the number of work emails sent out of hours, reduce people’s temptation to check their devices.”

Back in 2009 I wrote about My New Fear of Working from Home which highlighted a similar cycle.

My smartish-phone is set to turn itself off in the evening and I try my best to leave it that way.

Via Lifehacker

Teenagers still prefer face-to-face

In an age of highly connected teenagers you’d think, according to the popular stereotype, that young people were living their lives as bedroom recluses unable to be parted from Facebook.

GraffitiA recent study by Ericsson ConsumerLab of US teenagers paints a different story:

In an era of online social networking, it may come as a surprise that teenagers’ preferred form of communication doesn’t rely on technology. Asked what form of communication they would miss most if it were taken away, the vast majority of respondents replied “face-to-face.” Less than half as many said they would miss texting the most, putting it in second place. Meanwhile, Facebook use came in as only the fourth most popular, after talking on the mobile phone.

Graphically it’s quite stark:

image

The report goes on to say that although teenagers have a huge array of communications available to them they see them as tools to create real-life interactions. I quite liked the diagram of how Ericcson envisaged how these tools fit into the Teenage Dating Timeline:

image

Speaking as a father of a couple of UK teenagers it correlates quite closely with the way that I see interactions happening around here.

A fuller summary of the report is here.

Seasonal Gratitude

It’s been a great year for infographics, almost too good (they’re starting to become a bit formulaic). At this seasonal time I thought I would highlight one to make us grateful:

image

(I’d link back to original, but I don’t know where it came from originally. I got it from here)

Giving up on a goal: 1000 posts

Back in September I set out on a process of writing less to write more. It looked then like there was just a possibility that I could get the end of the year and have written 1000 posts on this blog.

Castle CragI need to set myself personal goals otherwise I get nothing done, it’s my way of focussing.

This is post number 907 and I’m clearly nowhere near the 1000 number. So I’ve decided to put the 1000 goal to one side. I’d rather focus on quality over quantity anyway, but sometimes it’s nice to have a target and quality targets are more difficult to set.

I like to reach a summit, but not at the expense of the view on the journey.

I also thought about adding up all of the other contributions that I’ve made on Twitter, Flickr, etc to come up with a view of my overall output this year. That got too scary so I decided to leave that one under the carpet.

Because it's Friday: Visual News

Back to the regular Friday them of how we make things more visual, today’s example is – the news.

Newsmap has been around in beta for a little while, but I’ve never written about it. Here is the news for today (4th November 2011 at 8:20) for the UK in visual form:

image

It’s not the only visual news site out there, but I like this one.

I have to admit though, it always makes me slightly sad, while many of these things are really important, some of the things that get people attention are not important at all.

On a lighter note: It always manages to highlight something I hadn’t seen, and that’s exciting for an information addict.