Category: My Brain

Older Users Take Longer – 0.8% Longer per Year.

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"

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

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.

Learning About Me – Learning Agility

That RockThe other day I realised how much personal development stuff I had done this year. So I’ve decided that it’s time to assimilate some of it, rather than just learn it.

Starting with the one that I did most recently, and have assimilated the least – learning agility. This is based on the Lominger book – FYI for Talent Management.

As a quick introduction here’s an extract from the start of the book:

Talent is usually considered the people who are in the upper 10 percent of what they do. What separates the best from the rest who perform well? To be good at anything requires some knowledge, skills, and technical know how. Both the best and the rest have that. One thing that separates the best from the rest is the ability to adjust, adapt, respond to, and be resourceful in the face of change.

….

Regardless of how intelligent or technically skilled you are, the best way to increase your talent score or effectiveness is to improve you learning agility. Relatively unrelated to intelligence (also good to have), learning agility is basically how well you adapt to the new and different.

The book then goes on to split learning agility into four areas, each with a set of learning themes.

On a quick assessment there weren’t really any surprises to me.

The four areas are:

  • Mental agility
  • People agility
  • Change agility
  • Results agility

Anyone who knows me would guess the top – mental agility where I came out above the 99th percentile. The only surprise was how high this was, it’s nice to have it affirmed though.

After that the other three are quite close between the 75th and 90th percentile.

Getting into the themes.

My strengths are:

  • Critical thinker
  • Inquisitive
  • Solution finder
  • Agile communicator
  • Personal learner

Again, no surprises there and reinforcement for previous assessments.

Onto the “to be worked on” section. The areas where I came out weaker were as follows:

  • Cool transactor
  • Light touch
  • People smart
  • Presence

Each of these areas then has a set of remedies and recommendations. I’ve picked out a few things that I am going to try and do. I’m not going to detail them here just yet, we’ll see how I get on with them first.

I do feel a bit like I’ve come back to the beginning of a journey, because learning agility is almost where I started from in August 2006.

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Assessment, Assessment, Assessment – Time for Some Assimilation

Choices, choicesThis last year has been one of personal development – primarily leadership development. I’ve done a number of seminars, sessions and courses. These have all involved some level of assessment, learning agility, leadership style, learning style, etc. the list goes on. Yesterday was another day when another quick assessment gave another view on who I am.

I feel like the time has come to assimilate some of this information. It’s not really any good as information, if I’m not going to do something with it. Over the next few weeks I think I need to go back over the various assessments, glean from them the appropriate observations and then do something with them.

As a starter, though, I need to work out what it is I have actually done:

I’m not sure yet whether I’m going to through them all and try to pick out the common themes are whether I’m going to revisit each of them in turn and build a plan for each one.

I’ve tagged this to go into my category “My Brain” because I think that it is all linked to the original purpose of those thoughts.

Happiness at Work

If you ever wondered what happiness at work looked like then watch this video:

It’s not about pay – it’s about passion.

See more here.

Concept of the day: Deindividuation

Caramel and Cream - yummyAnyone who has used email or any other form of electronic communication has seen (and probably sent) written content that shocked you. You were amazed that the person, that you know, could say such a thing in such an aggressive way. The New Scientist has an interesting article that suggests that some of the reason for this is deindividuation:

Social psychologists have known for decades that, if we reduce our sense of our own identity – a process called deindividuation – we are less likely to stick to social norms. For example, in the 1960s Leon Mann studied a nasty phenomenon called “suicide baiting” – when someone threatening to jump from a high building is encouraged to do so by bystanders. Mann found that people were more likely to do this if they were part of a large crowd, if the jumper was above the 7th floor, and if it was dark. These are all factors that allowed the observers to lose their own individuality.

Social psychologist Nicholas Epley argues that much the same thing happens with online communication such as email. Psychologically, we are “distant” from the person we’re talking to and less focused on our own identity. As a result we’re more prone to aggressive behaviour, he says.

The most recent place where I have seen this personally has been in the occasional reply-to-all storms that we have in our email system. Someone will send out an email to whole set of people. Someone else will reply-to-all that they don’t know why they received the first email, or similar. This will then set of a storm of activity from people replying to the reply-to-all. Each of these replies will get more and more aggressive in their language.

If only these people sat back and analysed what they were doing they would stop doing it. It’s unlikely any of them have read though the recipient list to see who is on it, in their minds they are just replying to some random person. What they are actually doing is replying to all sorts of senior people who could have a great influence on their career, what’s more they are abusing a fellow colleague. If they only thought about how they would feel to receive such an email they wouldn’t do it.

A wise person once said: “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.”

via TechCrunch

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Concept of the day: Attention Deficit Trait (ADT)

Need a hand Grandad?I’ve just finished reading a Harvard Business Review OnPoint called Overloaded Circuits: Why Smart People Underperform. This talks about attention deficit trait (ADT). The Harvard article comes at a cost but the article in Time has a good overview, as does the CNET article.

Frenzied executives who fidget through meetings, miss appointments, and jab at the elevator’s “door close” button aren’t crazy – just crazed. They’re suffering from a newly recognized neurological phenomenon call attention deficit trait (ADT). Marked by distractibility, inner frenzy, and impatience, ADT prevents managers from clarifying priorities, making smart decisions, and managing their time. This insidious condition turns otherwise talented performers into harried underachievers. And it’s reaching epidemic proportions”

Sound like anyone you know?

It seems that ADT is completely caused by our environment, by the office, by the technology, by relationships.

So how do we control it:

  • Promote positive emotions
  • Take physical care of our brains
  • Organise for ADT

ADT is closely related to the way that our brain reacts to fear so it’s important to promote positive feelings through stressful times. Positive feelings are also associated with good relationships. The author recommends interacting with someone you like at least every 4 to 6 hours. That’s an interesting thing for someone who mainly works at home to hear.

I’ve talked before about the physical side of looking after our brain, sleep, diet, etc. It’s a good reminder that I’ve let it slip a bit recently.

Organising for ADT is about creating the space and time to think away from all of the distractions. This isn’t just time management, but it’s also managing things out.

I was talking to someone who runs a huge fund in New York, and he was saying he demands that his employees take several days a month just to think–to leave the office and just go off and think. He wants them to not bring their e-mail, not bring their cell phone–make themselves unavailable. And I think it’s a really smart management strategy.

Organisations used to give people sabbaticals, some still do. In a world that is increasingly asking for for “fast” rather than “right” I think that people are increasingly going to need times to reconnect with “right”.

Brain Activity of the Visionary

Blencathra from Walla CragEver been running a My Brain category for some time now. It started with the question of whether it was possible to “strengthen” your brain.

Steve lent me Making a Good Brain Great by Daniel Amen which talks a lot about examining people’s brains which concludes that the brain can be changed by the environment and “training”.

Church of the Customer had an interesting blog recently that highlighted some research being done at Arizona State University.

Visionarybrain_2

I wonder what my brain would be like?

I’ve recently been through a whole load of personality/leadership/management type profiling. All of them have used a similar tool to do the assessment. They have all used questionnaires of one kind or another. At best, these questionnaires are an indirect assessment of what my brain is actually doing. Taking the direct approach seems like a very interesting approach.

Coaching Tips also picks up on the research.

Infomania and Facebook

Sparkling Water at the Science MuseumThere are days when thoughts come together. I’ve been wondering about the impact of Facebook on infomania. This follows on from some of the reports in recent days about the productivity impact of Facebook and a newish report on Informania.

To recap, infomania is the condition that your boss (probably) has when they feel the need to checking emails on their Blackberry while they are talking to you. it’s the need that they have to make sure that they aren’t missing out on something.

As we increase access to information and information sources then we increase the infomania that these people all feel. Facebook is just the latest source of information.

This need to access information costs business lots of productivity, but is it really Facebook that is to blame. I’ve written before about the Blackberry effect on the work/life balance as another example.

My starting point is that infomania not the tool’s problem, it’s a human problem. We are still in control of the machines, we still have access to the off button (although I was in a meeting earlier this week where a senior manager didn’t know how to turn his Blackberry off). It’s our choice not to use it.

The numbers in the report are startling:

Intel employees spend an average of some three hours per day processing email. About 30 percent of messages (one million per day) are unnecessary.

On average, knowledge workers can expect three minutes of uninterrupted work on any task before being interrupted.

On average, a major interruption occurs every 11 minutes, the time to return to an interrupted task is 25 minutes …

The bottom line: Infomania causes a damage of about US$1 billion per annum for a knowledge-intensive company of 50,000 employees. As usual with such calculations, this value is conservative, representing only more direct aspects of the problem. Additional, harder to measure damages exist but are not included.

If those numbers are true, then we need to do something to protect people from themselves. If we were talking about a drug we would probably ban it. If not an outright ban we would at least have a huge education programme making sure that people understood the dangers they were entering into. Anyone can buy a computer and connect it to the Internet without any understanding of the potential dangers. A car is a dangerous thing, so we train people how to use it properly.

I wonder, though, whether we need to go further.

  • Perhaps we need global information rest days when we turn everything off.
  • Perhaps we need to run infomanics anonymous courses to help people.
  • Perhaps we need to remove network connections and ban blackberry’s from meeting rooms.
  • Perhaps we need to give children IT Education alongside Sex Education.
  • Perhaps…
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Procrastination and Pondering

Jimmy and Grandad at Dark LythamMy colleague Charlie asked an interesting question in his post on “Window Watching – Space for My Brain“:

As we continue to move towards a 24/7 online, adhocracy based work style (not sure where the lifestyle fits in).  It is important that information workers recognise the need for creating effective brain-only time.  I think there needs to a cultural shift in thinking that downtime (time away) from our connected/online work environments is valuable and useful.

It has me wondering how procrastination fits into this… as Graham has blogged about here in the category My Brain Topic.

I think that the difference between procrastination and “effective brain-only time” is the difference between procrastination and pondering. These two things are different, in my opinion:

  • Procrastination are the times when you are filling your time with anything and everything just to avoid doing something. The only thing that you are thinking about is the thing that you really should be doing, but you are avoiding doing it by doing all manner of other things.
  • Pondering is when you are doing nothing, or at least nothing that requires your brain to be in process mode. Pondering is something that is very important and can be done in many different ways.

Personally I have two main ways that I ponder; walking, free journaling.

One of the main reasons that I go for a walk in a morning is to ponder. Sometimes I listen to a podcast, but most of the time I walk to ponder.

I also try to free journal. To free journal you sit down with a piece of paper and write whatever it is that you are thinking about. There should be no structure to the writing, no grammar checking, no spell checking, no sense checking, just writing. As I write I find that thoughts spark other thoughts. I don’t analyse them I just write them down. As the words are put onto the paper it’s like they are released from spinning around my head and make room for another thought.

I always free journal with paper because there is no technology to tell me I have done anything wrong and no way of going back and changing something.

This type of free expression is apparently very good for the brain.

A study was undertaken with older people who were asked this question: “If you had it to do over again, what would you do differently?” and the answers:

  • Risk more.
  • Reflect more.
  • Do more things that would live on after I died.

I think that reflecting and pondering are quite similar.

(My procrastination busting was successful and I managed to get the document finished.)

Procrastination Management

That RockI am suffering from terrible procrastination today.

I have a document that I should really get finished but I can barely look at it without being distracted. It’s one of those jobs that I just can’t be bothered to do. I know it needs doing, I know it will be better when it is done, but I really just can’t get enthusiastic about getting it done.

I’m playing the game of procrastination by avoidance. Most people experience it from time to time:

I’ll just do this, and then I’ll get around to that document.

I’ll just check my emails and then I’ll get around to that document. Oh dear, no new ones.

I’ll just check on my feeds to see what’s new.

Right read them, I wonder if I now have some new emails to distract me. Great a new one.

Right dealt with that, I’ll no see if there any more new ones. Oh dear, no new ones.

Wish my phone would ring.

I’ll just check on the BBC to see if there is any significant news today.

I’ll just have a sneaky check on Facebook.

Slow news day today. I wonder if I now have some new emails to distract me. Oh dear no new ones.

Wish someone would IM me.

I’ll just check on my feeds to see what’s new. Oh dear no new ones.

Who can I IM for a chat.

I’ll just have a sneaky check on Facebook.

I’ll just go and make a drink.

and on, and on, and on.

It’s time for some procrastination busting.

Here is my technique for procrastination busting.

Finish small achievable task – get reward

A small task is something like: review a section or update a section.

Rewards are things like: make a drink, IM a colleague, read feeds, read email.

I do not allow myself to do any of the rewards things until I have finished the current task.

Before I really know it I have finished the big task, by doing the little tasks.

Simple really.

Off now to get section 1 of this document updated, then it will be time for a cup of tea and then on to section 2.

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