Our daily practice says more about ourselves than we like to admit. If my practice has me multitasking, there must be something about it I enjoy. Is it possible to change my practice? Of course, it is.
All in personal effectiveness
Our daily practice says more about ourselves than we like to admit. If my practice has me multitasking, there must be something about it I enjoy. Is it possible to change my practice? Of course, it is.
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." - Stephen Hawking, who died 14 March 2018.
The goal isn't efficiency. The goal is getting the right things done.
Digital tools (and other humans) can interrupt the flow of work. But are they necessarily bad? Can I allow disruptions in such a way that I can still work and get stuff done?
Marshall Goldsmith's "Triggers: Creating Behavior That Lasts - Becoming the Person You Want to Be" is a great, quick read. I couldn't help but think of "wear the world as a loose garment" as I thought further about the book.
Paraphrasing a quote: As soon as we stop losing sleep over the success of our business, and start losing sleep over the success of our customers' business, then we will find success.
The Ministry of Ideas podcast has a recent episode of the idea of "(In)Efficiency." It was also excerpted in yesterday's Boston Globe, "Long Before Uber, Efficiency Was Divine." It was informative, but there is a big element that is missing for me: why is the concept so strongly embedded in the way we think - so much that it actually damages individuals and organizations.
I've had "Stop Letting Email Control Your Work Day" by Paul A. Argenti flagged for follow-up since it was posted a month ago. The title is pretty obvious: so many people let email control their work day. This doesn't make sense - it is a tool like any other and should be controlled by the wielder, not the other way around.
"Leadership and Self-Deception: Getting Out of the Box" by The Arbinger Institute was a good and challenging read. I found it engaging with connections to ideas from Theory of Constraints that I have been exploring and using in my work. I also finished the book on Yom Kippur - a day of reflections - so I was thinking about my own assumptions around how I operate in the world.
When I don't take control of those requests, I can become slave to every interruption (or request every request that comes through on my calendar). Poppy Harlow (CNN anchor) had a great piece in yesterday's USA Today on "Finding Happiness in 'No'," where she described her journey in learning how to set limits.
By now, most people who read this know that multitasking causes a lot of problems in organizations. It creates delays, lowers quality, and creates more and more tension in an organization.A recent HBR Ideacast with Mark Mortensen described a variant that I have talked about but had never named: "multiteaming" - being assigned to multiple (different) projects.
Every time we switch attention, it causes us to burn mental energy. And that energy lost ends up costing us: I usually focus on the fact that everything takes longer when my focus shifts. But we also lose creativity, sleep, energy... and more.
I finished "Stretch: Unlock the Power of Less - and Achieve Than You Ever Imagined" by Scott Sonenshein a few weeks ago, and have had the ideas rolling around in my head since then. I really like the overall premise of the book: lean towards Stretching instead of Chasing. I found that it nicely connects to the ideas of Theory of Constraints and process improvement in general.
Personal productivity writers and thinkers harp on and on about email. And for good reason - our default behavior around email creates a lot of chaos. Dan Ariely has been thinking about this and the result was "A Behavioral Economist Tries to Fix Email" in The Atlantic earlier this month.
A video about multitasking told from the perspective of a design engineer who was lost in the world of multitasking - it took him four weeks to do a 2-4 day design task.
"The rule of five" is a new-to-me idea for managing multitasking at the individual level. It's a combination of the task board and the idea of dropping things to the floor. Have an explicit list and keep it in control. Interesting.
My network is not the vast number of people I'm connected to on LinkedIn or Facebook or Twitter.
Everyone wants to kill email. I'm no fan of it either, but it does serve a purpose - a purpose that no other tool serves quite as well. Or more specifically, better than any SINGLE tool serves.