You think you get more done by multitasking? Think again.
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{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
One ass less to bite.
Great episode, Lars, thanks. Especially the “thinking is an activity and it takes time” is a great point I think.
I think it also means sometimes it is beneficial to stop for a while when there is a difficult problem to solve and have a walk for example. But you should not listen to a podcast during that walk obviously..
Regarding topics, I most enjoyed episodes about finding passions, reaching goals, and time management. I’m trying to get a business of the ground and these ones helped me think about the right ways to do things.
Cheers again and keep it up.
Thanks, Jan. Yes, taking a break and going for a walk is almost always a great way to tackle an intricate problem. What happens is that your brain enters i different state, operating at a different frequency, which allows you to access more of your creativity and your intuition, so you can see solutions and connections you otherwise couldn’t.
It reminds me of the experiment with ATMs. If the ATM was beautiful, people more easily solved problems than when it was ugly, despite the software and the functions being identical. The reason being is that looking at something beautiful helps us access our creativity thus finding a way around an obstacle. I believe it was referenced in Donald Norman’s book Emotional Design.
Just listened to rails podcast and headed here. First episode watched.
It’s always a good point that conceived thought beats “the wisdom of the crowd” or whatever. Good stuff.
My question, on the other hand, is what you would say to someone who thinks too much, overthinking. I don’t mean it in a pretentious way, simply that I feel I spend too much time thinking about ideas or beliefs and how to improve or eliminate them, that it cuts into my productivity.
Only in the recent months have I Learned How To Be Productive at all, and it does require me to let go of relying on expert advice and expert best practices and just start handling the alphabet blocks myself. Then, I’m much more aware who and what I need to know.
So my point is that there is way too much “take my advice (or the consequences)” rather than “spend an hour learning on your own, then talk to me.”
Also my peers don’t grok my “verbose” comments. Do you know ways to reduce linguistic overhead in thought?— clean out the stock phrases, cliches, and stuff, that make thought painful to begin with?
Thanks
Jesse,
Thanks so much for your comment. This comment warrants its own entire show, or maybe even series of shows.
It’s so common, I know it only too well from myself and many of my friends in the software world.
What happens is that we’re trying to solve problems at the wrong level. There are questions whose answer aren’t found with the rational mind. The brain operates at different wave frequencies – beta, alpha, theta, and delta. Most of the time, we tend to mostly be in beta or high alpha, but access to our intuition and subconscious, where a lot of the most useful answers to the most important questions are to be found, happens in the theta anad delta states.
A simple trick is to go for a walk in nature. Seriously. Take an hour to walk near the water or in the woods, and try to really be present there, and it’s going to alter your brain state.
Meditation is another good method.
Recently, I’ve started using Holosync from Centerpointe, which does an excellent job of changing your brain state very quickly. Pretty neat stuff.
I have a habit of getting distracted incredibly easily so I’ve been training myself to get rid of all the sources of distraction (TweetDeck, Mail, IRC etc.) and focus on what I’m supposed to be doing. It’s still quite tough and I often fall into the trap you mentioned of getting stuck on something and thinking “OK, I’ll just quickly check my email while I figure this out and then come back to it”.
Something I’ve found useful is a way to deal with those thoughts that pop into your head while you’re in the middle of something else – stuff like “I must remember to make that phone call” or “I mustn’t forget my wedding anniversary next month”.
I use Things to manage my tasks and the global keyboard shortcut of ctrl-alt-space lets me add a todo item when it occurs to me without getting sidetracked. Then I can spend half an hour at the end of the day organising tasks and making sure that I schedule a time to get them done.
I found very interesting the fact that multitasking is killing productivity. Not because I didn knew, in fact is not something new. But the point is that at any company that I work previously and at the actual company where I work bosses and project mannagers wait that this is the working pattern to follow.