I don’t have a poor attention span ! I’m multitasking
I both chuckled and agreed when I read the post on Lifehacker. It describes the typical "geek" and having trained themselves to multi-task and when confronted with a situation that is best suited to focusing on just one thing - meetings and conference calls come to mind - it is difficult if not impossible to shut down that multi-tasker brain. I would completely agree with the challenge but I would not say it is a factor of "geekiness" but rather it is a byproduct of the way we live today.
If you want to challenge your brain but have a short attention span <grin> you can jump to my proposition below or just read thru.
First, a digression: There is no such thing as "multitasking". Computers can’t do it. People can’t do it. What we can do, and do increasingly well (or poorly) is rapid time slicing. I won’t get into the breathing, digesting, walking, while talking on the cell phone form of multitasking because that really is offloading simple tasks to ‘lesser’ separate processors and not multi-tasking.
Most professionals have more work than they can accomplish and by time-slicing, try to fill even the tiniest sliver of idle time with work. Take for examples, waiting on hold, walking to a meeting, getting lunch, waiting for a text message reply, loading a web page or downloading a file, sitting at a traffic light, etc. All of these are small fragments of time and we end up using all of them to get "other stuff" done.
I believe that "poor attention span" has unique aspects in the geek population because computers have always been one of the things that keep them stimulated. I believe this relative perception of poor attention span is actually caused by two factors. The first is genetic. The brains of some people are just programmed to multi-task … the second factor is a simple training issue. The typical geek trains their brain to be heavily focused while multitasking day after day. Source: Tech-Recipes
The "training" aspect is not a generational phenomenon and not specific to a career path. Starting in the 1980’s TV started changing its marketing format to be more intense with more images crammed into 30 and 60 second ads. video games ratcheted up the rate further. Then personal computers, chat rooms, text messaging, SMS, multi-player games, and more really concentrated the "training" regime for the youth of the day. Well, it’s 15 years latter and those teenagers are now in the workforce.
Personally, I think it is a good thing. But, even if you disagree, please accept that it is reality. So, we can either adapt or we can burry our heads in the sand and think we can make like like it was in the 1950s.
What does "adapt" mean ? well, first, if conventional meetings and conference calls do not work with the time-slicer generation, then why not do away with them ? There must be a better collaboration experience that get’s the same end result but works in a time-sliced workforce.
What would happen if your calendar allowed you schedule up to 4 things for the same period - only one of which required speaking. Next, we change the etiquette for asking questions when speaking. Rather than Sam saying, "hey, Joe - do you agree?" We assume everyone is multitasking and ask the question, "hey Joe, Bill says we need to have the contract ready on Monday for review rather than Wednesday to insure one last read-thru. do you agree?" Obviously, the second question takes a few more seconds to say but it allows Joe to be doing other things while Sam and Bill hash out the schedule for the contract.
As a matter of fact, let’s assume Joe has 4 time-sliced meetings going on. He is on the call with Sam and Bill. He is watching a slide presentation, in a project status chat room, and is in a text messaging session with a mentor. Now assume all of the people in those 4 events are also time-slicing.
This may sound confusing but I would bet the vast majority of business people today do something very similar to what I just described. The problem is not that we do this, but that we have not adapted our culture and business practices to embrace it. It is a strange case of "expected behavior" but not "accepted behavior". Business today forces us to work this way but does not support this style of work. It’s all rather two-faced to be honest.
So, do you work in a time-sliced culture and if so, could you / would you try to change the behavior and etiquette to embrace time-slicing or stick with the work model of the 1950’s juxtaposed to the reality of the "time slicer generation" ?
October 21st, 2007 at 09:41
Hi Glen,
Thanks for this post. The notion of multi-tasking is an interesting one to me.
It’s my experience, both personal and working with lots of people over the years, multi-tasking is largely a myth used as an attractive plaster skim-coat over the reality of today’s work pace - which can charitably described as too many “opportunities” for the amount of time available. I don’t think that humans are truly adapting to this manner of conducting our affairs. Instead, it’s a coping mechanism being portrayed as adaptation.
As you say, humans, like computers pay the price for multi-tasking (or time-slicing) in the form of the context switch. According to Gerald Weinberg, adding a single concurrent task yields a loss of 20% of your time due to context switching. A third concurrent task consumes 50% of time in context switching. These numbers from from a post over at http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000691.html. That post at Coding Horror also mentions a BBC study that estimated that people lose 10 points of IQ when their work is interrupted by incoming emails and phone calls - more than by smoking marijuana. This same post contains a another very interesting link on multi-tasking by Kathy Sierra.
By the way, we don’t have to go back to the 50’s to remember a time when focussed, uninterrupted time was a valued facet of the work environment. Tom DeMarco in his book “Peopleware” wrote about the importance for engineers to have a certain amount of space to work in accompanied by the privacy sentinels of an office with a door and a phone you could turn off. I remember the 80’s in the Software industry when there was not the competing attention sinks like Instant Messaging and cell phone calls and cell phone text messaging to name just three.
Regarding your last question: I work in a heavily time-sliced culture and am in a role where my day is largely interrupt driven. Personally I cope by doing what I suspect many of my colleagues do which is try to keep the competing balls of IM’s, phone conferences, emails, phone calls, and personal deliverables all in the air at once - without letting them completely overrun my entire waking life. I don’t believe that we can turn the clock back to a slower time. I also don’t think that the way we conduct our business lives right now is the only way. I do think we’re on a trajectory that will need to be completed before other ideas are entertained.
Thanks again Glen.
Best,
Roy.