Overload, Schmoverload: The Myth Of Personal Productivity

The newest attack on connectedness and whole brain attention is here, spouting conventional wisdom as gospel:

[from Lost in E-Mail, Tech Firms Face Self-Made Beast by Matt Richtel]

The onslaught of cellphone calls and e-mail and instant messages is fracturing attention spans and hurting productivity. It is a common complaint. But now the very companies that helped create the flood are trying to mop it up.

[...]

Their effort comes as statistical and anecdotal evidence mounts that the same technology tools that have led to improvements in productivity can be counterproductive if overused.

The big chip maker Intel found in an eight-month internal study that some employees who were encouraged to limit digital interruptions said they were more productive and creative as a result.

[...]

Many people readily recognize that they face — or invite — continual interruption, but the emerging data on the scale of the problem may come as a surprise.

A typical information worker who sits at a computer all day turns to his e-mail program more than 50 times and uses instant messaging 77 times, according to one measure by RescueTime, a company that analyzes computer habits. The company, which draws its data from 40,000 people who have tracking software on their computers, found that on average the worker also stops at 40 Web sites over the course of the day.

The fractured attention comes at a cost. In the United States, more than $650 billion a year in productivity is lost because of unnecessary interruptions, predominately mundane matters, according to Basex. The firm says that a big chunk of that cost comes from the time it takes people to recover from an interruption and get back to work.

Ok. Let's take it from the top. I will just mention in passing that a company called Rescuetime is unlikely to structure any study at any time that ever suggests that anything other than personal productivity should be important to management. Basex seems to be following the same miserly chain of thought, as well.

My rebuttal:

Personal productivity -- While people may think the appropriate unit of measuring the benefits of social tools is personal productivity, it isn't.

As we have moved from hierarchical, top-down, centralized work -- think Henry Ford's assembly lines or the pre-Internet global corporation -- to networked, bottom-up, edgewise work personal productivity has been trumped by network productivity. Network productivity is the effectiveness of a person's entire network: contacts, contacts of contacts, and so on.

Connected people will naturally gravitate toward an ethic where they will trade personal productivity for connectedness: they will interrupt their own work to help a contact make progress. Ultimately, in a bottom-up fashion, this leads to the network as a whole making more progress than if each individual tries to optimize personal productivity. (Trust me, its provable. I studied queuing theory in graduate school.) I call this Boyd's Law, by the way.

Perhaps more importantly, the willingness to assist others leads to closer social connections, and increases the likelihood of reciprocal behavior, where an obsession with personal productivity does not.

"Some" found they were more productive and creative by minimizing interruptions -- I am in favor of people having time away from others, to do all sorts of things. Sleeping, writing, playing the guitar, sex -- there are an unending set of things that people should do while disconnected.

However, while I advocate disconnecting for these reasons, I am remain convinced that the bias should be toward remaining connected to the greatest degree that allows individuals the time apart and disconnected that they need to make sense of the world through creative and contemplative pursuits, and no more.

My argument is not really about the downside of missing something flowing by the torrent of information everyday, nor is it about being a busy little bee working like mad on some sort of modern information assembly line. It is about the psychological, spiritual, and work benefits of connection. Note that for these to hold, people will have to learn to be much more judicious in the determination of who -- and how many -- they will connect with. The willingness to swap personal productivity for connection is just that: it is an ethical choice that asserts that the bonds of connection, today and over time, are more important -- not just abstractly, but in the most concrete way -- than making headway on this piece of work, right now.

On a work basis, businesses today want it (or think they want it) both ways. They want their employees to be personally productive, making the classic logical error that if everyone is highly productive personally then the company will be. Nope.

But at the same time, the company is still arrogating to itself control of connections. Most obviously, a worker can't really choose who to work with, which projects are most interesting, which bosses are worth listening to, and so on. Like pigeons pecking a button in a Skinner box, the enterprise gives its workers an on/off switch but little other control.

Can workers opt to 'block' messages from dumb managers? Can they direct email that they are cc'd on to the spam filter? No. But they should.

Participation costs -- Yes, it is true that moving from one full brain task to a different full brain task has a high cost of participation, especially for some one who doesn't transition from task to task on a regular basis. However, learning to operate in a flow mindstate, where partial attention is being paid to "partial tasks", can lead to the transitions costing less at each interruption.

Consider the case where I am doing something involving frequent mental churn, like reading and responding to email. If I get involved in a series of parallel instant messaging sessions at the same time, the apparent costs of switching from one to the other fall, just like being involved in a discussion with a bunch of people at a cocktail party.

Or like the highway on the way to work: you have to deal with many cars as you commute. That's the way it is. While it is true that your commute would be quicker with no other cars on the road: well, sorry, that's not the way the world works. Of course, you might argue that to the degree that it is in your control, you should minimize the number of cars you expose yourself to. But the counter argument is that we need to expose ourselves to the challenges that we need to face, in order to gain the skills necessary to survive, or excel. Just like we are now learning that we need to expose our kids to a reasonable amount of dirt, so they get exposed to enough bacteria that they don't grow up like autoimmune-challenged lab rats, suffering from every allergy under the sun.

And in the case of the conversational swarm at the cocktail party: you may think it would be more productive to have just one-on-one conversations -- to focus mindfully on one friend at a time -- but the reality is more complex. There can be a significantly greater spark when a diverse collection of people are involved in a swapping of views on some subject, or even a collection of related subjects. You can learn more, experience more, gain more, although there is a greater level of mental gymnastics involved.

This doesn't detract from the benefits of one-on-one conversation, but does suggest that we need exposure to larger group interactions to learn how to participate in and benefit from them. Just like we need to drive on busy streets to learn to drive safely, and finally, to learn to drive safely while listening to the radio and carrying on a conversation with someone in the passenger's seat.

As we become habituated to media -- like the radio in the car -- we can remain aware of it with out dedicating our full attention to it. This has taken time to trickle through to popular culture. The same change is at work in business.

I have said for years that the centroids -- media, religion, government, and corporations -- would war against connectedness and the flow consciousness that is needed to operate in the new social Web. It is inherently subversive, because at its core flow is about remaining connected to those that matter to you over the more formal and official relationships that individuals are supposed to have with organizations.

The small shift of consciousness that comes from remaining in the flow setting -- messages and posts flitting by, dozens of chats, firing off quick updates to your circles of contacts -- seems like the devil to the advocates of industrial age thinking and practices. Stop fooling around, get back to work, stop daydreaming, quit gossiping, get those coversheets on the TPS reports!

But the real issue is what is of value, and how to measure it.

The old school thinking is about individual productivity: but the social revolution has moved past that into network productivity, which entails connectedness and social meaning. The personal hit on productivity is real, but it's not a cost: it's an investment; and the juice is worth the squeeze.

They may say that we are getting lost in the flurry of tools we are using, but the truth is we are just moving out of their field of vision. Just like a novice watching a martial arts master, they can't see what it is we are doing. They will have to come to the dojo for a few years, and then -- maybe -- they will be able to see.

Comments

[Michael Leis]

Great post. Couldn't agree more. The major institutions also fear this kind of interconnectedness because it competes with their own "legacy systems," of control. If there were a coordinated connection between people beyond the control of work, local society, and government -- that's really bad news for them. So they go and do things like sue Microsoft or Apple. They like Global Village theory as long as it's one-way communication between hegemonic institutions like TV or film. But they don't like like it. Not enough to go past dating.

The other point that article really missed out on is how much of our jobs today are centered around maintaining that network on their own behalf. Moving some piece of data from one point to another is a large chunk of most people's workday.

[Vicki]

Well said! Bookmarking and sharing.

[Tony Wright]

"I will just mention in passing that a company called RescueTime is unlikely to structure any study at any time that ever suggests that anything other than personal productivity should be important to management."

FWIW, RescueTime is a 6 month old 3 person startup who didn't structure a study about ANYTHING. We're a free tool that helps people and businesses understand how they spend their time. That's it. Matt (the author of the article) asked us to pull some information from our aggregate data, which is our contribution to the conversation.

There's no one denying the value of social software to productivity. But I tend to think the removing the incremental cost of communication and the broadening array of things that interrupt us (whether it's self-initiated or not) can be pretty damaging to those who over-indulge. And many people do.

Anyhoo, interesting post and conversation... thanks!

As with anything, I think plenty of people have the ethics and maturity NOT to over-indulge. And, as with any vice-- moderation might be fine. A regular glass or two of red wine is good for you.

But I've yet to see the human race prove to me that we're capable (as a whole) of healthy moderation. And, in the meantime, the sites and services that prey and profit on grabbing bits of our attention are getting better at their craft.

[Deva]

"this leads to the network as a whole making more progress than if each individual tries to optimize personal productivity."

I think this would be a fantastic topic to discuss at the IORG conference. I'm not sure "contrarian" is quite the right word here, perhaps "alternative" would be better, but whatever we call it, I think a viewpoint on this issue that is different than most of the conventional wisdom around this topic would be great to share and discuss. http://www.iorgforum.org/IORGConference.htm - conference info is there, feel free to contact me directly for more info.

[Johannes Stock]

Collaboration is the road we are heading. And we already have the tools for it. The question for me is, if we already adopted the right habitus to use the tools in a productive way. I think, at the current state, the signal to noise ratio is still to low. People embrace the different forms of digital communication and there's no doubt that advanced users already benefit enormously from them. But what we need to be really productive is a shared habit on how to use digital communication. That doesn't mean all people have to use them in the same way. There will always be different requirements and circumstances. But we have to come up with a shared understanding of appropriate kinds of usage (in the office, i.e.). To be really productive we have to be highly connected AND speak the same scenario-dependent languages.

So, is stopping using this tools the answer? Definitely not. And you made the points perfectly clear. But lets move on and collaborate on reducing the clutter!

[Mary Anne Davis]

ah, thank you, yes, we have now entered the Matrix...

[phil jones]

I think I'm going to start calling these people "neo-Fordists" ... mayby "neo-Taylorists" is more accurate but neo-Fordists is shorter and sounds better.

[Zbigniew Lukasiak]

While this personal versus network productivity is a great way to show the where the new productivity comes from - the dichotomy is actually wrong. The network productivity - as you describe here - is the productivity of the others that you help while you interrupt your own work - but you interrupt those others as well and they help you and this help increases your personal productivity. Your personal productivity is a part of the network productivity.

[Stowe Boyd]

Z -

Yes, individual productivity is part of network productivity, but the difference is perspective. By looking at the network as a whole, and visualizing assistance being passed around -- a developer asking for help on a code fragment, for example -- we start to see that some individuals may have to decrease productivity (in any given quantum of time) for the productivity of the whole to be bettered.

And notice that the network is trans-enterprise: individuals may be helping contacts in other companies.

[Stowe Boyd]

Michael - I didn't understand "The other point that article really missed out on is how much of our jobs today are centered around maintaining that network on their own behalf. Moving some piece of data from one point to another is a large chunk of most people's workday." Especially, who is 'they"?

[Stowe Boyd]

Tony - Apologies if I miscast it, but I was reading from the article more than was intended perhaps.

By the way, I am *not* arguing that social tools are making us more productive. I am saying that they make us more connected, and changing what we value, and hence, change our work ethos. There may be a loss in productivity relative to pre-web norms.

[phil jones]

A couple of thoughts on this ended up conversation here : http://smartdisorganized.blogspot.com/2008/06/stowe-boyd-vs.html

[David]

covered the subject well-thank you

[Nicolas]

Also helpful: Blog on information overload

[gregory]

stowe boyd nails it of course ... there is no problem here except from the point of view of those with no context of what it means to be a conscious human being ... if you are only aware of the objects of awareness, thoughts, you will never know that there is another possibility ... to be aware of awareness itself

this he, we, can call flow, but the essential thing to know is that it is a deeper AND MORE PRODUCTIVE way of functioning ... quiet mind solves everything

[Craig Roth]

There’s no “right” answer in the debate between those that believe information overload will soon cause the heads of information workers will begin to pop like popcorn as they slump over in their fuzzy cubicles and those that believe we’re just adapting to the new flow. I toggle back and forth between both points of view myself depending on what I’m facing at that time.

What I propose is a focus on attention management (specifically what I’ve been writing about as enterprise attention management) that focuses on how enterprises can help information workers to pull the important messages forward and push the less important messages back. Whether you see information overload as a crisis or just one more thing people are adapting to, improving efficiency is something everyone should be able to get behind. I blogged about this at http://knowledgeforward.wordpress.com/2007/08/17/a-manifesto-free-definition-of-attention-management/.

And I fully agree with what I have called closed-loop analysis and you term as network productivity. For those who learned not to be selfish in kindergarden, what is important is the value of interruptions to everyone in the loop as a whole, not just you. If a 5 minute interruption of you for clarification saves me a day of work, you’d be a jerk to say no. I just posted a set of interruption patterns to try to clarify the good-and-bad nature of interruptions and the need to look at the closed-loop at http://ccsblog.burtongroup.com/collaboration_and_content/2008/06/interruption-mo.html. I’d be interested in your feedback.

[Vicki]

Interesting study on IM actually reducing interruptions and distraction. This would seem to support the group or network productivity theory.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/06/080603120251.htm

http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/garrett.html

[Stowe Boyd]

Vicki - Thanks. I blogged it.

[Brad Ovenell-Carter]

Social networking seems something like old-fashioned sewing circles and the like. I expect vast amounts of information was exchanged--where to find the best prices on bread or shoes, how to treat colic, daily gossip etc. (I recognize this is an unsubstantiated hunch and I'd need to call up an anthropologist to confirm it; but in the meantime I'm happy to go on my wife's assertion that that is exactly what happens in her rug-hooking circle.) There was productivity in the common sense--the sewers made a blanket. But there was something more: the productivity, or efficiency, or health, or wisdom etc. of the whole group increased. Not so incidentally this group gathered around a shared interest, something like Twitter groups Stowe Boyd talks about. The point is that all this hullabaloo about too many distractions comes from forgetting the fact that we've been twittering for generations.