I wrote last week about multitasking. Pointed out there’s no such thing.
It was unlikely a complete shock to discover that our attempts at multitasking are massive productivity killers.
But is there a danger in being too quick to pick one thing to focus on?
Anne-Laure Le Cunff thinks so. Her recent article for Ness Labs makes the case for a little more nuance than ‘don’t ever multitask’ or ‘only ever focus on one thing’.
There’s a risk otherwise, she argues, that we will shut down creative exploration too soon.
It was unlikely a complete shock to discover that our attempts at multitasking are massive productivity killers.
But is there a danger in being too quick to pick one thing to focus on?
Anne-Laure Le Cunff thinks so. Her recent article for Ness Labs makes the case for a little more nuance than ‘don’t ever multitask’ or ‘only ever focus on one thing’.
There’s a risk otherwise, she argues, that we will shut down creative exploration too soon.
Similar to the way you need both exploration and exploitation in order to foster innovation, you need both open loops and closed loops to produce great work. In the exploration phase, you may wander through many creative paths. In the exploitation phase, you will choose a few select ones of these paths to execute on. First, you create open loops to cultivate your creativity; then, you close those loops to increase your productivity.
Research suggests that the more ideas we generate, the more creative they become. Focusing on one thing at a time too early in the creative process defeats the purpose of the exploration phase. Networked thinking requires to keep many open loops to connect ideas across various work streams. Only when you have spent enough time identifying patterns and connecting ideas together should you pick one work stream to focus on.
This makes a lot of sense. Though I don’t necessarily think this is the primary area of multitasking we struggle with. For most of us, we do do the creative exploration with an open loop mindset. It’s the handling of the high number of tasks we need to ‘exploit’ that we struggle with. Rather than focussing on one of them, we jump rapidly between them based on who just chased us on Slack, or a meeting we just had, or an email saying something is high-priority. We end up jumping almost randomly from one thing to the next. There’s no focus.
That said, this is a solid reminder to not take the messaging around focus and doing one thing at a time too far. It’s intended to be a productivity aid, not a creativity destroyer.
That said, this is a solid reminder to not take the messaging around focus and doing one thing at a time too far. It’s intended to be a productivity aid, not a creativity destroyer.