While stuck in O'Hare on Saturday, I wrote a post about personal productivity as related to "email overload" and rounded up some tips. (Written while being stranded at O'Hare airport due to flight cancellations does not always allow neurons to connect ....) After posting it, I remembered the phrase - "Social Productivity" that I read in one of the final chapters of "Connect: A Guide To the New Way of Working on the Web" by Anne Zelenka. I didn't have the book with me and couldn't quite remember exactly the details, but googled a bit and found this post from her personal blog about productive multi-tasking.
Then I got a track back from the email dashboard blog that rounded up all posts that responded to the New York Times article about information overload. It pointed to a post from Stowe Boyd called "Information Overload, Schmoverload" that suggested the article was another attack on connectedness and whole brain attention.
"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."
Stowe goes on to clarify that personal productivity is not the way to measure the benefits of social tools and coins a phrase "network productivity" - perhaps better described as "network effectiveness" which in my mind consists of the Three "R's" of network weaving (relationship building, rewards, and reciprocity) -- all of which involve tasks that take time. Stowe Boyd says much better:
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.
He also talks about the value of "disconnecting" - to focus on the other tasks - but suggests that our bias should be towards being connected.
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.
He also builds an argument for multi-tasking or rather the overhead of multi-tasking.
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 mind state, where partial attention is being paid to "partial tasks", can lead to the transitions costing less at each interruption.
I'm reading John Medina's Brain Rules. There is a whole chapter on attention and it covers multi-tasking and Medina observes that multi-tasking is myth because the human brain is not capable of focusing on more than one thing. He outlines the process that we go through when "multi-tasking" - it is more like rapid attention shifting between tasks. (Shift Alert, Activate Task 1, Disengagement, Activate Task 2). He says the brain does these four steps in sequence each time we shift from one task to another. That's why people loose track in the middle - now where was I? when switching tasks.
He suggests that those who appear to be good a multi-tasking actually have good working memories, capable of paying attention to several inputs at one time. According to the research that Medina points to - it takes longer to complete a task -- so there in lies the meaning of what Stoww Boyd was saying about participation in his piece.
So, I'm wondering where the sweet spot between personal productivity and networked productivity comes into play? More on this in the comments to this post. I also twittered this question and got some thoughtful responses:
Dave Wallace said in a tweet
While I know what you are getting at, I feel connectedness and productivity needn't necessarily be at either end of a gtd continuum
PF Anderson said in a tweet
I think of it as appropriate balance between input and output.
I am wondering how nonprofits may (or may not) appreciate the value of networked productivity. In a recent article over at NpTech News called "Twitter: Networking on the Run"
But the best "value proposition" of Twitter, one that seems to be shared by many of Twitter's early adopters, was summed up by Cloward. "I'm better at my job because of Twitter, because I have access to a wide network that I didn't before. I can ask questions, get them answered, share information, and get feedback. The reason why organizations send staff to conferences is to 1) gain knowledge, and 2) network. Twitter lets me do that every day."
All this leads me to ask:
- Does your organization value or understand the concept "networked productivity"? Why or why not?
- How do you balance networked productivity with personal productivity?
- What is the value of "disconnecting" and do you think your organization has a bias towards connectedness or disconnectedness?
It's Stowe, not Stow.
The notion that people can't multitask is obviously false. How can you drive a car and talk on the phone? Listen to music and read a book while scratching your arm?
Posted by: Stowe Boyd | June 17, 2008 at 01:41 PM
For me the real win has been social connections around the world so the 'reciprocity' piece really resonates for me. Instead of feeling more isolated, I feel more connected and more effective for it.
I'm okay with not groking the total volume of the internet, but I'm up on the .01% that I need to stay informed and even more importantly stimulated to create.
Great post as usual!
Posted by: Hans | June 17, 2008 at 05:22 PM
@Stowe .. oops for mis-spelling your name. John Medina would chalk it up to multi-tasking which also leads to more errors (according to the research he mentions)
Medina is talking about multi-tasking in terms of your attention - yes you can do things at once - but apparently the brain can't pay attention to two things at once.
Posted by: Beth Kanter | June 17, 2008 at 06:02 PM
@hans see what Liz Straus has just written about that ..
http://www.successful-blog.com/1/lasting-relationships-and-15-second-friends-are-you-a-solo-in-a-social-media-world/
Posted by: Beth Kanter | June 17, 2008 at 06:03 PM
I think there are tasks -- many tasks -- that are still very one-to-one in nature. Applied to a nonprofit context, they are things like writing and submitting a grant, hiring a new staff person, getting ready for the board meeting. In those instances, personal productivity matters more. As I check things off my list, I'm making real forward progress. Here social productivity and connectedness may help me and improve my work, but my work getting complete isn't dependent on that.
There are other activities that are much more based on moving a network and require me to be social productive. In those instances, me getting things done on my list are dependents but are insufficient. Made contact with people at edges. Check. Gave my hubs materials to spread in a viral fashion. Check. Those activities are not going to help me to get to done.
So, I guess, I'm saying that the answer to your question is based on context and what it is you are trying to get done. Increasingly, I think we need to be socially productive because more and more of our work requires it. And social productive in the sense that it is required and not just additive.
Thanks for the thought provoking post.
Posted by: Marnie Webb | June 17, 2008 at 06:18 PM
This was a great read. Thanks, Beth.
I'm very in tune with Marnie's remarks. I feel my organization does appreciate networked productivity, though I'd never thought about it in these terms or context. That said, whether I'm focusing on personal productivity or networked productivity depends on the landscape: what's going on today, what's happening tomorrow, etc.
For instance, a large part of my job is legislative advocacy, which involves both personal production (I need to make direct contact with X offices, host an event in Y district, or place an OPED in Z paper) as well as networked production (I need to develop our grassroots network in A region, nurture B number of new grassroots leaders, or reach out to C constituency).
As it turns out, the time of year has a lot to do with this. While the legislature is in session, I'm much more focused on personal production. Obviously, I'm reaching out to our network, but I'm not as focused on nurturing the network through the three Rs. When the legislature is out of session (which hopefully will happen this year in Illinois - other Illinoisans will know what I'm talking about), I will put aside more immediate personal goals and work on nurturing our network so we're stronger next year.
Ideally, we'd have someone 365 days a year focusing on networked production, but given our resources, it's not possible. The personal production tasks are important too.
Are there examples of successful social change movements that haven't at their foundation had people focused on personal productivity?
Ultimately, some stuff is best done loosely, in a decentralized manner by groups, but other stuff is best done by one person drawing on their own intellectual and time resources. It just depends on the context.
Posted by: Scarlett Swerdlow | June 17, 2008 at 08:40 PM
I used to work for an organtion where everyone was logged in to Skype all the time. We used it for IM and for phone calls. It favored a certain kind iof personality, who could handle interruptions, and it did at times make it hard to get tasks done which required strict focus. We also tended to gossip with each other via IM while we worked.
But - we had offices in London, LA, DC, and Croatia as well as country offices all over the world. Being constantly linked on skype made us a true team, and being able to instantly get answers to highly specific questions made it well worth the interruptions. And 20 minutes spent discussing other people's love lives with a country director in Uganda or Lebanon formed a bond that made work go better.
At my new job, I really, really miss that connectivity. It made me feel like I was part of something that was both big and personal.
Posted by: Alanna | June 18, 2008 at 08:22 AM