The Myth of Multitasking is a short book that conveys a single, critical idea: to do two things at once is to do neither.

The Myth of Multitasking: How Doing It All Gets Nothing Done, by J.D.

JD’s blog entry begins with him describing the 227 tasks open on his computer as he writes. “That’s 227 discrete tasks awaiting my attention. That doesn’t count the dozen or so books submitted for review, the eight unread personal finance magazines, and the pile of papers spilling onto the floor.”

He says multitasking is really switchtasking and not productive. While I generally agree, there are times to set a task aside and let it ripen while you work on something else. Switchtasking in larger chunks can lead to more creative completions than sloughing through each task one at a time. Hand some off to your unconscious for ripening. The trick is knowing when to do that - not letting it become an excuse for procrastinating.

Parallel task - internally - tasks waiting quietly on the computer don’t count.

…In my experience successful risk takers are not overly preoccupied with making mistakes. They learn and move on. They are also individuals who are willing to admit when they are wrong….

Most importantly, these are people who minimize the downside and focus on what could go right. They are relentlessly upbeat problem solvers. To succeed in business - and in social media environments - today, one has to be made of this cloth. It’s not just about resiliency and endurance - it’s about flexibility and adaptability. These are qualities that will also serve organizations well….

Risk is not a Four-Letter Word, Valeria Maltoni

I’d say the real risk is being blind to being wrong.
One antidote is the focus on what could go right and recognizing when the evidence doesn’t support the hope of that focus.

…My creative beast is restless and hungry, and I’ve learned that if I starve it by arbitrarily limiting its routine, it’s not happy. It’s all well and good to cut the fat out of your life to make time for what’s important, but you can take it too far. By turning off the internet, I turned off my source of inspiration. I was trying to write in a vacuum….

…Often many people ask tough questions mainly to satisfy their ego of making others uncomfortable, cover up their lack of knowledge, or to impress others. Most discussions and arguments you observe are all about how someone outsmarted someone else by firing a smart question. Watching someone squirm gives a self congratulatory sadistic pleasure to many people like, “Hah, you should have seen that bozo’s face when I asked him that tricky question.”…

And then discusses the alternative.

…However, a beautiful question can be described in many ways. Here are a few ways to learn how to ask beautiful questions….

3. Beautiful questions create pleasantness and collaboration. It removes fear and extracts right answers even if the answer is bad news. Successful managers know how to get the right answers from employees by not being intimidating in their approach. Their objective is to solve an issue or a problem, and not get a mischievous pleasure by making people uncomfortable. Beautiful questions help you achieve that….

And closes with a great quote by Dorothy Nevill. Check it out.

“The moment of truth,
the sudden emergence of a new insight, is an act of intuition.
Such intuitions give the appearance of miraculous flushes, or short-circuits of reasoning.
In fact they may be likened to an immersed chain,
of which only the beginning and the end are visible above the surface of consciousness.
The diver vanishes at one end of the chain and comes up at the other end, guided by invisible links.”

[Arthur Koestler, British novelist, journalist]

This is, after all, how we constructively create - paying attention to the nearly invisible.

For example, Six Rules Doctors Need to Know
Rule 1: They don’t want to be at your office.
Rule 2: They have a reason to be at your office.

…On every visit I try to identify the real reason (or the real fear) that brings them to see me. I don’t end the visit until I have addressed that reason.

Rule 3: They feel what they feel….

Her family story is similar to mine, folks having grown up in farm communities then raising kids in the new world of suburbs and not knowing the neighbors.

Actually, while I grew up, we knew the neighbors, but then…

more on where this goes later…. Safe to say her phrase “Thirsty in the Rain” is a key turning point in perspective. And her linking family to the Sioux word, tiospaye, is key. It is the bridge to the families all kids need to know to grow up well and alive to possibility.

tiospaye means the people with whom one lives… and means more than a nuclear family.

We find that employer learning about productivity occurs fairly quickly after labor market entry, implying that the signaling effects of schooling are small.

Here is much more.’ And here is more yet; this second paper estimates the speed of employer learning and uses that estimate to bound the value of the signal at no more than 28 percent of the value of education.’ I consider this devastating to the signaling hypothesis.’ How can ?? years of schooling be needed to signal your quality, if your employer often knows your quality within months?’

In my view education is mainly about indoctrination to give you more productive habits.’ So yes it is learning, but not in the way they might have told you, and that is why it so often does not feel like learning.

(Via Marginal Revolution.)

Given the context, I believe they mean “signaling” is about showing strengths in becoming a good employee - trainability.

But, as I mention in my other blog, work is returning to being about stints. Planning is about making decisions:

Then he returns to something mentioned earlier in the book - the future is jobs as stints. You are, as he states, fundamentally a business of one equipped with a portfolio of skills and experiences. Your stable skills will be applied in unstable settings. (and a large chunk of my career has been stints in unstable settings)

Your Email Password: A True Horror Story About Why We Need Authentication Standards

Blogging developer Jeff Atwood has written up a story of password theft that will run a chill down the back of anyone who enjoys trying out new applications online.

The story is about a GMail archiving application being sold by an unscrupulous coder who programmed the app to forward all GMail usernames and passwords from customers to his personal GMail account.

The story underlines the importance of the emerging movement for user authentication standards, a part of the user trust dilemma that will prove key in the near-term future of online innovation….

Steve Rubel posts about the post: Startups That Fail to Invest in Trust Will All Die

He makes some good points, but I’d add another - have a plan to prevent it, and to then audit staff’s activities to catch misuse early. Its the old accounting method of dividing responsibilities so no one person can abscond with the customer’s treasure. Trust but Verify.

So how does one do that? Like accountants, you design it into the system. Doing it as an afterthought is too late. As they said in an earlier era, “The horse has left the barn.”

That design will be critical in winning customer trust as they see headlines like this and begin to question their vendor’s business process - your business process.

“Conventional wisdom says the internet will continue to become more central in our lives, bringing with it productivity gains. And for more than 15 years, internet innovations have revolutionized marketing.

Culturally, however, there are some signs of a backlash against technology — even among the most addicted. This trend is worth watching because it could slow down or even derail the digital-marketing train.

more

(Via The Steve Rubel Lifestream.)

Steve goes on to say, “Over the last decade, Americans have become hopelessly addicted to information and busyness.”

He’s right. Busyness is not the same as Business. Is it?

There is effort and there is rewarded effort.
(& not all rewards are in money either)