Drucker’s solutions for fragmented executives—reserve large blocks of time on your calendar, don’t answer the phone, and return calls in short bursts once or twice a day—sound remarkably like the ones offered up by today’s time- and information-management experts.2
Group items tagged
1More
24More
Recovering from information overload | McKinsey & Company - 0 views
-
-
Add to these challenges a torrent of e-mail, huge volumes of other information, and an expanding variety of means—from the ever-present telephone to blogs, tweets, and social networks—through which executives can connect with their organizations and customers, and you have a recipe for exhaustion. Many senior executives literally have two overlapping workdays: the one that is formally programmed in their diaries and the one “before, after, and in-between,” when they disjointedly attempt to grab spare moments with their laptops or smart phones, multitasking in a vain effort to keep pace with the information flowing toward them.
-
First, multitasking is a terrible coping mechanism.
- ...21 more annotations...
-
econd, addressing information overload requires enormous self-discipline.
-
Third, since senior executives’ behavior sets the tone for the organization, they have a duty to set a better example.
-
Resetting the culture to healthier norms is a critical new responsibility for 21st-century executives.
-
What’s more, multitasking—interrupting one task with another—can sometimes be fun. Each vibration of our favorite high-tech e-mail device carries the promise of potential rewards. Checking it may provide a welcome distraction from more difficult and challenging tasks. It helps us feel, at least briefly, that we’ve accomplished something—even if only pruning our e-mail in-boxes. Unfortunately, current research indicates the opposite: multitasking unequivocally damages productivity.
-
he root of the problem is that our brain is best designed to focus on one task at a time
-
When we switch tasks, our brains must choose to do so, turn off the cognitive rules for the old task, and turn on the rules for the new one.
-
arely helps us solve the toughest problems we’re working on. More often than not, it’s procrastination in disguise.
-
the likelihood of creative thinking is higher when people focus on one activity for a significant part of the day and collaborate with just one other person.
-
survey of managers conducted by Reuters revealed that two-thirds of respondents believed that information overload had lessened job satisfaction and damaged their personal relationships. One-third even thought it had damaged their health.8
-
feeling connected provides something like a “dopamine squirt”—the neural effects follow the same pathways used by addictive drugs.9
-
some combination of focusing, filtering, and forgetting.
-
Managing it may be as simple—and difficult—as switching off the input.
-
A good filtering strategy, therefore, is critical. It starts with giving up the fiction that leaders need to be on top of everything, which has taken hold as information of all types has become more readily and continuously accessible.
-
ome leaders now explicitly refuse to respond to any e-mail on which they are only cc’d, to filter out issues that others think require no action from them. Y
-
giving our brains downtime to process new intellectual input is a critical element of learning and thinking creatively
-
Getting outside helps—recent research has found that people learn significantly better after a walk in nature compared with a walk in the city.
-
The strategies of focusing, filtering, and forgetting are also tougher to implement now because of the norms that have developed around 21st-century teamwork.
-
But there is a business responsibility to reset these norms, given how markedly information overload decreases the quality of learning and decision making. Multitasking is not heroic; it’s counterproductive. As the technological capacity for the transmission and storage of information continues to expand and quicken, the cognitive pressures on us will only increase. We are at risk of moving toward an ever less thoughtful and creative professional reality unless we stop now to redesign our working norms.
-
First, we need to acknowledge and reevaluate the mind-sets that attach us to our current patterns of behavior.
-
eaders need to become more ruthless than ever about stepping back from all but the areas that they alone must address.
-
eaders have to redesign working norms together with their teams.