I don’t think productivity is directly influenced by time alone. There are other important factors which make it or break it.

• There are days when I can get a lot done in lot less time and other days life moves slower than a snail.
• There are days when I can stay very focused and productive for up to 15-16 hrs and there are days when couple of hours of work seems like torture.
• There are certain type of tasks that I can get very productive very quickly and certain type of tasks which takes times to get into the flow.
• If I have a vested interest (financial, reputation, learning, etc.), I train myself to stay focused and productive longer (can back-fire as well.)
• There are phases of one’s life when one can clock in more hours and there are phases where one cannot; other things are higher priority. If forced (soft or hard), it usually leads to wrong behavior.
• I’ve seen many people who are very deadline driven (including myself.) I get a lot done when I’m working against hard deadlines. Yes, quality certainly takes a hit, but in many cases delivering slightly lower quality stuff is more important than not delivering at all or delivering later.

If we look at these various aspects, we get close to a start-up environment. And under these conditions, we do see teams being quite productive and delivering interesting products.

Applying this in a different context/environment usually back-fires.

What do you think?

This blog post was trigger by Tim Berry's blog post on Productivity Paradox: Maybe Less is More.

I always knew and believed that I need to exercise and stay in shape to be effective at work. But for few years other burning issues always forced me away from exercising. I kept procrastinating!

Gradually, inch-by-inch, year after year, I found myself becoming a potato. It got to a point where it felt like there was no going back.

Unfortunately many professionals (including myself) do the exact same thing when it comes to Learning and staying up-to-date (keeping our skills in shape.)

We all know the importance of learning, yet we always find reasons not to invest right now.

But why?

If you Google for “avoid procrastination”, you’ll find tons of techniques to help you avoid procrastination. But I don’t know a single person who does not suffer from this.

Luckily for me, from the last 3 years, I’ve really been exercising every day (almost everyday.) On a given day, if I don’t, I feel really crappy.

So far I’ve not seen a similar behavior when it comes to Learning.

So what made me change my attitude towards exercising but not learning?

• Most important thing, with exercising, both the outcome and output is easy to measure/judge.
  • There are some very easy measurements that can quickly show you the difference between being in-shape or not.
  • Did I workout for 30 mins everyday and is my weight stable? (Output)
  • Do I feel energized and fresh the whole day? (Outcome) (I can easily judge this.)
  • But with learning, how do I measure the outcome? Its a lot more vague and much more long term.
• Few things changed, I was in a company of people (at work, back home, amongst friends), who were all very conscious about staying in shape. Being surrounded by right people, who felt much better after staying in shape, reinforced my thinking and encouraged me to take the first step. Unfortunately its hard to find similar environment when it comes to learning.
• I was able to set some simple targets (run for 30 mins every day) and measure if I met the targets or not. If I did not meet those targets, the results were quite obviously immediately. Unfortunately when it comes to Learning I’m not able to find a simple model like this, esp. results being immediately obvious.
• Personally for me, exercising, which involves mostly physical work, is relatively easy even when I’m tired or feeling lazy. But its hard to learn under such conditions because learning requires high cognitive processing.
• There are many options for exercising, but I was able to quickly decide on running everyday as its the simplest thing I could do anywhere and still get a good workout. But when in comes to learning, we have so many options and its intimidating to even get started.
• Exercising usually is fun. Its enjoyable. There is an immediate positive feedback cycle. With learning that’s not always the case. Many times its frustrating.

When it comes to learning, I’ve tried to set various targets like:

• Everyday for 30 mins, either read a book or blogs or twitter or practice solving some design problems.
  • Problem is, even after doing this, I’m not sure if I’m really benefiting or not. May be in the long run, but not now.
• Write a blog post every other day. Hoping that, to write a meaningful blog post, I would go read something at least to clarify my thinking.
  • Problem is, I continue to write crap without reading much and I don’t write that regularly either.

What have you tried to keep up with your learning?

P.S: I learn a lot at my work, but its primarily driven by the need at hand. Which is good. But the broader learning and staying up-to-date with things is equally important and that’s what I’m talking about.

The fundamental attribution error (AKA correspondence bias/attribution effect) describes the tendency to over-value dispositional or personality-based explanations for the observed behaviors of others while under-valuing situational explanations for those behaviors.

For example, if Alice saw Bob trip over a rock and fall, Alice might consider Bob to be clumsy or careless (dispositional). If Alice later tripped over the same rock herself, she would be more likely to blame the placement of the rock (situational).

(Shameless rip-off from Wikipedia)

The funny part is, this error only occurs when we observe other’s behavior. We rarely apply fundamental attribution error to ourselves.

All of us are victims to this behavior daily. As Management, Coaches or Consultants, we need to be extra careful. Its easy to judge a team/company based on our personal explanation for the observed behavior and ignore the situational explanation.

For example, if a team of developers don’t meet their estimates, we might conclude that the developers are inexperienced and have not spent enough time estimating. They need to spend more time estimating, to get better at it. But if we look at the situational explanations, the developers don’t really understand what needs to be built, the person requesting for the feature is not clear what they expect, there might be a huge variety of ways in which the problem could be solved and so on. If we switch roles and try to play the developer’s role, we might be able to understand the situational/contextual explanation for the observed behavior.

I also see many people attribute poor team/company performance to lack of “Agile process”. They bring in the trainers and the coaches, who train and coach the team with standard “Agile practices”. Months/Years later, the team (what ever is left) have got good with process, but the product does not pull its weight and eventually dies out.

Fundamental Attribution Error is another reason why we see such vast spread abuse of Metrics in every field.

So how do we deal with this?

And I hear the Lean Extremists scream, 5 Whys…5 Whys…

Based on my personal experience, 5 Whys can also suffers from the same problem of Fundamental Attribution Error.

Being aware of the fundamental attribution error and other concepts like actor–observer bias and other forms of bias can help.

And in some cases, trial and error (brute force) seems to be the only answer.

By now you must have heard/read numerous people explain the pitfalls of multi-tasking and why its evil.

• Jeff Atwood’s blog on “The Multi-Tasking Myth“
• John Naish’s article on “Is multi-tasking bad for your brain? Experts reveal the hidden perils of juggling too many jobs“
• Clarke Ching’s blog on “Multitasking MAKES YOU STUPID“
• Joel Spolsky’s blog on “Human Task Switches Considered Harmful“
• Gina Trapani’s article on “Work Smart: Stop Multitasking and Start Doing One Thing Really Well“

Some people offer some decent advice on how to avoid Multi-tasking:

• Don’t Multi-task When You Can Use Chunking by F. John Reh
• The Pomodoro Technique forces you to focus on 1 task for 25 mins & then take a short break of 5 mins after every 25 mins (and a long break after 4 Pomodoros).
• The Dangers of Multitasking And How To Stop by Laura Earnest
• How NOT to Multitask – Work Simpler and Saner by Leo Babauta
• How to Avoid Multi Tasking on WikiHow

While I agree with everyone here. There are things in my daily life that contradicts (to some extent) what they are claiming to be universally true for all humans. For Ex:

• I listen to the news on the radio every morning while I brush my teeth
• I have interesting, deep conversations with friends/family while driving on Indian roads (driving itself involves multiple tasks. Driving on Indian roads adds a whole new dimension to it)
• The Indian Gods had attainted a whole new level of multi-tasking

What I’m trying to highlight here is not all multi-tasking is bad/inefficient. If I take the driving example, I can do other tasks while I’m driving. My efficiency starts to go down if I’m driving to new destinations. It further goes down if I’m driving in a different lane-system and a different car.

Its important to note that multi-tasking does not hurt you much if the activities you’re performing are routine activities (embedded in your long-term memory and is referred to as muscle memory.) Multi-tasking becoming significantly exhausting, error-prone and inefficient if the tasks you are performing requires conscious processing/thought (.i.e. uses your prefrontal cortex intensively.) Five brain functions, understanding, deciding, recalling, memorizing and inhibiting thoughts, make up majority of conscious thought. Activities like planning, problem solving, communication, etc use these functions heavily. Hence multi-tasking on such activities is a bad idea.

Harold Pashler come up with a phenomenon called Dual-Task Interference. Via various experiments he showed that performing 2 cognitive tasks at once can reduce the cognitive capacity drastically. But if an individual performed 2 tasks, out of which only one task required conscious processing, then the cognitive capacity did not see the same drop.

There are simple activities which illustrates that one cannot normally carry out two tasks completely independently when each of them requires a choice of response.  When we try to do so, substantial delays occur in one or both tasks.  This is true even when neither task is anything that would be described as mentally challenging. Much research in this area argues that one particular mental operation is almost invariably carried out sequentially in tasks like this: the planning of responses.   The same is true of certain types of decision operations and memory retrievals.  On the other hand, the brain seems capable of perceiving stimuli while it is choosing a response, and actually producing motor responses in one task can overlap with the choice of a response in another.

Again, not all tasks requiring a choice of responses are subjected to this sort of processing bottleneck. Tasks that involve extremely “natural” mappings between stimuli and responses appear not to be.  For example, repeating words aloud as you hear them is a task most people can carry out in parallel with other tasks (McLeod & Posner, 1984).  The same is true of moving your eye to look at a spot (Pashler, Carrier & Hoffman, 1993).

Are humans capable of only uni-tasking? Not at all. If one of the tasks does not involve a choice of responses (e.g., if it merely involves repetitive rhythmic tapping, or requires perceiving and identifying stimuli without the need to decide on responses), interference is often reduced or even absent (subsequent demos on this site will illustrate this point).  Laboratory experiments in which response times are analyzed in detail have lent considerable support to the idea of a “central bottleneck” in response planning and indicated that other operations are often processed in parallel between the two tasks (for recent reviews, see H. Pashler, The Psychology of Attention, 1998, MIT Press; P. Jolicoeur, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human perception and Performance, 1999, 25, 596-616).

Summary: Multi-tasking activities which require conscious processing is exhausting, error-prone and inefficient, hence a bad idea.