What Is A Wicked
Learning Environment?
know particularly 80s and
accelerating forward suddenly it becomes a lot easier to access information
more broadly and
the most impactful patents started
to be authored by teams that include individuals who've worked in a whole
number of different classes and they're
often merging things from different
areas uh for invention so how important is focus in this this equation focusing
on one thing because you're talking
for much of this conversation about being Broad and people will associate that
with being unfocused yeah it's it's
a right I think the differen is between doing a bunch of
things sort of over your career over
your life or a span and doing attempting to do a bunch of things at once we
can't
technically do a bunch of things at
once like we we don't really multitask we don't have the capacity to do it
we're actually just toggling between things
really quickly um and it's it's been
shocking to me to look at the research
how how big of an impairment that is
for people's performance particularly because it takes time to switch and so
you're not again it it's it the the
scientist Gloria Mark who who I think has been at the Forefront of study of
attention describes your brain as
like a whiteboard where you're doing something
and to do something else you have to
erase and that residue is left and it's still going to be there when you move
to the new thing for a while and so you you
can't totally get into the next
thing if you're interrupted um and and it impairs your
performance and it's stressful
that's been the most surprising part to me is that when people are heart rate
variability is measured and some
immune parameters um that when people switch a lot like if you just saw how
many times
people switched their task you know
email to this other thing to some notification over a day you'd have a pretty
good bet at predicting their
stress level and their performance
level over the day really yeah they've done studies on this she has done that
she's
hooked people up you know at Big
organizations too like inside Microsoft and and places like that um where
people are wearing heart rate variability
monitors everything they're doing is
being tracked in the old days she was like sitting behind people with a
stopwatch but technology obviously
progressed from then um and I think
that's a surprising aspect of it one of the reasons that email makes people so
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stressed is because it leads them to
do this like con I think in one of her studies people were checking email
office workers were checking email
and average of 77 times a day that's a lot of switching when you're switching
in and out of email and that just turns out
to a stressful thing because there
there's switching actually takes place in two uh kind of phases where you the
first phase is is shutting down what
you are doing and the next phase is activating the rules for the next task
so even if you kind of think you're
doing the same thing like you're working on focused writing but you're also in
a slack Channel or something with a friend
or colleague those are both writing
but they're not the same style of writing and so you're still having to
activate
different cognitive rules and that
that comes with a switching cost so if I can
do something about it what should I
do to to make sure that I'm both happy um more productive and healthier I would
again not start your day with
something that is inherently a multitask so if you cannot start with email I
would not
start with it because I view that at
least for me as something that will
start the day with multitasking and
will always feel unfinished like never feel like it's finished um blockout
times
where you designate on your calendar
that this is the only thing that you're doing and leave some buffer for it
because there's something called the
planning fallacy we always
overestimate how much we can get done in a given amount of time so I'd say
fewer things
on your to-do list fewer things and
on the top maybe even just one thing that's if I get this done this this was a
good
productive day focus on that thing
you know pay yourself first do the important thing first and really try to have
some
when you're trying to be focused
it's important to mingle with people and exchange ideas when that's what you
want to do but when you really have to be
focused to try to be in a place
that's as distraction free as possible and un that includes even you know
turning down
or off music even though it's
Pleasant and can help your affect and can motivate but it also does have an
impairment on cognitive function
because you are paying attention to it to some degree so don't listen to music
while I'm doing my work I mean that's hard to
say because I do it sometimes too
because it can have an energizing effect or it can have a calming effect and
those are good but it does take up brain
space so you have to balance those
how do they know it takes up brain space you can see how people perform on
tasks when
the music is on and when the music
is off and it's it's a it's it's not as big a deal if the music is very
familiar where you're kind of like it's not novel
so you're not attending to it the
same way but you know when I'm trying to be super focused now I'll I'll turn
the
music off but if I feel my sort of
motivation waning then maybe I'll tune it back on but I want to use it
deliberately instead of just having it in the background all the time because
it takes up a little space if it's
and if it's real noise like decb is a
logarithmic scale so small
differences are actually a big deal but if you go from I think it's like maybe
70 to 80 DB
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