Leave the great indoorsnotes on the journey

Two very different articles in today’s New York Times made me think about how our rushed, 24-hour lives might be affecting our concentration and ability to solve problems, so I wanted to write a quick post about it.

The first article is a fascinating profile of Rahm Emanuel, Pres. Obama’s chief of staff.  It describes Mr. Emanuel’s remarkable ability to multitask (“He can juggle 20 or 25 things in one day, in part by delegating and in part by picking only the things that matter”).  The part I found particularly interesting was this:

Aides estimate he talks with 50 people a day by telephone and sends hundreds of e-mail messages. Phone calls often last a minute or two, just long enough to deliver a point or extract information. E-mail messages are often a word or two.

I smiled at that last part, because it reminds me of a good friend who we always tease because he uses only two words in emails he sends around to his team: “FYI,” or “Thoughts?”  On rare occasions he would combine these two words (“FYI… thoughts?”) in which case you would know he is very serious and a proper response is definitely required.

The second article (and I’ll come back to the first one in a little while) is something completely different: an opinion piece by Alison Gopnik entitled “Your Baby Is Smarter Than You Think.”  It is a really good read and I highly recommend it.  Ms. Gopnik explains some research her team did at Berkeley about the different ways that babies and adults learn — and how important those early learning experiences are.  But the part that caught my attention was this:

But babies and very young children are terrible at planning and aiming for precise goals. When we say that preschoolers can’t pay attention, we really mean that they can’t not pay attention: they have trouble focusing on just one event and shutting out all the rest. This has led us to underestimate babies in the past. [...]  Babies are captivated by the most unexpected events. Adults, on the other hand, focus on the outcomes that are the most relevant to their goals.

I’ve never thought about it that way.  It’s not that things don’t hold the attention of babies, it is that too many things hold their attention, and they haven’t figured out how to process that.  And for babies that’s a good thing, because exploring those “unexpected events” helps their brains develop.

So, I wonder if there is some significance in looking at these two articles together.  On the one hand, you have babies who can’t make up their minds about what to focus on.  On the other hand, adults (like myself and probably you as well) pride ourselves on the ability to multitask, “juggle 20 or 25 things in one day”, and just get things done.  But Ms. Gopnik continues:

Focus and planning get you to your goal more quickly but may also lock in what you already know, closing you off to alternative possibilities. We need both blue-sky speculation and hard-nosed planning.

In other words, being “captivated by the most unexpected events” is a good thing for babies, because it helps develop their imaginations.  But now that we are adults, we need to take the good from those experiences (blue-sky thinking) and leave the bad (getting distracted by every single shiny thing we come across).

My question is if we have actually done the opposite — have we become overly attentive to everything?  I wonder if the behavioral fabric of our always-connected society consuming constantly-changing information is preventing us from achieving the right goals.  I wonder if we can still focus long enough to diverge into “blue-sky speculation” so we can understand and define a problem properly before we go about executing the solution. Or do we move down our parallel to-do lists so quickly that we don’t stick around to celebrate success (or even know if we were successful)?

Look, I’m not saying we should write longer emails.  Just that we should probably not think like babies all our lives.  Let’s try to focus on the issue in front of us, instead of the three problems that are coming next.  And let me know how it goes, because I’m pretty sure I’ll forget about this piece of advice by the time my first meeting rolls around tomorrow morning.