Mike Lehr's Blog

In Tobey Deys’ comment about my post regarding the implications of people’s unawareness to television viewing, she asked for my thoughts on the productivity of multi-tasking and to some degree channel surfing.

Generally, there are many studies reference the decline of productivity from these tasks. We frequently hear about cell phones and driving for example. However, there are five contrarian considerations:

1. Situational awareness varies by person
2. Situation might require it
3. Over focus produces narrow-mindedness
4. Synchronicity could occur
5. Enjoyment could result

First, the negative effects of multi-tasking and channel surfing will vary by person. Two people can focus on the same task and retain a different degree of awareness with respect to their surroundings. Thus, varying levels of situational awareness can make multi-tasking and channel surfing less costly for some.

Second, the situation might demand multi-tasking. Rather than focus on one task at a time, productivity might increase if we coordinate the performance all tasks such as running errands.

Third, over focus can prevent us from seeing other opportunities for increasing productivity. Here, multi-tasking and channel surfing can retard the effects of anchoring in which we become too wedded to an approach.

Fourth, these activities allow synchronicity to play out by allowing us to “stumble” upon people, information or other resources that might benefit us later rather than now.

Finally, we might find so much enjoyment in multi-tasking and channel surfing that we become more productive because our attitude improves.

In the end, these activities are a personal decision. People are too different to apply findings without modifications. Of course, there is also the point that sometimes having fun is more important than being productive.

I recently read in the Schumpeter column, “In Search of Serendipity,” of the July 24, 2010 edition of The Economist about the book, The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things In Motion, by John Hagel, John Seely Brown and Lang Davison. Automatically, the vision of bell bottoms returning to vogue arose. The concept is very similar to Carl Jung’s 1920’s introduction of synchronicity.

As stated in Schumpeter, the basic premise of the book is that “success in business increasingly depends on chance encounters.” It’s these chance encounters that seem spontaneous in the present but more purposeful with future’s hindsight. This is synchronicity repackaged.

About ten years ago, a good colleague was asking about the connections I’ve made to see if I could support this conclusion about his connections: the most profitable ones tended to come outside of his traditional, planned sales efforts. They originated from “out of the blue” encounters at non-business events when he didn’t expect them. I could relate.

It’s a basic premise of my blog that technological advancements are allowing us to see better and better the powerful impact our emotional-related processes such as intuition have in our everyday lives. As Schumpeter supports, advances in the internet – with the social media that it delivers – increases our ability to connect. This is giving us a larger sample population in which to observe that chance encounters really might not be that coincidental. It’s easy to discard one or two coincidences, but a dozen? But, make no mistake that is a concept that has been around for thousands of years in many American Indian and Eastern philosophies.