CHAPTER 16
Comfort, Computers, and the Multitasking Myth
W E ALL CARRY with us a mistaken belief that comfort is a good thing. We strive to live in comfortable homes. Our food is produced comfortably for us by someone else. We work to be surrounded by comfortable things. Comparing today’s comfort levels with those of 100 years ago, we live pretty good lives.
However, The Creator Mindset cannot be achieved when comfort is involved or accepted. Comfort in and of itself is not the breeding ground for ideas and innovation. It’s the breeding ground for complacency, which we will look at in greater detail in Chapter 19. But for now, Comfort is a deeply ingrained method of survival that acts as self-preservation. It’s simply not in human nature to stick our necks out, to take risks, and to drive ourselves further. We all seek comfort and predictability in every moment of our lives. We build up anxiety when things don’t go our way.
Our love affair with technology feeds into this myth, too. It operates under the false promise that it will give us what we crave the most: comfort and predictability. Many technology companies actively work on this human vulnerability. They activate dopamine sensors within all of us to “reward” us with a like here or a new app there. They prey on our genetic makeup.1 It’s no wonder we have such intense relationships with our devices.
Despite this relationship with our devices and the attempt to make us feel more connected, this increasingly makes us more and more alone. Our technology presence becomes an idealized version of ourselves that we can never hope to obtain in real life. It leads us down a rabbit hole of seeking more and more comfort that breeds more and more isolation and a greater reliance on technology. But in a world of isolation, creativity becomes more important and powerful than ever because it is the one thing that connects us to our ancestral selves. Today that is something we crave more than ever because it is real. And what is real allows us to develop a Creator Mindset. How do we get off our overreliance on technology as a false prophet and relearn creativity? I have a few tools that can help.
RELEASING YOURSELF FROM TECHNOLOGY’S GRIP
Part of The Creator Mindset includes fighting comfort and the death grip technology has on our lives. Here are six ways you can release yourself from technology’s grip.
1. Schedule a Tech Detox Day
Once a week (more often would be even better), shut off all technology and detox from it. You will find amazing renewal when you step away from technology and will see how much time and energy our screens devour in the false name of productivity.
You may be tempted to think that this is a cliché or something people talk about but do not do. But this is important, and the results you see will be substantial.
Allow yourself some time to adjust to being in the moment without a phone, a tablet, the Internet, or television in your life. Then gradually increase these times away from technology so that your reliance on tech becomes more and more sporadic. You will discover that there is grace and strength in time away from your devices, and you just might find that you have more time to pay attention to the things that really matter. If you cannot shut your devices off, at least turn off the notifications from time to time. That way, you are not disturbed when you are working on getting creativity to flow.
2. Do It in Person
It never ceases to amaze me how many people try to use technology as a substitute for human interaction. There is no app or technology that can substitute for face-to-face time. Whether it’s with clients, customers, or friends, being present and in person is always the best way to communicate. You may be thinking that no one has time for in-person meetings anymore and that my advice is a bit old school. But sometimes when you are thinking creatively, old-school ideas become completely new, and this is one of those times.
Travel to meet a client in person. Share a meal or a cup of coffee with a friend and spend some time together. Building relationships that do not involve technology and convenience is essen-tial in mastering The Creator Mindset.
One of my favorite Fortune 500 companies spends an exorbitant amount on travel. They seek to do as much business as possible in person by sending folks all over the world to engage in personal meetings and conversations. You may think that it’s an unsound strategy that involves spending millions a year on travel that could be replaced by technology, yet they are one of the most profitable companies in the world.
3. Accept that Multitasking is BS
Let’s do a little exercise that will help us understand how to recover what we’ve lost as a result of technology so that we can find a better way forward with creativity.
Find a piece of paper and draw two lines a few inches apart parallel to each other. Make those lines about the length of the entire page. Take out a timer and time yourself as you write out the following sentence: “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” Don’t just rush through it by writing sloppy letters; it must be legible. When you’re done, write down the time it took you to write the sentence and circle it. This sentence happens to have all the letters in the alphabet.
On the line below this, write out a series of numbers. But first you will start that timer again. This time, you’ll be writing every even number starting with 2 and going all the way up to 70 (2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14, 16, 18, 20, 22, 24, 26, 28, 30, etc.). Again, you must take your time and write legibly. When you’re done, write down the time this took and circle it as you did with the previous sentence.
Now for the tricky part. First, I want you to flip the paper over so that you have a clean page to write on. Draw two lines on the page parallel to each other and get that timer ready to go again. This time you’ll be working on both sections simultaneously. On the top line, you’ll write the first letter (“T”) and then write the first number (“2”) in the bottom part of the page. After that, go back to the top section and write “H” and then move back down to the bottom for the “4.” Keep doing this until you have competed the entire sentence “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” and the number sequence as you did before, continuing to alternate with each. Remember to keep it legible. Do this exercise as fast as you can and once again write down the time it takes to get it done and circle the final time on your page.
Once you are done, flip the page and look at both circled times you wrote down for the first parts of the exercise. Not too bad, right? Now flip back to the side of the page where you switched between numbers and letters and compare that time. That number isn’t as impressive, right?
Why? Because we are terrible at multitasking.
Conventional logic (the analytical) says that multi-tasking should be faster, that you should be able to do two things in the same amount of time it takes to do one. But as you can see when you compare the times from doing each task individually versus doing them both at the same time, multitasking takes far longer.
For the record, I’ve tried this exercise all over the world in different cultures, with different people, different genders, and different countries, but the results are always the same.
Multitasking often takes four to eight times longer than just doing the letters and the numbers by themselves.
It turns out that doing one thing at a time and sticking to it actually is faster. The brain cannot execute both tasks with efficiency. It’s actually the opposite: it’s less efficient. This is a simple exercise, but it shows that multitasking is a myth.
Despite the evidence, we live in a world that idolizes multitasking. Yet as you can see with this simple exercise, multitasking is indeed a myth. Now change those tasks to real-world work tasks and you’ll start to see how much productivity we’ve lost by thinking that we’re able to multitask.
I know you’re tempted to find some technology solution to help you process all the information that you deal with throughout the day. You want an app or some other technology to help you with the deadlines, the meetings, and the temptation to multi-task. But there is no technology solution better than paying attention to one thing at a time! The Creator Mindset is all about focusing on one thing at a time. If you are able to do that instead of trying to multitask, creativity will fill your decision making.
4. Switch Gears
To move away from the temptation of multitasking, I challenge you to use a method I call switching gears. This method will help you deal with the ever-increasing weight that technology and multitasking put on us today. Switching gears is a tool in which you focus on one thing at a time instead of multitasking, giving one thing at a time your full and undivided attention. That’s it. Then, when you are finished—and only when you are finished—switch gears to something else and give that your full and undivided attention
No matter how much time you spend on each gear or how important that gear is, give it your undivided attention. One gear might be about finance in a meeting. The next gear might be a phone call about distribution. Another gear after the finance and distribution meeting might be a discussion of hiring or human resources or a deadline coming up. All of these gear changes are essential, and creativity is the oil that lubricates the machine. How? Creativity results from focusing on one thing at a time. Changing gears allows you to concentrate on the item in front of you exclusively. Without trying to multitask, you will allow the creative mind to balance the analytical and therefore allow creative solutions to emerge.
5. Do Something Uncomfortable Today
Allow yourself to enter a situation in which you force yourself outside of your comfort zone. Do this today. Whether it is at a work meeting or a social event, step out of your comfort zone once in a while and take a risk. Force yourself to stick your neck out for something new and different.
You will notice that doing this will result in an unexpected and creative view that pushes you out of the familiar and into the unknown. In this view, you will find a new and different creative way of seeing things.
Why? You are literally forcing yourself to step outside of what is comfortable and predicable for you. It’s different for everyone, and what works for you may not work for someone else.
We all have a mental inventory of things we would love to do and things we would love to try, but we probably don’t do them because we prioritize comfort and push those situations off to tomorrow or next week or next year. Stop that now and start to do these things today. The mental inventory we carry around with us is chock-full of ideas we want to try or things we want to do. That is our primordial creativity trying to get out into the world. Get out there and listen to it, and do it now. Not tomorrow, not next week or next year—today.
6. Realize Tech Is Fleeting; Creativity Lasts Forever
I studied music as an undergraduate, and to this day I remember a very important lesson I learned about harmonic theory in a piano class. The theory states that each note played on a piano (or any other instrument) lasts forever—music actually lasts forever. Isn’t that awesome? It means that any music ever played is still playing. Literally. It’s just that the volume it plays at is ever decreasing. Yet that doesn’t mean it’s not there. Sure, the volume is so low that no one can hear it anymore, but think of how special it is. It means that Mozart’s and Bach’s music is still in the atmosphere, sounding at ever-decreasing volumes. Forever. Jimmy Hendrix’s guitar is still ringing somewhere in the ether. Isn’t that something? Before I lose you, let me tie this back to our discussion.
The work you generate by using your creative tools is just like harmonic theory: because it involves creativity, it will last forever.
The lives you touch from the product or service you create by using creative principles will live on forever. Don’t rely on machines that are analytical code instructions that force us into predictable boring patterns. Rely on yourself and creativity for so much more.
We can give our careers and companies meaning by understanding that the creative principles we are beginning to practice live on forever. How powerful is the line supervisor at a shop that makes door thresholds when she knows that one of her products will deeply touch a buyer in a way she can’t possibly imagine? She will never get a thank-you card in the mail or an online review of how this product was special. But it will happen. How powerful is your career as a delivery person knowing that one of your deliveries will change a person’s life forever? And how powerful is a company that makes patio umbrellas for restaurants knowing that at some restaurant at some point in time under the shade of your product will be an epic family reunion 30 years in the making?
We seldom will ever know these things. And the fact that we cannot “hear” it—as in the harmonic theory—doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Creativity forces us to realize that there is not a direct connection between our actions and the results. We have to believe and trust creatively that they are occurring.
WE MAY NEVER KNOW how we affect people by the outcome of doing our jobs or running our companies. But creatively thinking about our jobs and companies just might create amazing connections. Analytically, a person is just another number on the spreadsheet, drowning in the despondency of mediocrity. But creatively, we see that everyone—no matter who—matters.