Evil Multitasking or Powerful Spotlighting to Manage Your Time – Small Business Show 106

The Small Business show, episode number 106 for Wednesday, February 15, 2017. Greetings folks and welcome to the Small Business show here at BusinessShow. Co here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton.

And in Concord, California, I am Shannon Jean. How are you, Dave?

I think I'm exhausted, to be perfectly honest with you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I traveled all last week, back and forth. I was down in Boston for an event with Sonos and then a press event with Sonos and then, and then Friday I flew, I did a. Well, I stayed over, but I did a down and back I to Dallas. I spoke at their Apple user group on Saturday morning, which was interesting. They call it the Apple User Group, which is sort of the right name for any of those Mac user groups. The mugs. Sure. But their name is their original name because they started in 1978, which was really interesting.

That's awesome.

Yeah, it was fun.

Yeah.

So I talked to him about Mesh Networks, which is a hot topic these days.

That is a hot topic. Yes, yes. If you're into networking, it's a hot topic.

It was fun. Oh, and then I came back and dove into this sort of crazy theater show that I did last night, Tuesday night, for Valentine's Day, but it wasn't really for Valentine's Day, although certainly people made it their Valentine's Day. But I had to prep stuff. And so it was this week of, well, hell, really. I mean, it was all fun, but it was really compressed and I think somewhere along the line and maybe even before that, I feel like I picked up some sort of chest cold thing. But I don't know, I just, I'm exhausted is really what it is. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But you're powering through, right? Because that's what we do.

Well, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's much better just to power through.

Yeah, I agree with you. Yeah, yeah. There's nothing worse than, you know, if you get up in the morning, you're not feeling great and I, I always tell my kids, I go, the worst thing to do is lay in bed or lay on the couch because you will feel worse. But if you get up and start. I mean, obviously, unless you're really sick, but if you get up and start moving around, you tip magically. You typically start feeling a little bit, maybe even a little bit, but certainly.

Yeah, the power of powering through. Yeah, it's totally true because, yeah, once you, once you start doing something and once you're even just a little bit productive, that, for me anyway, inspires me to do the next thing, which then, you know, it's a snowball at that point.

Yes, yes, that's right. Yeah, it's, you know, you have to surmount it and instead of getting overwhelmed by it.

Right, right, yeah. Like you said, unless you're really sick.

Yeah, yeah.

Then you know, then you got to.

We'll give you, we'll give you a pass.

We'll give you, you know, that, that actually lead to something I wanted to talk about. I had the pleasure of meeting a guy last week. He's a neuroscientist, a guy named Daniel Levitin. He's done a lot of work with Sonos, which is why I got to meet him and had dinner with him actually on Tuesday night. Yeah, he did this whole thing about how a study actually was Sonos on Apple last year about how having music being played out loud in the home increases families interactivity together. People have higher enjoyment levels, people are having more sex. I mean it was like this whole thing and they actually proved it. They used ibeacons, believe it or not, which is why they brought Apple in to see were people in the same rooms together more frequently with music being played aloud as opposed to not. And it turned out, yeah, it was. But he's a really interesting guy. He's a musician, but also a neuroscientist. So he's really intensely into sort of the neuroscientific aspects of music. And he just scanned Sting's brain while he was playing music to see what that was like. I mean, the guy does all this crazy stuff, but he sent me an article based on a conversation we had about why you shouldn't multitask. Now he didn't write this, but I think one of his neuroscientist buddies did. And it sadly rings true for me.

And me.

This article goes through this whole thing about multitasking and really what it comes down to is if you think you're good at multitasking, it's only because you have successfully tricked yourself. That's an illusion. And by thinking about too many, by thinking about more than one thing simultaneously, you're actually limiting your ability to do any one of those things fully and limiting your creativity for everything that you do. So let's break.

There's two concepts there, right? So the first is, and see if I have this right, by trying to do too many things at once or jump around, we're going to do kind of all of them half assed, right? Or not as good as we, as we could do one, right? And so, you know, and I get, I get that. But I also think there's a lot of enjoyment in being able to jump around from concept to concept. But I would agree that, yes, if you can't sit there and focus on, you're not going to be as effective at solving this one problem or, you know, completing this one task.

Right.

And. And I. I would say I often find I get to a point where I'm not sure how to move forward and it's just much easier for me to go, you know, let me jump over there and check out how this thing's doing. Sure. You know, and. And then I get that little endorphin rush or whatever because I solved this other problem. But sometimes that kind of fuels me to come back, unless I'm just tricking my brain, which I'm sure I am.

See, I'm not convinced that what you described is necessarily bad and also not necessarily multitasking. I think where the problem and I will fall into a habit of multitasking. There's no question about it. But what I've found is that if I can be a little bit intentional about things and, and do what I call spotlighting, as opposed to multitasking, where I choose a task and then dive into it, now I might limit my time on that task because I then am going to move to something else, or if I truly hit a wall, then I think that stopping and moving to something else is actually okay. It's when you're trying to literally just bouncing back and forth between two things. That's where certainly for me, I find this article rings true, where I just can't. Neither one of them gets completed the way it should. It's like, all right, that's close enough. All right, what about this one? Yeah, that's close enough.

Interesting.

To me, again, this is just the way I frame it. In my own head, I see a difference between multitasking and spotlighting. Right.

Yeah. That's good. So to define them, and that's, I think, an important thing.

Let's define.

Define what multitasking really is here.

Yeah.

Are we talking about what I just described? We're kind of jumping in and out of tasks and projects throughout your day, which in my case I find can keep me energized and interested.

Right.

Because I definitely have small business attention deficit disorder, of course. And I like being able to jump in and go, oh, well, I can do this, I can do that. So if that's not multitasking, then is it where more, you know, we're here, like we're recording this podcast, but someone's typing. It drives me insane, by the way. We have an interview and you hear somebody typing in the thing. You're like, they're not typing to us.

Right? What's happening?

Yes, that's right. Yes. So that would be more reflective of, you know, real multitasking.

Yeah, I think.

Makes sense.

I think, you know, doing. If you're involved in a task and you stop to check a text message or an email. Right. That kind of thing. And for me, that's. That's where things get to be the worst. Because not all. Maybe you do come back. Right. You know, you have task A, but you go check your email and come back you like that takes a lot of energy to refocus and get back to where you were. Whereas, and I think to me, that's where multitasking is a problem. And. And I've. I've actually, I try and limit all the interruptions that I have. I. Although now with Sierra, I don't think my Mac does what I've asked it to do. But. And an example of multitasking would be me going and checking my email settings right now while we're. But I didn't. But there was an urge to do that. An urge, yes. But I have my email set. A, not to ding when an email comes in, and B, not to check my email more than once an hour. I can always go, hit the check email button. But there's not only the audible interruption, but the visual interruption. If I see that there's the little red dot on my mail thing I hate, then I'll want to go and look at it. It becomes very distracting. And so. And I had this pretty well licked. But all the notifications that we get, you know, email's not the only way. In fact, often now it's the least. For me, it's the least common way that people get me. It's messages or Slack or, you know, Facebook notifications, whatever it is. And so again, I'm a Mac guy. And so I will do two things now. When I'm at my desk, I generally don't wear my Apple watch while I'm in the office. In fact, I just don't wear it. It stays on my bed stand. I often wear it when I'm traveling. I find it very handy when I'm not in my sort of normal element. Sometimes on the weekends, I'll wear it, but during the week, I generally don't for exactly this reason. I don't need these interruptions that's why.

I parked mine too.

Yeah. And I take my phone and I put it face down so that I don't see all the notifications showing up on it. And if I'm really heads down on something, and especially so after reading this article, I will. There's a notification. See? Did you hear it? Yeah, I did.

Yeah. Yeah.

On your Mac, you can actually turn off notifications for 24 hours. And the easy way to do it is to just option click on the little notification center icon in the upper right hand corner of the menu bar and it'll come back on within 24 hours if you forget about it. But then you can just option click again and it will turn it back on. But I've found that really helpful. Really. It's that I've found it so distracting lately. You know, like, we've got slack groups and we've got, like, my family has a text message group sometimes, you know, and sometimes, often during the day that's pretty quiet because the kids are at school and, you know, we're all kind of doing our thing. But sometimes somebody will post something and it'll result in this, you know, 15 minute flurry.

Messages of cat videos.

Yeah. I mean, it's like, you know, somebody you'll like. My, My daughter might post that she made, you know, high honors or something. Sure. Which is great. But it now is these, you know, there's. There's now 32 messages that happen in the course of 15 minutes.

Yeah.

And it's like, whoa, I just got to turn off notifications. I can come back to this later.

And I think that the, you know, the phone and the, the urgency of apps, which I love, are, you know, like slack and the implied urgency. The implied urgency. Cor. Correct. It is, but it's so addictive to, you know, it's feeding something in all of us and perhaps those of us, you know, living the charm life of, you know, small business owners, especially multiple businesses, it draws us in even more. So it is really, I agree it is very important to allocate time where you're not going to have those interruptions. And I think that it's, it's very challenging. And I, I would comment on, you know, in, in last year when we started this social media business, you know, experiment.

Yeah.

And, and I love it and it's been successful and I think it's, you know, going, going well and it's going to do good. But however, the, you know, the concept back then was to see if you, you know, start the business On. On our. With the phone. Run it with the phone and see how things work. And it's great, and it works good. But the concept of running it on your phone. I have had to turn off all those notifications or I would be sitting there all day and you have to dip in. I really like your term. And this concept of spotlighting. Plus, it also gives me a free pass because it sounds like that's what I do much more than multitask is dip into. Okay, I'm going to jump into Poshmark and, you know, look at all this stuff here for the next 15 minutes. And then I'm. While I'm waiting for my kid to get out of lacrosse and da, da, da. And then jump into the next thing or, you know, while I'm at my desk. I like that idea. And I think that's an important distinction between these two because, yeah, I think it's.

It's managing interruptions. And I'll put an asterisk on interruptions because those interruptions can be external or internal. Right. I mean, the notifications that we described, those are external interruptions, and those are like, we are wired. In the article even talks about it, you know, we are wired. What does it say that back in the prehistoric days, any new piece of information might be critical. A rustling in the bushes on it, for example, could mean a tiger was about to leap. Right. Thus it was adaptive for our brains to seek out and pay attention to new information. Right. And that's. It totally makes sense why these. These external things are like, we are wired to pay attention to them, so we just have to limit them so that we aren't firing off those things in our brain. But there's also the internal portion of this, which is you're in the middle of a meeting or something and you have a moment of downtime and you're bored. Right. And I mean bored. The definition of boredom has changed dramatically.

Yes, it has.

In the last five years. Right?

Yeah. Yeah.

And so it's like, we don't know how to be bored anymore. We don't know how to do nothing. Right.

There is no downtime.

Right. And I think that is the. That's the biggest problem for me with the multitasking is it's like I have, you know, 32 seconds here where I need to wait for something and that, like, if I'm doing a programming project and I need to upload to test, or I'm waiting for a sync to happen or whatever it might be, I'll think, oh, I'll go check my email. And really what I found the best thing for me to do is literally sit and wait and quiet.

Yeah.

Yeah. Because I find some of my best ideas come when I'm driving my car or I'm taking a shower.

Yeah. We've talked about this car driving thing in the past years and years ago. I mean, because I like it too. And I haven't done this in a few years, but I used to be, you know, have a, an annual trip where I would fly out to a certain part of the country and, you know, rent a car and just drive and visit customers, you know, clients of ours, and just, hey, I'm going to be in town. You want to grab coffee, grab lunch or whatever? And if nobody could meet me, no problem. I just kept driving. Sure. Because it was uninterrupted time where you could really think. And I think the phones have really impacted us from that aspect in a negative manner because you just don't have that deep breath or you have to make yourself have it more and even just the little things of focus. And for me, I know if I can get outside and work in my garden or on my hillside and do these kinds of things for a couple hours, I feel so much better than sitting there thinking, oh, I got a minute, I can jump and see the new, or jump on Reddit or do whatever. And that does not make me feel any better. Usually, you know, especially if you're reading the news, it makes you feel worse. Yeah, yeah.

You know, that's a, that I don't mean it. I do mean to interrupt. I apologize for interrupting. I always used to not ever read the news.

Yeah, me neither.

Like, I, I, and I used to say, the news just makes me sad. I don't care. Like, it doesn't really matter that much to me. Like, there are things that matter more to me. Right. I don't want to dismiss the world, but it's like, look, that only impacts me a certain amount. And maybe that's what it is. I used to have a very proportional balance between the amount which the news actually impacted my life and the attention I paid to it. Right. Whereas now because of, really, social media, for me, and I think many of us, you know, I can't go check on Facebook or Twitter to see what people are up to in a general sense, without now being exposed to the news. So the amount of attention that I choose, and I mean, you know, to say that I'm forced to read the news is incorrect, but, you know, it is in this stream of Other information that I want that I can't filter it out. So the amount of attention that I pay to the news now is greatly out of proportion with the amount that. Because it.

That it impacts your life.

That it impacts my. The amount that it impacts my life hasn't changed at all. Except now I waste a lot of time thinking about it.

You know, Dave, that comment right there could save millions of people undue aggravation in their lives. That, you know, allocating as much time to it that it impacts your life. And again, I don't want to turn this into a show about how the phone has or social media or whatever it is, but it is dipping. Where I used to be able to spotlight and jump into social media to see what was going on with my friends, it's virtually impossible to jump in now. Even though you hide this or I don't want to see this or whatever and not get it doesn't matter, in my opinion. And you know, kind of sucked into, you know, what's going on. And this kind of thing that again, has no impact on you might be interesting, but you could certainly read it at the end of the day or hell, even on the weekend.

I was going to say once a month used to be enough. Yeah, Literally, like that was enough. Like, am I aware of the world? We're not at war, are we? Okay, good. Right. Right. Okay.

Yeah, fine. Yeah. So I think that. And we could, you know, we could do a whole show on how that makes people feel and all that kind of stuff. But, you know, I think that.

We.

Have a certain sense that we should jump into these things and answer them immediately. And I've had a couple texts come in here and I have not turned off my notifications on my Mac. So of course they pop right up while we're sitting here and I don't want to see them right now. But I'm afraid that if I hit mark as reply, I'm like, oh, am I going to remember to go get back to those. That kind of thing. So I definitely see the power in or the negativity in jumping into that multitasking. And I think it is a fine line between spotlighting and moving from one thing because you could do little. I tend to do micro tasks and projects during the day. And that's my system that I've developed to live the kind of life that I would like to live.

Yeah. As you described it initially and as you've sort of refined it and clarified now, I would not call you what you've described. I Would not call you a multitasker because there is that spotlighting thing. And years ago, I read a book called. It was like the five habits of CEOs or something. No, it wasn't the one you're thinking of. I gotta find this book because I've read it a few times and I have it in paperback. I don't have it electronically, so I just go dig it up off the shelf and I read it, and it's like every. There were Maybe it was five CEOs that were interviewed for this book, and every one of them doesn't multitask, but does Spotlight. And that's where that term came from.

I like it.

And every time I've read this book, I've been, like, more productive for a year. And then, you know, and then the lesson sort of fades away and I gotta reread. But, yeah, there's something to this where.

It'S like, I agree with you. Yeah, yeah, I agree. And I would, you know, I would argue that that's actually. Can be a real strength if you harness it correctly and, you know, be able to. I met a guy years and years ago who I actually wound up going in business with him. And one of the comments that he made was that he had a very wide bandwidth of dealing with, you know, business information as it came in. Because I had concerns at the time. He was. He had another company and. No, no, I got it. And it was proven. And I like that. And I stole that phrase.

I learned that phrase from you telling you had a wide band.

Yes. Which you do. Yeah, I think I do. And so it's a testament to your ability to kind of field things. But also, I hate to admit, but I still use sticky notes, like physical sticky notes on my desk. And if I can't tell, I mean, my common phrase around when I walk through our building is when someone. Somebody asks me something, if I can't answer that for them right there, I just say, hey, slack me. So when I get back to my desk, it'll be there for me. Yes. And I need that cue. You know, that is the wonderful part about all this information is it allows you these things to be queued up, if you will. Then I can sit down and I can knock them out, like, boom, boom, boom, boom, versus. Oh, yeah, let me make myself a note and get back to you on that. Which is completely. I'm terrible at that. But I still have these little pieces of paper, and I'm like, oh, I gotta do this. Because I look down at my desk And I want to be reminded it's an urgent. It's like, hey, this has got to get done today. It's going to get a piece, you know, a sticky note right here on my desk so I can throw that note away from when I leave, you know. Yeah, it's old school, but it. But. But it works for me.

No, well, that's it. Yeah. And so I think, you know, the. The advice that I would give is, you know, for example, while we're doing this, I got a series of texts from somebody that I'm working on another project with, and they said, hey, here's an idea. Can you send this off to the designer that's working on the logo for us?

Sure.

I saw them when they came in. Actually, they came in just before we started the show, but I saw it as I was turning my phone over. So you can't unknow something, right?

No, no, no, you're right.

So this information is in my head, and they're great ideas, and, yes, I want to pass them off to our designer. Now, I could have, while you were talking, while we were doing the show, responded. I could have. Right, right. Taken these and sent them off, and it would have been fine. I suppose I would have clearly missed some aspect of what you were saying, and I also wouldn't have put the intention into the email. It would have just been, well, I'm gonna throw this idea out here and send it and she'll figure it out.

Yeah. And I think it's that sense, the thing, we feel this urgency, like, oh, they've dumped it here. It's like, you know, years ago. And I've said this on the show, too. You know, years ago, I shut down all of the voicemail at work. And so I was like, you know what? We're not going to do this, because it's just one more place for people to ask us to do something. On my personal voicemail, we still have customer service stuff, but of course. But I just tell them, here's my email, and if you have my mobile number, call me if it's urgent. And that was great. And I've almost done the same thing with email now, because it is the last thing that I look at for a response, because most of the people that I interact with are either on Slack or they can message me. And I kind of, at the end of the day or during the day a few times look at email, and I could foresee that even going away further. But you have to then be comfortable with not feeling the urgency to jump in. Like when somebody sends you a message or a Slack thing like, oh, I got to go take care of it. A good example is like you're talking about.

Yeah, for some reason I'm okay because I managed this years ago. I trained myself. I'm okay seeing an email come in and leaving it, knowing that I will get back to that later. And that's fine. And I do. And mostly, I mean, sometimes things fall through the cracks like they do with somebody, but that, that process is okay with me. But when a text message comes in or a Slack, I still like, I'm of the mindset of this, this can. This is like email is asynchronous for me. Like totally. For some reason I am of the mindset that text messages must be synchronous and I have to like deal with it right away. And that's just not true. It's, you know, it's fine.

But you know, it seems to me like it would be great then that sounds to me like an opportunity for. And maybe there is out there some type of app or integration with Slack that when those messages comes in, when those messages come in that you want to queue up into something that, you know, I mean, I run a lot of my Slack and even my email, you know, like a to do list.

Right.

If it's, if it's sitting in my inbox, I'm eventually going to have to deal with it or answer a question or something like that. But it would be great if when those messages came in and you had set your filter or whatever that hey, I'm going to be during this time, this stuff pushes over to here and waits for me. My concern with messaging is it's, it's like I look at it like, oh, did I? I clicked on it. Boom, there goes a little dot right now.

I don't do anything with it though.

I did nothing with it.

There's no filing of Slack or text messages.

And there should be.

Yeah, I agree. Yeah, that concept of there's a difference between seeing it and action.

You know, whatever the action is, it's an action item. Oh, I need to take an action here. I want to click this quickly and that kind of thing.

Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah.

Now Slack, you know, they have multi threaded conversations now where you can turn all those problems. It does not. Yeah. And you know, I would love to be able to have a convince like, oh, hey, from 1 to 2pm here, while we're recording, anything that pops in is going to get, get flagged and will be waiting for me when I come back.

I guess I could always star things, but that's like an action that I have to take as opposed to the other direction.

You want an. I want an automation.

I want it to be there until I say I've dismissed this one. I'm good with.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

So. But it's good stuff. But. But I do agree that the. I think the best part of this show and was the two seconds or two minutes where we defined, you know, spotlighting versus multitasking. Yes. And I think spotlighting is a. Is a huge benefit and an opportunity for people that are trying to do different things at one time. But I do, you know, multitasking does pull you out, pull you. And I'm sure I do the same thing. And I'm going to follow up with this article. We'll post it up in the show notes, and we'd certainly like to hear how you folks deal with these kinds of things. We've had some great people on the show lately that are doing all kinds of stuff at the same time. They must have the same problem.

We all have to. Yeah. It's the world we live in. Yeah. Yeah.

So. Feedbackusinessshow Co. Or you can just jump businessshow co. Facebook, and that'll take you right to our small business group over there on Facebook where you can post some. Some comments. We would love to hear from you.

Yeah, that's right. Folks, thanks so much for listening. Thanks so much for. For being a part of this whole charmed life that we live together. It's a good thing. Have a good week, Shannon.

Hey, you too, man. Thanks, man.