To be or not to be, (or how much to be) that is the question…

To be, or not to be: that is the question:

Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,

This famous soliloquy more or less describes the dilemma the information  overload and

 multitasking has imposed on the CEO’s of the day. Of the enormous amount information;

desirable, undesirable, solicited, unsolicited, important and trivial, often presents

dilemma for then CEO of what is to be considered, what is to be ignored, where

action is to be taken and where it is to be left alone.

Technology advance brings with it the evils of its own. The speed with which the information is received and decimatedand the tremendous amount of information flow through all the channels of communication, is making multitasking essential and inevitable, especially for the senior management and “C” level executives.

There is a feeling that the speed and diversity is causing an information overload. Is this overload reducing the efficiency and adversely affecting the quality of delivery of the executives.

One might think that constant exposure to new information at least makes us more creative. Here again, the opposite seems to be true. Teresa Amabile and her colleagues at the Harvard Business School evaluated the daily work patterns of more than 9,000 individuals working on projects that required creativity and innovation. They found that the likelihood of creative thinking is higher when people focus on one activity for a significant part of the day and collaborate with just one other person. Conversely, when people have highly fragmented days—with many activities, meetings, and discussions in groups—their creative thinking decreases significantly.

These findings also make intuitive sense. Creative problem solving typically requires us to hold several thoughts at once “in memory,” so we can sense connections we hadn’t seen previously and forge new ideas. When we bounce around quickly from thought to thought, we know we’re less likely to make those crucial connections.

 While Human beings have worked to continuously increase the quality and speed of the communication in terms of distribution, reception and decimation, the communication mechanism in the Human Body has remained constant. In case of multitasking, while the executives switch from one task to the next quite fast, it takes longer for the brain to switch off from one task and switch on to the next. Hence the productivity of the executives is less in each of the multiple tasks they handle, when compared to the output when they are handling single tasks.

Best wishes,

Shyam

2011 Alumni Achievement Awards at Harvard Business School