Jonathan M Gitlin at Ars Technica has a good bit about the supposed evils of multitasking on your computer at work:

The complaints against multitasking are the usual; you’re not as focused as you could be if you were just doing one thing at once, switching focus repeatedly actually makes you less productive as each time your brain takes a few moments to reprioritize tasks and so on.

I’m the first to admit that there’s a lot be said for shutting down everything else and focusing on a single task when you just need to power through and get something done, but these days talk of ‘multitasking’ seems to take the form of huffy managers cruising through the office, looking over shoulders and trying to catch a glimpse of someone looking at something “non-work-related”.

This, quite frankly, is a lame thing to do.

Gitlin again:

Employers seek ever-greater productivity from their workers, which means getting more work from them for the same amount of pay. Faced with that situation, it’s hardly surprising the cube-dweller responds by spending 15 minutes an hour looking at LOLCATs. Besides, I’m just old enough to remember the days before you used to be able to multitask; people used to sit at their desks reading the newspaper instead.

Technology has definitely exasperated this issue. It seems entirely acceptable for an employee to spend 10 minutes chatting with co-workers about the movie they saw on the weekend or 5 minutes on a personal phone call, but apparently just a glimpse at Facebook is an instant productivity killer. The message, I guess — and this is coming from those generally clueless about everything online — is that you can’t be working if you’re also on some website.

The real issue I have with this is one of trust. By constantly monitoring your employees’ screens, by installing filters and blocks, by blanket policies forbidding access at work, you’re essentially saying to your employees that you can’t trust them. “Why would you do this stupid work I’ve assigned you when you have fun internet things to look at?”

Could spending a lot of time on Facebook at work cause an employee to miss deadlines or produce sub-quality work? Absolutely. And those employees should face hell because of that. But you’re always smarter to criticize and (if necessary) discipline based on outputs, not process. The process is entirely subjective and unique to each person, whereas the outputs can be objective.

If the work is getting done, does it really matter if the worker is ‘multitasking’ all day, bouncing between windows and tasks like — as Gitlin puts it — a crack-smoking housefly?

Technology has led to a diversification of work styles.¹ There is no ‘right’ way to get things done in the computer age. Trying to establish one-size-fits-all processes, policies or rules — even for something as seemingly frivolous as ‘banning Facebook’ — is a losing battle.

Thanks to Ari Najarian for pointing me to the article.

Photo by Vedlia. Licensed under Creative Commons

1. I’m thinking of things like keyboard users vs. mouse; command line versus GUI; maximized versus juggled windows; open source versus Microsoft, etc etc. [↩]

I spent a day this past week attending sessions on Generation Y in the workplace presented by Max Valiquette and Giselle Kovary. I’ve seen both speakers before, but they’re both entertaining and continue to evolve their presentations to include interesting points, so I was glad to spend the time to hear their messages again. Plus, all-day workshop are a very welcome respite from the day-to-day work sometimes.

Listening this time, though, I was struck with something that’s actually been rolling around in my head for a while. Whenever anybody talks about Generation Y these days, they mention technology.¹ According to conventional wisdom, Generation Y loves technology. We love video games and cell phones and the internet and every gizmo, gadget or doowhacky under the sun. It is undoubtedly a very very ironclad part of our overall generational identity.

It’s not hard to find evidence. The Financial Post ran an article about the Ryerson Facebook incident (which I touched upon here) this week, and included a standard technology-is-everything piece in their explanation of Generation Y:

Confident, global -thinking and impatient, this generation of workers — approximately everyone born between 1982 and 1990 –does not know life without computers. It takes technology for granted, turning to e-mail, blogs and social-networking sites 24/7 to gather information and interact with colleagues and friends.

I’m not meaning to appear as contrary to this, because it totally does describe me. I’ve been a lifelong nerd, accessing the internet well before my teens and living a life largely based in three-letter acronyms for over a decade now (ICQ, IRC, AIM, WWW, FTP, HTML, CSS, JPG, BRB, LOL, ETC.) And the connectivity and virtual communication piece seems obvious: look at the explosion of popularity in any kind of online service that connects people with their friends.

But the paradox part of is that, for the last few years, I’ve spent a significant amount of time interviewing, hiring and working with other, younger members of Generation Y and throughout that time my questions to them about computers have yielded a fairly consistent statement:

“I’m not very good with computers”

This kills me, because it just seems so unbelievably wrong. We’re the COMPUTER GENERATION! How can you not be good with them? That’d be like a Gen Xer not being good at wearing flannel! Or a baby boomer not being great at complaining about everything! Or a traditionalist not being great at making babies!²

Plus, generally the same people making the claim that they’re not good with computers are the same people who spend their evening with seventeen instant messenger windows open while downloading tracks from Limewire and working on a term paper: “I’m not very good with computers, but often I use them for ten hours straight to do any number of tasks simultaneously.”

Trying to make sense of all of this

I’ve been trying to figure out why this disconnect exists, and I’ve come up with some potential explanations:

• Pure Semantics: Refer to the idea of a Digital Native and think about cars for a second. I would never describe myself as “good with cars” but that has absolutely nothing to do with my ability actually operate a vehicle. I’ve got no real idea where the fuel lines are or even how to change a tire but I still do pretty good at driving to work a few times a week.
  

  Similarly, I think a lot of Gen Yers see themselves as “not good with computers” because they don’t know how to install RAM or put in a hard drive, but that doesn’t mean they’re not adept at using software and performing creative/administrative/organizational tasks on a computer.

  As so-called “digital natives”, we tend to speak and think differently about computers — more compartmentalized, specific to software, hardware and even individual programs — but Gen Y needs to be aware that, by and large, this isn’t how the older generations (read: the ones hiring you) think.

• Confidence: Gen Y lacks a lot of confidence when it comes to some of their skills, particularly their computer skills. Again, if you think about it in terms of being a digital native, it’s easier to understand why this is.
  

  If you asked a native English speaker if they were “good at English” they’d likely reply that they weren’t, especially if they struggled with Shakespeare and hated James Joyce. On the flip side, though, if you asked a native English speaker if they were “good at Spanish”, they might answer in the affirmative even if all they know is how to ask where the bathroom is or how to get back to the cruise ship.

  One of the more difficult things you need to do when selling yourself to a potential employer is frame your skills in relation to their expectations, not yours. This goes beyond computers, but it is perhaps most important within the technology sphere. Just because you don’t feel like an expert at Photoshop, for example, because you don’t know how to work with Lab colours and multi-layer documents, doesn’t mean your potential employer won’t see you as “Photoshop expert” because you know how to do rudimentary tasks. It’s all context.

• Education: This is a big one — almost too big to go into here — but to sum it up: everything they currently teach about computers and the internet in high schools is terrible and does more harm than good. The track in high schools has been, until very recently, to separate “computers” into its own once (or maybe twice) a week ghetto, where you learn how to type and not much else.
  

  As a result, I think a lot of people come to understand “computer skills” as separate from math skills, writing skills, artistic skills, communication skills, business skills, etc. When, in reality, a computer should be thought of has nothing more than a tool through which you exercise and develop these primary skills.

  As a first step toward providing real, valuable and much-needed education that fits into the ‘digital native’ sphere, schools NEED to start blending computer-use into every class, in a way that makes sense and isn’t just window dressing. (Letting the kids who finish their math problems first play on the computer is not, for example, a good way to handle this.)

But, then, I don’t know

I think there’s even more to this that I fully understand at this point, so I pose the questions back to the readers: have you ever claimed that you’re “not good with computers.” Why? How do you justify that to yourself? And is Generation Y’s much ballyhooed technological expertise a myth?

Photo by practicalowl. Licensed under Creative Commons

1. In fact, I recently attended a session where a presenter summed Generation Y up thusly: Love technology, difficult to manage. Which, you know, I won’t dispute, but there’s a little more to it than that. [↩]
2. I’m kidding. Don’t get mad. [↩]

This blog post got me thinking about something that’s been around, according to wikipedia at least, since 1975: the paperless office.

Generation Y has, by and large, earned their digital stripes. We’re technology savvy and, coincidentally, we’re also environmentally conscious. Add those two together and you get a generation of employees that might finally push to make the paperless office a reality.

That said, my two years of experience in the workplace have shown me that there are still a number of barriers to the paperless office that have absolutely nothing to do with the readiness of the technology. Unfortunately — or, I guess, fortunately, if you’re one of those people who loves their printer — paper is pretty culturally and politically ingrained into office life.

Here’s a list of a just a few of barriers I’ve noticed standing in the way of a paperless utopia.
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I love e-mail. It’s undoubtedly my primary means of communication at work, to the point where I feel as if I could give up my phone tomorrow and not really be impacted. Honestly, I think being able to communicate effectively via e-mail is an absolute must in pretty much ANY industry these days, including unlikely ones like carpentry and stock car racing.

And while I love to rail on business for being backwards technologically, I’d be really hard-pressed to argue that e-mail wasn’t adopted quickly enough. Because it exploded onto the scene and became incredibly pervasive very quickly.

That said, there’s a whole lot about e-mail — and, more accurately, the way people use e-mail — that drives me crazy. Having spent many of my years in the office in a mostly unofficial ‘tech support’ role (something I’m sure a lot of Gen Y workers can relate to), I’ve seen absolutely mind-bending practices from co-workers when it comes to their e-mail programs.

I think a lot of the odd behaviour stems from the fact that e-mail did come into offices so quickly. If you think about it, nobody was ever really trained on e-mail, at least not like they were trained on how to use the copier (or whatever). Habits that may have made sense for composing, sending or filing ‘real’ mail were transferred over to the electronic Inbox, despite the fact that those habits make almost no sense when dealing with electronic media.

In that light, I don’t blame anyone for adopting these bizzare practices. But I’m still going to make fun of them.

What follows is five non-sensical things people do with e-mail.

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