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.

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.

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.

1. Signatures

The Problem: Let’s start with the obvious one: people need to sign things. And there is no real way — accessible to your average office — to sign a document without printing it out first.

On one hand, I absolutely understand why this is a barrier. The signature is really all we have, in this digital age, to act as a marker indicating that, yes, this came from me. And a scanned-in signature obviously isn’t worth as much, given how easy it would be to cut and paste a signature from one file to another.

On the other hand, though, my to-hell-with-history side is asking why we still put such an emphasis on signatures as any kind of legal indicator of anything. Especially given that a lot of signatures are now faxed through on contracts or whatever. Do you know how easy it would be to fake a faked signature? The only prerequisite is knowing basic arts and crafts. You need scissors and a glue stick. And even with in-person signatures, it’s not as if they’re above reproach in terms of forgery or whatever. Going digital and doing away with old-fashioned signatures might actually INCREASE security, assuming we use encryption or PGP or similar.

How we get around it: Barring doing away with the signature altogether (admittedly unlikely), I’m thinking touch screen technology might actually help with this one. Being able to ‘sign’ your screen with a stylus, like you do to accept a Fed Ex package or (at some retailers) sign your credit card receipt, is likely just as good as signing a piece of paper.

2. On-screen proof reading and editing modes

The Problem: One of the big reasons people still print out documents is so that they can take a red pen to them. And why not? This is how we’re taught to edit other people’s work. Even if you’ve never taken a copy editing course in your life, you’ve likely been passively trained to edit on paper. It’s how all your teachers did it, after all.

How to get around it: Let’s start in the schools by training, and then encouraging (and, if necessary, forcing), teachers to edit student assignments on screen. The technology is already there: Microsoft Word’s ‘Track Changes’ mode is probably one of the most powerful features of the program. And, if that’s too complicated, just highlighting in red is a perfectly fine substitute.

3. Digital back-ups

The Problem:Despite using it every day, the older generation still doesn’t have much in the way of trust for technology. You can see it in every middle-aged person making off-hand comments about how things used to be when the e-mail server goes down for two minutes in the morning.

And they’re not without justification. A lot of companies did not have a smooth transition when it came time to adopt computers and the internet into day-to-day procedures. Most egregiously, many of them had lacklustre or sometimes non-existent back-up solutions, leading — on occasion — to massive data loss, either due to virus or hardware failure. Or, as I’ve had it described to me once or twice, because of gremlins.

Because of this, a lot of people see a hard copy of something as more tangible: once they’ve printed it out, they can’t lose it. It won’t just disappear.

How to get around it: Back-ups Back-ups Back-ups. Apple’s Time Machine is a step in the right direction, as an effortless, user-friendly way of backing up files. And, while network-level back-up systems are obviously a necessity, there’s something to be said to doing user-level back-ups as well — letting people see how their own files are backed up, and where they’ll be if something were to happen to their computer. Once they have that level of calm, hopefully they’ll be less likely to print everything for posterity’s sake.

4. Battery Life

The Problem: Having everyone use laptops or other portable devices as a meeting might sound like a good idea, but it can quickly fall apart when everyone is looking for an outlet 20 minutes in. Ideally, it’d be great to just have everyone reference the agenda file in a network folder, avoiding having to put ‘packages’ together that often total dozens of pages, but that plan is only workable if everyone has a screen that works.

How to get around it: I think the holy grail of battery life for laptops is somewhere in the neighbourhood of ten to 12 hours. Once people can pull their computer out at work in the morning and not worry about charging it all day, the on-the-go dream will truly start to take hold. Given that battery technology is not advancing as fast it should this isn’t likely to happen anytime soon. Unfortunately, the meeting room might be the last place to go paperless.

5. “I can’t read on a screen”

The problem: Most people nowadays are comfortable using a computer for active tasks like typing an e-mail or an essay, but when it comes to a passive task like reading, they maintain that they need paper.

For anyone touting paperless as the way to go, “I can’t read on a screen” is going to be a familiar rebuttal. There are, for better or worse, a group of people who just find the idea of reading a long document on a computer screen to be incredibly unpleasant. And so they go to their printer.

How to get around it: Some of this is purely just people being stubborn: it’s not how they’re used to reading things, so they don’t like it. But I think, if you dig deep, a lot of the reluctance people have about reading on-screen comes from the screen they’ll be doing their reading on. How many of these people are using low-bit LCDs at some weird resolution? Worse, how many of them are using ancient CRTs with terrible refresh rates?

Of course reading on screen will suck if you don’t have a screen suited to your eyes. For employers seeking a paperless workplace, giving employees high-quality monitors that are easy on the eyes is undoubtedly the first step. Cheaping out on computer screens is a surefire way to ensure that your employees — particularly your older employees, as their eyesight starts to go — will be running to the printer every opportunity they get.

And so

There are undoubtedly more. Coming into the workplace, I was all abuzz about how I was going to make the workplace paperless. Having experienced it now for a few years, I can see how hard it truly will be to separate paper out of the workplace equation. Even if you don’t print anything, someone is bound to print things for you.

Any tips for reaching paperless status? Let me know.

Photo by thatts. Licensed under Creative Commons

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.

Creating hundreds of subfolders, many of which are redundant

One of the most common thing I see when troubleshooting an older person’s e-mail is the giant list of subfolders under their Inbox. Inevitably, these subfolders are based on one or both of the following criteria:

• The person who sent the messsage
• The date the message was received

So you get people who manually move all the e-mails they get in March to their “March” folder. Or all the e-mails they get from Bob to their ‘Bob’ folder. Or, and this is truly staring into a dark abyss, all the e-mails they get from Bob in March to a “Bob – March” folder.

This is CRAZY.

Some subfolder organization I can understand. Personally, I keep it simple: I have “Inbox” and I have “Old”. But I could understand folders like “Policies”, “Reports”, “Harassment Claims” or the like. But subfolders based on person and/or date are undoubtedly stupid and a HUGE waste of time for the people ‘organizing’ their e-mail.

Any e-mail program EVER automatically lets you sort by date and by person. Newer programs even let you set up Search or Smart folders that let you see those items without wasting twenty minutes every day playing a useless drag-and-drop game with Outlook 2003.

Calling to make sure you got their e-mail

I could understand this one when people were new to e-mail and still using dial-up connections. Back then, sending a 200 kilobyte message was dicey. If it was of particular importance, it made sense to call and confirm everything made it to the other end intact.

But now, over a decade later, it’s still commonplace for your phone to ring simultaneously with the e-mail hitting your inbox. And so you end up picking up your phone as you read the message, and the first question is always “Did you get my e-mail?”

I understand not trusting technology. Especially for people who were around in the Windows 95/98 era when everything pretty well sucked and attempting to send a simple two-line message to a co-worker could lead to four blue screen error messages, a bunch of crap about IRQ settings and then, weirdly, a viewing of Weezer’s video for “Buddy Holly”, but we’ve passed the threshold. Either call me or e-mail me. Don’t do both.

And don’t even get me started on ‘read receipts’. If people judged my e-mail reading habits based on my response to read receipts, they’d assume I never check my e-mail ever.

Taking spam really personally

I.T. workers will understand this one better than anyone else. The co-worker who knows that you’re “into your computers” and always wants to talk about one thing: all the spam they get. They turn their computers on in the morning and make remarks like “20 messages? Bet most of it is SPAM!” while chuckling to themselves. They read off spam subject lines and messages to no one in particular. They’re constantly on the look-out for ways to fight spam. They’re inevitably the ones who end up getting their identities stolen through phishing scams.

I hate spam too, of course. Everyone hates spam. But acting like it’s some sort of epidemic that’s landed squarely in your e-mail box is more than a little non-sensical. And also a major waste of time. The best way to ‘fight’ spam? Turn on your e-mail client’s filter. And ignore the stuff that slips through the cracks. Honestly, do you get this worked up about the junk mail flyers you get in your mailbox at home, too?

Forwarding EVERYTHING

If real life were exactly like e-mail, every time anyone said anything remotely witty in a gathering of people, all of the people in attendance would immediately contact all of their friends, known relatives, acquaintances and vague undefinable relationships and share the witty comment with them.

E-mail forwarding is an epidemic worse than spam. At least with spam there’s the chance that someone, somewhere might find it slightly useful. Some people really want cheap black-market viagra or diet pills. But nobody wants a poorly-researched treatise on how aspartame is bad for you that was written in 1996. Or an appeal to forward this message so some little orphan girl can buy shoes to be a ballerina. Because she will get $5 per forward through the transitive technological property of magic faerie computery gizmos.

If you do this, please stop.

Refusing to upgrade

People were generally willing to adopt e-mail as part of their day-to-day business, but, for a lot of people, that’s where they stopped. Try to upgrade a person still using Outlook Express 6 to a more current e-mail client and be ready for them to freak the hell out. What happened to all their FOLDERS? This address book doesn’t work the same way! All of the emoticons I had readily available through a handy toolbar are GONE!

For some reason I can’t quite fathom, people somehow got stuck in a rut, even standing on the cusp of the new internet wave. I’ve even had issues getting people to switch from pop3 to imap/exchange, despite the obvious benefits, as trying to get people to understand archiving old messages — versus keeping a phalanx of subfolders — is damn near impossible.

I’m convinced that a big reason e-mail viruses are still an issue is because of these people. Microsoft, for all their faults, has done a fairly good job locking down recent versions of Outlook to casual e-mail viruses — you can’t really get infected through the preview pane anymore, for example — but the people still deeply devoted to their OE6 install are ruining it for everyone.

Bonus: Using Comic Sans

I don’t think I need to say any more about that one.

There are lots more, of course. Things like privacy policies, having no conception of what a reasonable attachment size is, trying to do html newsletters via e-mail, using proprietary Microsoft stuff (I had someone trying to ‘recall’ a message they sent me the other day; it was weird) and using txtspeak in business e-mail all drive me just as crazy. But I think that’s enough to start with.

Generation Y, by the way, is by no means immune to any of this. In fact, in some cases we’re the worst offenders. For a supposedly ‘tech savvy’ generation, we’re often very… not. I think in a lot of cases that has to do with our education system, which still treats computers & technology like an irrelevant lark. More on that in a later post.

For now, though: what about e-mail drives you crazy?