Anne Truitt Zelenka

Are we overloaded and overconnected, checking email like rats pushing a cocaine lever, too distracted and unfocused to get anything done? Maybe. Or maybe there’s a way to be productive other than single-tasking and firewalled attention: connected mode productivity.

In connected mode, you stay in near-constant touch with colleagues and maintain a broad awareness of what’s available online. You accept multitasking as a fact of at least part of your work life. It’s not necessarily a substitute for single-tasking and dedicated focus, but can be a good complement if you know when and how to use it.

There are at least three trends promoting connected productivity:

Younger generations practice connected productivity. There’s plenty of research and anecdotal evidence (example) showing that teens today are more likely to use instant messaging or SMS than email for communicating with their friends. Here Jon Udell discusses an observation from Microsoft researcher Mary Czerwinski, that many teenagers now operate in “group mode.” Czerwinski sees it with her own teenage daughter:

the groups she belongs to optimize themselves by moving tasks around to the members with the right knowledge, skill, and inclination for each task. The research finding was that although the resulting multiasking effect is suboptimal for the individuals and clearly damages their productivity, it can be the optimal way for the group to achieve its goal.

As these young people enter the workforce, they may bring their skills of group-oriented productivity with them… and they will meet a world that is increasingly ready for connected productivity.

Computer tools store more context for us, decreasing the cost of multitasking. One of the main reasons multitasking can harm productivity is because of how difficult it is to reacquire the context of a task after an interruption. You have to remember where you were in the document you’re writing and what you were writing about, or what variables you were using in the software code you were writing, or what your most recent question was as you reviewed a contract.

However, modern tools and hardware display more information for us and remember more context — think of advanced software development environments that use color and indenting to show you the structure of your code or tabbed browsers that display all the pages you were considering or a research management tool that compresses a huge amount of information into a small representation.

And researchers are working on even better ways to help us multitask, recognizing that fragmented and interrupted work is the rule rather than the exception. For example, Czerwinski and her colleagues (PDF here) are experimenting with better ways of maintaining and displaying information about multiple tasks such that switching between tasks incurs less overhead.

The world of mashups works on connection. Mashups, which create new value out of existing resources, require an awareness of and access to distributed ideas, information, and services. If you’re creating content from scratch, you’ll likely commune just with your desktop software — MS Word or PhotoShop or Eclipse or something else depending on your profession. But if you’re creating value by combining distributed nuggets of value — by brokering relationships or by building a website from a content management system and plugins or by blogging your response to other people’s opinions — you’ll be communing with people and ideas and computers across the whole web.

Multitasking: good or bad?

Let me be clear — especially with myself, because I’m often carried away with enthusiasm for different ways of doing things — connected mode productivity is not necessarily better than single-tasking mode. You must accept certain tradeoffs when you use one or the other mode.

In a later post I’ll look at the research that suggests that multitasking is bad, and consider why it may not always be representative of our actual experience of connectedness.