Idea Surplus Disorder #78

Welcome to another Idea Surplus Disorder. As you read this, I'm jetting off to Boston and then on to Charleston before getting home on Thursday.

Then, next week, I'll do it all again (Chicago and LA), so if I miss hitting "send" on next week's edition ... well, you've been warned. ;-)

This week: multi-tasking misery, handwriting benefits, last-minute meetings, listening villains, surviving misinformation, writing manifestos, happy people, seven questions, color walks, blue vs. blue, and more.

I'm Matt Homann, and I'm glad you're here.

Last Minute Meetings

We've opened up a few dates for our turn-key, full-day Last-Minute Meetings. Here's what we've got available in September:

• Wednesday, September 18
• Thursday, September 19
• Tuesday, September 24
• Friday, September 27

If you want to get a jump-start on 2025 with your team, here's your chance – and they're available at a pretty significant discount. But you've got to act fast.

Ideas + Insights

Cal Newport believes that beyond multitasking, there's another reason our digital tools make work miserable:

And then we have the second thread, which I think had been somewhat unexplored, which is this way of working makes us miserable. It just clashes with our fundamental human wiring to have this nonstop piling up of communication from our tribe members that we can’t keep up with. And that hits all of these deeply rooted social networks in our brain to take this type of thing seriously. No matter how much the frontal cortex tells us it’s OK, we don’t have to answer these emails right away. There’s a deeper part of our brain that’s worried. And so it makes us miserable, and it makes us terrible at work.

Related: being glued to your smartphone makes you less creative:

“The reflexive pulling-out of my [smartphone]… was, I suddenly realized, very similar to [a] nail-biting habit, except in one important respect: biting my nails occupied only a tiny proportion of my brain capacity and it could, in fact, by warding off distracting thoughts, help me concentrate on reading that book or doing that sum,” Ian Robertson, a neuroscientist and clinical psychologist who wasn’t involved in either of the recent studies, wrote in Psychology Today. “The [smartphone] habit, on the other hand, is neurally all-consuming — vision, touch, memory, thinking are all full-on occupied by this gorgeously shiny piece of technological seduction and its inspired, all-consuming software systems.”

So perhaps we should go back to working with pen and paper:

• Writing by hand stimulates your brain. According to Forbes, an Indiana University study found that freehand writing stimulates the brain in three distinct areas that typing doesn’t—and has a similar effect on the brain as meditation.
• Writing by hand enhances learning. Researchers at Princeton and UCLA found that students learn better when taking notes by hand, partially because of what scientists refer to as “concept mapping.” Enhanced learning comes in handy in advertising as we frequently have to produce work for new clients and unfamiliar categories.
• When you write by hand you actually produce more ideas. A University of Washington study showed that “when children composed text by hand, they not only consistently produced more words more quickly than they did on a keyboard, but expressed more ideas.”
• Paper doesn’t have a “delete” button. When you write or sketch by hand, you have a permanent record. Sometimes you get lucky and land on something good early on—and if you’re deleting as you work, you could be throwing away gold.
• It’s easy to fall into patterns in digital. Very easy. And we’ve all done it. Starting a new project with an old template. Repurposing material from a previous save. The same fonts, patterns, grids. A blank piece of paper simply doesn’t have all that baggage.

This is a useful list of tips and tricks for "surviving" misinformation. I particularly like the advice to approach truth-seeking as a puzzle:

In the past, when I was talking to someone I disagreed with, I saw it as a battle. I went on the offensive, trying to beat my opponent down with evidence and statistics. That approach worked approximately zero percent of the time. In fact, it was usually counterproductive: Both of us usually just got angrier and more entrenched. 

Nowadays, when talking to someone from the other side of the political spectrum, I try to frame the discussion as a puzzle, not a war of words. It’s a mystery we can investigate together. I ask questions such as: Why does she believe what she believes? Why do I believe what I believe? What evidence, if any, would to change her mind? And what would change my mind? Even if we disagree on some points, what do we agree on? And given those agreements, are there practical actions we could take that would work for both of us? 

Which of these "Four Villains of Listening" do you play most often?

1.  The Dramatic Listener - You love creating drama and exploring every element of the discussion. Rather than helping the speaker progress, you get stuck in the detail and dissecting the historical events and patterns that have led you to the discussion. You are so engrossed and engaged in the story that you become completely preoccupied in the theatre of the drama.

2. The Interrupting Listener – You’re so focused on finding a solution to the problem that you finish the speaker’s sentences for them. You feel they are moving too slowly in describing the issue, so you listen with the intent of solving, rather than their intent of being curious. You interrupt and interject, creating all kinds of confusion. You are busy solving problems the speaker hasn’t yet verbalised.

3. The Lost Listener - You’re in your own mind rather than in the conversation. You are so absorbed with your self-talk you don’t create enough space for the dialogue to land in your mind, you are so busy thinking about your last thought or your next thought that you can’t focus on the discussion. You are lost before you even turn up.

4.    The Shrewd Listener – You’re too busy trying to solve the issue before listening to the explanation. You might be shrewd enough to wait patiently and not interrupt the speaker, but you are anticipating the future, trying to solve the problem before you’ve heard it or understood it all. You have forgotten to be present and to listen completely.

There's a significant cost to pay (personally and organizationally) for not finishing things:

Every unfinished project takes up mental space. It’s like having dozens of browser tabs open — a significant one uses a little bit of your mental RAM, leaving you with less capacity for new ideas and focused work. This mental clutter can be a significant drain on your creativity and productivity.

Perhaps most importantly, you deny yourself the incomparable feeling of satisfaction when you release a finished project into the world. There’s a joy in shipping that can’t be replicated by starting something new. Finished projects also invite feedback, and without shipping, you miss out on valuable insights from users or peers that could significantly improve your skills and future projects.

When he needed a dose of creativity, William Burroughs would take a color walk:

Another exercise that is very effective is walking on colors. Pick out all the reds on a street, focusing only on red objects—brick, lights, sweaters, signs. Shift to green, blue, orange, yellow. Notice how the colors begin to stand out more sharply of their own accord.”

Feeling a bit lost at work? These seven questions might give you some clarity:

• If I repeated this day for 100 days, would my life be better or worse?
• If someone observed my actions for a week, what would they say my priorities are?
• If I were the main character in a movie of my life, what would the audience be screaming at me to do right now?
• What lie have I repeated to myself so many times that it feels like the truth?
• If I knew I would die in 10 years, what would I do today?

Nvidia has a pretty flat hierarchy. One way CEO Jensen Huang manages it is to give his entire organization permission to share their top five things:

Jensen doesn't use status updates because he believes they are too refined when they get to him. Instead, anyone in the company can email him their "Top Five Things" regarding whatever is at the top of their mind, and he will read it. He reads 100s of these every morning.

It's better to be wrong than confused:

It’s OK to be wrong, but it’s not OK to be confused. If your team isn’t all pulling in the same direction, you’ll definitely fail. When everyone is pulling in the same direction, it doesn’t guarantee success, but it does give you a chance. Everyone needs to be aligned on where you’re going, how you’re getting there, and why.

Want to innovate? Hire happy people:

One way to spot people who are good at solving poorly defined problems is to look for people who feel good about their lives; ‘how do I live a life I like’ is a humdinger of a poorly defined problem.

Fun Finds

• Travel doc wisdom
• How to write a manifesto
• Meeting Openers for Busy Managers
• Is your blue my blue?
• The sustained two-shot
• The greatest actor in history (a statistical analysis)
• How military operations get their names

Words of Wisdom

"Are you learning as fast as your best clients' world is changing?" – Patrick Fuller

"Worry is a dividend paid to disaster before it is due." – Ian Flemming

"Ideas are the most vulnerable at the moment you have them; that’s also the time people are most inclined to run around seeking validation from everyone they know." – Sarah Blakely

"Wisdom is the reward you get for a lifetime of listening when you’d have preferred to talk." – Doug Larson

“Most geniuses prosper not by deconstructing intricate complexities but by exploiting unrecognized simplicities.” — Andy Benoit

"If you are allowed one wish for your child, seriously consider wishing him or her optimism." – Daniel Kahneman

"What did you do as a child that made the hours pass like minutes? Herein lies the key to your earthly pursuits." – Carl Jung

"That which seems like a false step is just the next step" – Agnes Martin

"The rarest thing you possess is your own potential.” – Shane Parrish