Author: JP

I’ve always accepted the received wisdom about men and women and multitasking. Mars and Venus. Men solve problems and work sequentially and logically, women are good at multitasking and some sort of ordered chaos. Or something like that.

Now, as I watch Generation M and the modern workforce, I’m not so sure.

Maybe housewives were the world’s first knowledge workers.

Maybe men did sequential and problem-solving and breadwinnining things because that was their ‘allotted’ place in society, not because their wiring was different.

Maybe women handled multitasking better because they ran the home and you couldn’t run a home with kids like an assembly line, you had to learn to multitask. Not because their wiring was different.

And as women “entered the workforce” some of these lines blurred, and we still tried to believe it was all wiring, but it really wasn’t.

Maybe it was always nurture and not nature, as far as multitasking abilities were concerned.

And now, as Generation M enters the workforce, they don’t care about perceived differences in wiring. In fact they don’t agree that there is a difference in this respect. They already know that it has nothing at all to do with sequential and parallel wiring, it has to do with what they have to do, and how they adapt to that task.

Maybe Generation M multitask because they can. Maybe we could have as well, but we were conditioned, “nurtured”, to believe men couldn’t and women could.

When I look at voluntary organisations and startups, they seem to have got this already. In both cases they did not have assembly line thinking to colour their perceptions, they did not have the luxury of assembly line behaviour, they had to multitask, no choice.

Yes, maybe housewives were the world’s first knowledge workers, working networked and in community, with collaborative filtering and ratings and reviews and recommendations. With constant interruptions and an innate sense of deciding what’s important, very quickly. An innate ability to make mistakes and learn and move on. They had all the practice. They just didn’t have the technology.

Now, with the altered workforce and the entry of Generation M and the availability of relevant technology, maybe we will see multitasking proven as a gender-neutral thing, as it probably was in the first place.

Just maybe.

In that serendipitous flow that blogs excel at, Chukti made contact with me after a quarter of a century. [Great connecting up, Chutki!) And as we conversed he brought up Attention Deficit Trait (as defined by Edward Hallowell) and wondered what I thought of it.

A few days later I was reading The Economist’s Intelligent Life Summer 2006 issue. And found this article by Tim Hindle referring to the same concern; unfortunately it’s hidden behind a premium wall.

I quote from the article. “Mr Hallowell says that people who work in physical isolation are more likely to suffer from ADT than those who share a lively office“.

When I see statements like that I start thinking about popes and catholicism and bears and woods and faeces.

But what do I know?

So I continue to do what I do, and learn from my wife and my children. It’s strange, my wife does not do e-mail. She wants to, and we keep putting off “the lesson”. It will happen. Soon.

But in the meantime.

Watching her deal with her daily routine, and (when and where possible) participating in it, teaches me more about multitasking and dealing with distractions than I could learn in an “office” environment. Let me draw out some themes, briefly.

1. Some of her tasks are regular and inflexible in terms of time. School runs and mealtimes are classic examples.

2. Some are regular but more flexible in the context of precisely when she does them. Shopping and laundry and meal preparation are examples of these. And keeping fit.
3. Some are regular and low-flexibility in terms of time, but she outsources them. Cleaning and ironing and dry-cleaning come to mind.

4. Most of this is done while I am at work and the children are at school, so she does them largely on her own. But she interacts a lot with people while she does them. And she has many interruptions, some welcome, some not. Phones and doorbells ringing. “Outsourced” task handlers needing answers to questions in order to continue. Things to follow up, things to organise.

5. And somewhere within all this, she finds time for herself, to rest, to relax, to read the Bible, to pray. And motivate and spur and cajole and support the rest of us. And stay contented and patient.

What I find particularly fascinating is a constant and dynamic prioritisation process. They say a woman’s work is never done. And sometimes it seems to me that as a result, their concept of what is important and what is not is very well defined.
Yes, I can learn a lot about multitasking from her. And I try to. Especially since she has all this without e-mail and IM and RSS, and has learnt how to deal with it all.

This mix of must-do and may-do, of time-inflexible and time-flexible, interspersed with personal and household recharging, this mix tells me a lot about how 21st century management could be. Not assembly line but networked household. With adults and children and friends and service providers. I learn a lot about prioritisation and pragmatism from my wife.

LifeKludger, if you read this, maybe you can give us your take on all this. You probably know more about working in isolation than I’ll ever learn.

Isn’t it ironic

That “the internet…a series of tubes”

is clogging up

The Internet [via] a series of YouTubes….

Speakers and headphones to be taxed as well….
You’re right, it’s not true. But it might as well be. Kevin Marks reminded me about this story, via Gordon Cook’s community. Thanks to Kevin and to Gordon et al; it has been a busy day, and I forgot to pick up on the story.

I’m not even going to bother debating it. Pfui.
Instead, I’m going to point you towards some more worthwhile developments, as reported by Malc. As the business model for digital music disaggregates and reaggregates, with some market participants leaving and others joining, some very interesting possibilities emerge.

An aside. The Tax-The-ISP plan had an unusual table on the sources of MP3 player content in the UK, apparently from ICM Research in December 2005:

• 65% ripped or copied from owned CDs
• 11% copied from friends
• 18% P2P downloads
• 6% paid-for downloads

I would be fascinated to see evidence of any relationship or linkage between the 18% downloaded and their related CD sales. I think the two are complementary and not substitutes, that P2P downloads spur the purchase of “legal” music, either in CD form or in digital download form.

The Friends bit is also interesting, given the way different cultures define Family.

I’m going to expose you to a few quotes first, with some artistic licence applied:

• Rather than subsidising the rewriting of existing [proprietary] code, [enterprise] resources and funding should be focused on areas where external investment is not being made, areas where [industry segment] requirements are not being addressed, and [radically differentiating] technologies. Within these areas smaller communities of interest should be encouraged to use the same tools and processes that have proven successful in external open source development. The [enterprise] has legal and valid [business] reasons to encourage or require [open source approaches] within those communities of interest, allowing specific systems and technologies to evolve more quickly in response to emerging [market threats and opportunities].
• [The enterprise] needs to evaluate the impact that locking into one set of proprietary standards or products may have to its ability to react and respond to [competitors] and more importantly, to technological change that is accelerating regardless of [market conditions]. In order to remain competitive in a rapidly shifting technological landscape (including the disruptive technologies leveraged by our [competitors] ) [the enterprise’s] software development and business processes must break out of the industrial-era acquisitions mold.
• Software code has become central  to the [executive’s] ability to conduct business. If this shift is to be an advantage, rather than an Achilles’ heel, [the enterprise] must pursue an active strategy to manage its software knowledge base and foster an internal culture of open interfaces, modularity and reuse. This entails a parallel shift in acquisitions methodologies and business process to facilitate discovery and reuse of software code across [the enterprise].
• To summarise:
• OSS and open source development methodologies are important to the [security] and [business interests] of the [enterprise] for the following reasons:
• Enhances agility of IT industries to more rapidly adapt and change to use needed capabilities
• Strengthens the industrial base by not protecting industry from competition. Makes industry more likely to compete on ideas and execution versus product lock-in
• Adoption recognises a change in our position with regard to balance of trade on IT
• Enables [the enterprise] to secure the infrasctructure and increase security by understanding what is actually in the source code of software installed in [enterprise] networks
• Rapidly responds to [competitive] actions as well as rapid changes in the technology industrial base

I particularly like the penultimate point, so much so I’ll quote it again: enables the enterprise to secure the infrastructure and increase security by understanding what is actually in the source code of software installed.

Now the kicker. These quotes are taken from the Open Technology Development Roadmap Plan, April 2006, Version 3.1 (Final), prepared for the Deputy Under Secretary of Defense, Advanced Systems and Concepts, Department of Defense.

When the DoD understands the value of open source in increasing security, and demonstrates that it really grasps Free as in Freedom not Free as in Gratis, how can it be that enterprises don’t? Now you know why I am Confused. Of Calcutta.