Infograpic Turned Lectographic by Giulia Forsythe

The Artificial Boundary Between Work and Play

At age 5, work for me meant also looking the part. After helping my grandfather dig postholes and repair fence line on the now-100-year-old Idaho ranch he had homesteaded but back then had turned over to my parents, my face didn’t show how hard I had been working.

So while my grandfather was reloading tools, I flipped the windshield visor down in the Jeep I was to inherit as my first car a decade later and, using both hands, transferred the dust I found there to my forehead and cheeks.

Even though my Dad would come in from working the ranch each night “feelin’ about half past dead” to borrow the great line penned by country-rocker Robbie Robertson, it was never lost on me, as we all gathered around to watch him eat “bread and milk” from a glass, that as we did we could see in his face how much he thoroughly loved working livestock along the Henry’s Fork in that Yellowstone-Teton nook of Eastern Idaho.

I was surrounded by adults for whom the boundaries between work and play were clearly artificial, something researchers later documented just after I came of age, yet it remains an area where business still lags behind science today. It is part of the fascinating story about motivation in Daniel Pink’s 2009 book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us.

Back while I was working at “looking the part,” I was also working up to getting to ride in my first cattle round-up at age 6 while also learning the lesson that researchers have since documented: For people who find passion and engagement, work can be even more fun than play.

I was also a little puzzled as an adult by people who only worked as a means to go play when I was having as much or more enjoyment in my work.

At an early age, I experienced what Pink adapts from the groundbreaking work of Dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (mee-hy cheek-sent-mə-hy-ee) about the three pillars of passionate and engaged work:

• “autonomy - the desire to direct our own lives,”
• “mastery - the urge to get better and better at something that matters” and,
• “purpose - the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves.”

Most were seasonal, some for only a few weeks or months but these pillars were reinforced during nearly every one of the 31 jobs I held in the years before starting my now-concluded four-decade career in community/destination marketing.

Ironically, two hundred years ago early pioneers in tourism may have contributed to the notion that is still so deeply embedded in today’s workforce that work and play are polar opposites. These people are easy to spot because they see work only as something you have to do and play as something you want to do.

Today there are many, even members of younger generations, who seem to work so incredibly hard at taking vacations, often requiring a “sick day” to recuperate before they return and then complaining mightily that they have fallen so far behind. They can’t fathom how people like me get as much or more pleasure from our work as we do from leisure or how 46% of us now can find peace of mind by occasionally checking in via email while we’re on vacation.

In her 1999 book Working At Play, Dr. Cindy Aron, a professor at the University of Virginia which is a three-hour drive north of where I live, chronicles the history of vacations in America.

Over the initial objections of religious leaders, early marketers first promoted vacations “from” work for health reasons beginning in the late 1700s to mid-1800s. When vacations accelerated after the Civil War, especially between 1870 and 1900 with the emergence of the middle class, they expanded to include recreation (amusements were still considered wicked) and then for self-improvement and education and then sightseeing for scenery, history and culture or to rusticate.

Even the dawning of large meetings, conventions, congresses and assemblies were rationalized as “working” family vacations and spurred the formation of the first community/destination marketing organization (DMOs) in 1896 to draw visitors to Detroit.

By 1914, the idea of community/destination marketing had caught on the what is now Destination Marketing Association International was formed. Now evolved to pursue every type of visitor-centric economic and cultural development DMOs exist in more than a thousand communities in North American and several thousand more worldwide.

Today, within the United States alone, each year Americans log 1.5 billion leisure person-trips over and above the 448 million person-trips taken for business purposes each year (including conventions and meetings,) and 62% try to also tie leisure into at least one trip a year with two-thirds bringing family or friends.

Increasingly though, an economy driven by the Creative Class is beginning the long-overdue upgrade of what Pink terms the “operating system” for work and leisure to “motivation 3.0.”

In her new book Now You See It: How The Brain Science of Attention Will Transform The Way We Live, Work, and Learn, Cathy N. Davidson traces the origins of the now-dated “operating system” that still artificially segregates work and play.

She also makes a compelling argument that, in order to be relevant and effective both public education and the workplace must transform by rapidly adapting to the Internet.

The Infrastructure of Poverty

While poverty is a deep concern to me, I may often fit Joe Queenan’s description below whenever I try to blog about it:

“This is compassion by anecdote, as if warm feelings or righteous indignation ever helped anybody. The professionally compassionate, the industriously empathetic, never, ever get things right; the textures of poverty forever elude them.”

But Queenan, a humorist and critic, actually did grow up in poverty.  It is part of the most recent book of his that I’ve read entitled Closing Time, a memoir published last year.

The article he published this month in The Rotarian magazine, entitled The Inconvenient Truths About Poverty, is truly a must-read for everyone along the entire ideological spectrum.

Queenan is an equal opportunity critic and his brief article isn’t really just about the “industriously empathetic” such as myself.  His article is also about those who have hardened their hearts, to use a religious reference,” to those in poverty.

I haven’t been able to get the following description of poverty out of my head (don’t be tempted to skim it, please read the entire quote, then go back up, open the link and read his entire article):

“The philosophical infrastructure of poverty is rooted in an interlocking series of self-fulfilling prophecies. Poor people eat bad food, drink bad beverages, and ceaselessly make bad decisions, and these counterproductive activities are then used as an indictment of their moral character. Thus, the poor become the architects of their own destruction. Poverty is a dunce school where the old teach the young how to make bad decisions. Adults who have bad eating habits, adults who smoke, adults who have substance abuse problems teach young people how to acquire these bad habits. They lead by example. The acquired bad habits are then used as an indictment of the poor children when they themselves come of age.”

It’s primary campaign season and we can all identify with Queenan’s comment that “every time you think you have heard the dumbest thing you are ever going to hear in your lifetime, somebody steps right up to the plate and hits the next pitch 400 feet farther than you’ve ever seen anyone hit it before. A lot of these people work in television.”

Conservative, moderate or liberal, you’ll be well-served to open the link to this article and read it.  For the most part, it seems that the vast majority of elected decision-makers and policy-makers have little or no first-hand experience with poverty.

Many on the right seem blind and insensitive and even idiotic when it comes to solutions to poverty.  Many on the left, ironically, seem much too conservative and wedded to solutions that no longer seem to be working.

As an Independent, I listen carefully to thoughtful voices on the left and many on the right such as David Brooks who wrote last week that solutions “cannot be done by government alone, but they can’t be done without leadership from government.”  He further noted that the “current Republican policy of negativism, cut, cut, cut is not enough.”

To me, the American way is to once again embrace, with vigor, F.D.R.’s vow of “bold, persistent experimentation…to take a method and try it: If it fails, admit it frankly and try another but above all, try something.”

Everyone concerned about poverty would be well served to seek out the perspective of people such as Joe Queenan who have actually been poor even if the truths are inconvenient and run counter to many commonly-held beliefs.

You Only Have 6.5 Seconds

The typical viewer really only pays attention to 6.5 seconds of any television advertisement.  That’s how long advertisers have to “capture attention and motivate action.”

In her new book released last week, Cathy Davidson breaks down one of the most successful television spots and explains why creators spent millions to apply the science of attention to make sure viewers give attention to just the right 6.5 seconds and disregard stipulations such as product side-effects or the sponsors behind political attack ads.

This is why the cost of placing an ad is only the tip of the iceberg.  Perceptual eye tracking analysis has revealed the same thing about print and other forms of advertising.  It is also explains why headlines and photos are much more powerful than newspaper text.

It is also one of the reasons that marketing expert Laura Ries wrote this week that:

“Unless you spend enough to get above the noise level, money spent on advertising can be extremely wasteful. That's why mass-media advertising for a brand that isn't well known or doesn't have enough money to spend is ill advised. A brand like this is better off doing PR, social media and anything else it can think of.”

If a small business or organization elects to use advertising at all, here are six suggestions from a marketer:

• Make sure the medium doesn’t turn off more consumers than it serves.  For instance, outdoor billboards are seen as a desecration by nearly 7 out of 10 North Carolinians compared to the 1 in 10 who make use of them weekly.  There are plenty of other “out-of-home” alternatives that are less expensive and don’t foster scenic and economic blight.

 

• Insist on seeing the details of the cost per impression.  An ad may seem incredibly cheap but that is because it reaches very few people. Know your target audience and match it against the distribution and demographics of the outlet before you advertise.  Show it to a competitor or vet it with your community’s destination marketing organization (DMO.)

 

• Leverage your ad by placing it in a publication that is official (in the legal sense) such a the Official Durham Visitor & Relocation Guide and don’t be fooled by perversions of that term “official” often used to hood-wink unsuspecting small businesses such as the low-circulation knock-off produced by the Chapel Hill-based Durham Magazine which uses the term “official” but only means that it is the magazine’s official guide, not Durham’s.

 

• Understand who your customers are in order to know how to reach them.  Before advertising, spend resources on research to identify exactly who your customers are.  Advertising in today’s over-communicated world is wasteful and ineffective as an expert blogged this summer in Advertising Age.

 

• Measure the results so you know how the advertisement performed.  Don’t rely on customers telling you they found your ad (they won’t remember.)  Use a unique URL or phone number in the ad that can be inexpensively tracked to determine the cost per inquiry.

 

• The scientific measurement of advertising shows that the effectiveness of this particular marketing tactic is in serious decline and in danger of slipping into the negative.  It is most effective for durable goods like automobiles and much less for perishable products and services.

Music Engages More Regions Of The Brain Than Anything

Many people who have been come to know her over her more than twenty-year career in community/destination marketing (DMO) have been surprised to learn that my successor in Durham has undergraduate and graduate degrees in music, degrees often cited as excellent preparation for admission to professional schools.

Music is obviously also a perfect preparation for running a DMO!

In her new book Now You See It, Cathy N. Davidson, notes that neuroscientist Dr. Daniel Levitin has discovered that “music makes complex circuits throughout the brain, requires all the different kinds of brain function for listening, processing, and producing in various forms and makes us think differently.”

Levitin, who wrote the book This Is Your Brain On Music,directs the McGill University Laboratory for Music Perception, Cognition, and Expertise in Montreal. He has noted that “music engages more regions of the brain than anything else.”

Additionally, in remarks at the University of Miami, he noted that “brain studies also indicate that components of expertise that contribute to superior performance include memory, attention, will power, belief in self, physical configuration and an ability to view multiple failures as necessary steps to succeed…”

One of Professor Davidson’s popular classes at Duke University substitutes the word “Internet” for the word “music.” The preparation materials for This Is Your Brain On The Internet, note that “the kind of research one does every day on the Internet helps one to think in a creative, collaborative, nonlinear fashion.”

Her new book makes the case that along with gaming, the Internet is giving us a model for how to reform public education. This month, we’re seeing the eighth class of first year students entering college who have grown up with the Internet as a given, a central part of the household, play and work.

Davidson’s new book makes a compelling case for a fresh look at the core benefits that subjects such as art and music bring to a holistic education. In the book, she also notes that the people who originated both the IQ test and the objective, multiple-choice exam, both warned against their use during their lifetimes and why.

Yet today, we find a major part of every class year devoted to taking standardized tests that measure only memorization and are largely irrelevant to the workplace. Davidson argues that the literacy skill to learn, unlearn and relearn must be added to the old three Rs of reading, writing and arithmetic.

Education according to Davidson must now include “three new Rs “rigor, relevance, and relationships.” Maybe innovation is right under our nose.

44% of Workplace Interruptions Are Self-Induced

I’ve spent all weekend reading and rereading an incredible new book, released just last Thursday.  It is entitled Now You See It – How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn.

This book is a must-read for anyone concerned with transforming both the workplace and public education to better suit the world that has evolved so dramatically “since that fateful day in April 1993 when Mosaic 1.0, the first popular Web browser” unleashed the Internet for widespread use as the author notes.

In full disclosure it is written by Cathy N. Davidson with whom I share a passion for Durham, our adopted hometown and whose work at Duke University, as co-founder of HASTAC and as an author are more reasons to believe Durham is indeed where great things happen.

This is one of those books where nearly every sentence reveals new research, information, insights and examples of why we urgently need to update both our workplaces and educational system.

Our current workplaces and the educational system meant to prepare us are both creatures of 19th century thinking.  The Internet has revolutionized the way we work and collaborate but the layout and rules of the workplace and the educational system largely remain stuck in the century before last.

Davidson humorously notes that Ichabod Crane, the schoolmaster in the classic 1820 book entitled The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, would be baffled today by electricity, moving images, computers and cell phones but he’d be right at home and find little had changed in today’s classroom since the horse and buggy days of Sleepy Hollow.

If you’re like me, you’re guaranteed to finish this book enthusiastic and optimistic about the changes we need to make.  You’ll also come away with a fuller understanding of how our brain works including the fact that it is always “on” and that 44% of workplace interruptions originate and 80% of our neural energy is consumed not from external sources but from the distractions in our own minds.

The question isn’t whether we can and must multi-task but when have we ever mono-tasked?  Researchers noted in the book have confirmed that switching from one specific task to another uses less than 5% of the brain’s normal “at rest” energy.

I really can’t do the book justice in the framework of one post but there is no one book I’d recommend more to anyone wanting to see into the near and long-term future of how we’ll live and work and learn and unlearn and relearn in this century.

Putting Multitasking In Perspective

(Reblogged from Inside Higher Ed and Now You See It)

One of the things I enjoy so much about retirement is more freedom and opportunity than ever to come across people who make Durham such an intriguing place to live.

Below is a very interesting out-take about "multitasking” from a June 24th interview by Serena Golden, an editor at Inside Higher Ed with Duke professor Cathy N. Davidson, author of a soon-to-be released new book, Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn.

For skimmers, I’ve italicized some comments that were particularly interesting or enlightening to me. 

Q – Serena Golden: You’re critical of recent studies on the impact of multitasking. Why is that, and how do you think the topic could more fruitfully be studied?

A – Cathy Davidson: In many of the hand-wringing and fear-mongering studies reported in the popular press, “multitasking” as a category can be ill-defined, vague, imprecise and subjective. I find it exasperating and belated. We now know there is no such thing as monotasking on a neurological level. Neurons are always firing and the brain is constantly chattering to itself, calling upon different areas at once to respond in ways we are only now beginning to understand. Lately, neuroscientists have begun to take ancient Eastern practices of meditation seriously, since those are founded in the principle that a quiet, resting, contemplating mind is ever-susceptible to distraction: that’s why meditation is a lifelong pursuit, not something you can do just by closing your eyes. The studies that try to make it seem as if multiple external distractions (new e-mail or digital environments) are somehow, in themselves, harming our very brains or shrinking our capacity to pay attention miss the point.

Of course these new practices change our brains in some ways — that’s what learning is. And of course cultural tastes and habits (novels, movies, T.V., video games, etc.) happen all the time. Yet the gloom-and-doom studies make it seem as if we’ve never experienced multiple tasks at once before. They often measure the dire results either through self-reporting (which the gorilla experiment shows us is notoriously inaccurate) or controlled laboratory experiments that have little to do with how we live our lives. Ask an insurance adjuster and you’ll hear that, of course teens texting while driving can have accidents, but if you really want to protect your kid, don’t let him drive with friends in the car. Similarly, the distractions that most often lead to accidents are the fight with your lover, a tenure meeting, hearing a frightening medical diagnosis, or anticipating a job interview. We tend not to think of those things as “multitasking.” Yet physical and emotional distractions — heartburn or heartache — are far more distracting than anything the modern office can throw at us.

History is also useful here. Legislators wanted to prevent Motorola from putting radios in dashboards in 1930 because they thought they would lead to highway catastrophe. Now we know the distraction of the radio helps truckers counteract the monotony of long-distance driving.

When we say “multitasking is bad,” what we are really saying is that certain things are stressing us out and they are making us suddenly aware of behaviors that used to be so reflexive we didn’t even pay attention to them. We see the gorilla, as it were. That’s not always a bad thing. On the other hand, if the issue is that Americans are working too hard at our jobs — and we’re now working more hours per year than our parents did or than their parents did (and more than anyone in the world except South Koreans), then we should be addressing that real problem. Work speed-up and overload has social, economic, political and indeed cognitive consequences. In this situation, multitasking is the smokescreen for a much larger societal problem.

Better to Transform Than Whine

I’m sorry but with 14 million Americans out of work, I found it hard to listen to people whining on the news yesterday about the unbearable burden they shoulder by being granted technological access to the office any time they need it or at their convenience – especially while on vacation.

It seems perfunctory now to do such an article one or more times a year near a long holiday weekend. This one was entitled Smartphones Making It Harder To Call It Quits. I’ve heard similar stories for years and now that I’m retired I have even less patience with them.

Having essential tremor in my hands from the time I was very young, technology has always been a solution to anxiety for me. I was so relieved when they let us begin taking tests in law school on typewriter.

I wonder how much better I would do today in taking the SAT, ACT and LSAT now that they let you schedule them in small groups, at convenient times and take them on desktop computers.

If it is as good as touted, Duke professor Cathy Davidson’s new book which will be released August 18th would be a better story. It is entitled Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn.

Here is a link to a write-up about the book in the July/August issue of Fast Company Magazine in a column by Anya Kamenetz. Davidson is also co-founder of HASTAC (Haystack) – A Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Collaboratory. Click here to follow her blog on HASTAC and click here for her blog about her new book.

A friend mentioned something interesting over coffee last week. She wondered if we’re being sure to re-evaluate ideas for new transportation infrastructure in light of the dramatic technological shifts to things like telecommuting.

Most of our transportation infrastructure is centered around getting people to and from work and transport of goods. We may be working on solutions to yesterday’s problems or tomorrow’s? Just think about all of those vacant bank branch buildings or for that matter Blackberries.

I’m eager to see what Professor Davidson thinks.