Archive for the ‘Interviews with Researchers’ Category
Control Makes Me Happy
My work has led me to believe that clutter, whether electronic or physical, but especially clutter of one’s work space, results in stress, because it sends messages to the owner of the clutter that they are not in control, that they are overwhelmed, that there may be things buried in the clutter that are important and need their attention. Clutter is an example of being out of control of the details that come in the form of paper and “stuff.”
Studies have shown that people who exert more control over their lives are more likely to describe themselves as happy. Personally I find that it not only makes me happy, but also productive, and my experience with my clients also confirms this.
I recently reached out to Dr. Craig Knight, of the University of Exeter, to ask him about a study on this topic that he conducted with Dr. S. Alexander Haslam that was published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology. The study measured the well-being and productivity of employees based on their control over their work environments.
Drs. Knight and Haslam explored the affects on productivity of three different approaches to office organization: lean, enriched, and empowered. The lean approach prescribes a work space free from everything except that which is required to get the job done – a rather austere environment devoid of decoration, ornamentation, or personal touches. The enriched approach suggests that plants, art, and other furnishings (i.e., an office “decorated” by corporate owners or managers ) create a superior environment in terms of worker well-being and productivity. The empowered office is one that puts workers in charge of the decor of the office, providing input into common spaces and having total control over their own work space.
Their experiments led them to draw the conclusion that the empowered workers report both greater well-being and productivity:
In both experiments, well-being and productivity were enhanced by enriching a space…and then further enhanced by empowering participants…within the same working environment. However, disempowering participants…had the effect of significantly compromising both well-being and productivity.
One of the greatest difficulties of the technological advancements of the 21st century is that it leads us to a life so full of opportunity, information, and communication, that we can be left feeling like we are at the mercy of all of the details necessary to run this life successfully: working hard to simply keep up with all of the commitments, communication and information that bombards us relentlessly. Through RegainYourTime.com, I teach a work-and-life-management process called the Empowered Productivity System, which is designed to put you back in the driver’s seat of your life and work. I take this approach based on the belief that the more control you feel you have over the details of your life, the happier and less stressed you will be. And that’s a much better way to go through life. =)
To learn more about how I can help you turn chaos into control, feel free to browse the site or call me at 424-226-2872.
Thanks for reading!
University Social Media Ban Pt. 5
This is Maura Thomas from RegainYourTime.com. This is part five of my interview with Charles Palmer, the Executive Director of the Center for Advanced Entertainment & Learning Technologies, of Harrisburg University of Science & Technology. Please click the link at the top of the page to read the earlier parts.
Please click below to hear the transcript, and come back tomorrow and in the coming days to read or listen to the rest of the interview.
MT: Well, I find the whole thing really interesting and you’re doing a great job of explaining how…all of the aspects of it. So, there was a study put out about a year ago by Nielsen Online, that…the exact statistics escape me right at this moment but there was probably somewhere around a 3% difference. They asked people who used the internet how….if they used email. And they also asked people who used the internet if they used social media. And the percentage was more people said yes I use the internet and yes I use social media, than it was to email, only by about 3%. But I still thought that was really surprising, thinking, “wow, there are really people who use, you know, FaceBook and Twitter, and who *don’t* use email?” And the only conclusion that I could come to was that it’s kids. You know, teenagers, or college students. Do you think that’s an accurate conclusion? And my conclusion from that is, you know, the workplace is changing and it’s nice to think that when these kids get into jobs they’ll adapt, and they’ll start using our communication tools. But what I think is more likely is that we’re going to have to adapt to them.
CP: Yeah, I think we’ll be adapting to them. I think last fall, our university…our admissions staff…you know the admissions staff uses FaceBook a lot for recruitment purposes. And they had to put in place a policy of um…I think our admissions staff, they now all have two FaceBook accounts. One that represents the university, and then one that they use for their friends and family and outside. And I think, as we move ahead, we will see more of that, we will see more of students…again I’m talking high-school students moving in to college and then moving into their professional life…of sort of separating their online lives, between friends and family, and then…co-workers and professional…or we may even see another tool. We may see FaceBook go solely friends and family, and find other tools start to rise above, like LinkedIn and Bebo, and some of those other things, pop up as just professional usage. I have a friend that’s a recruiter for…I probably shouldn’t say the name of the company, but…she’s a recruiter for a company that has a rodent as a mascot. And she had a very interesting thing that she would do during the interview process…is, students would…she was recruiting graduate students and they would come in to the interview…and they would sit down and they’d introduce themselves and she would hand them a printout of their MySpace page or their FaceBook page, and a couple of times she told me that she actually…she’d slide it across the table and say, “I’m sorry we will not hire you, and this is why. This image that you’re portraying of yourself goes beyond what you and your friends say, this is potentially…this individual would potentially be representing the company.” And she was…she was very adamant about that. And for us it became an eye-opener, as we went about educating our students that “you’re online persona…it follows you. You create these things online and just because you delete it, doesn’t mean they go away from someone’s server somewhere. But that’s one of the things that been great about inter….about teaching students that lesson.
MT: And it leads into what I was thinking when you were talking about two FaceBook accounts. Do you think it’s really possible to…to…you know, be two people online? Do you think it’s really possible to keep separate your personal account, and that maybe it…it creates almost a false sense of security. “Well, I posted this racy joke but it was on my personal page, not on my professional page, so I’m sure that it’s fine.”
CP: Yeah. (laughing).
MT: What do you think about those things?
CP: Yes, I think…Yes and yes. I think there…it is possible to do it. I don’t know if…I don’t think FaceBook has any way of tracking it, but it would be…I bet it’s a high percentage of people out there have multiple FaceBook accounts. Then, I think yes, they have a false sense of security that if they posted that thing here, that it won’t show up in this other place. Especially when you start talking about photographs and tagging images. I have a friend who’s in the film industry. And he’s never told the truth about his age.
MT: Uh huh.
CP: He’s…an actor director, and (laughs)…the people that know him in that circle know him as ten years younger than he actually is. The amount of time that he spends untagging himself from friends’ photos that might identify his real age is really funny. I just saw him this weekend and…he took it as great…pride to tell me that his newest girlfriend knows exactly how old he really is. And I just found that really funny. But yeah, I think that there are a lot of people out there that do it. And not just for the social aspect. I think there are people out there who also…are on FaceBook playing the games…where, you know like a Mafia War, right? Or some of the games where you need your friends to be…to be a friend of yours in order to be…higher status, or higher something in the game. And I know…I’ve seen some of the posts where people will create a new identity, and that identity is now a friend of their other identity, and…increase the number that way. And I guess FaceBook really could track that with IP’s, but it would be really interesting to see, you know, what percentage of FaceBook users have multiple accounts.
MT: And heartening to know that there might be one thing that FaceBook doesn’t track.
CP: (laughing) Yeah, right.
MT: Well this has been very enlightening, and I don’t want to keep you too long past our time but I really appreciate you taking the time.
Please come back tomorrow for part 6 of my interview with Charles Palmer of Harrisburg University. Thanks for reading!
University Social Media Ban, Pt 4
This is Maura Thomas from RegainYourTime.com. This is part four of my interview with Charles Palmer, the Executive Director of the Center for Advanced Entertainment & Learning Technologies, of Harrisburg University of Science & Technology. Please click the link at the top of the page to read the earlier parts.
Please click below to hear the transcript, and come back tomorrow and in the coming days to read or listen to the rest of the interview.
MT: Was it too short to…do you think, to really see any sort of academic results?
CP: Yeah, I think it’s too short to do something like that…it was just long enough for us to be able to say that…”there is an interesting study that could be done here.” I think, there are a couple of other universities that have done it for one day, and I think they came away with the same understanding of, “hey there’s something interesting here, we should think about this and see what we can do on a larger scale.”
MT: I am researching some…universities that are…that have implemented a…laptop ban, at least at the…not so many school-wide, but…or department wide, but at the discretion of the, of the professor. So the teacher says, “I’m going to ban laptops in my classroom,” they get the support of the administration for doing that, and I’m interested in your thoughts based on your experience.
CP: That’s great at that institution. That would never happen here. I mean we, we really embrace technology across the board. I think in a number of classes, why…why isolate the students in the classroom to this vast knowledge of information that’s out there? If you could share a URL that describes a process better than you’re drawing it on the board, why not do that? If there happens to be a YouTube video about, you know, a social uprising that really brings home part of your lecture, go ahead and let the students view that and make that part of the lesson plan.
MT: Well that’s assuming that they…that’s assuming that they, number one that they couldn’t, let’s say the professor couldn’t put it up on the screen from their own laptop, and that the students couldn’t have that as a homework assignment, but just, in the classroom…to…
CP: That’s true, we do…but then on the other side of it, we do a lot of collaborative work between students, um…in-class work sessions sort of thing, that I think that as an institution, technology…you know, we’re a science and technology university. I think the idea of banning any technology from our students would be detrimental to what it is we’re trying to do. We…we’re taking students that are normally under-represented…in, in higher-ed, and bringing them up to speed with some of their peers through technology. And, because of that, you know, we require all of our students to have a laptop when they come in to the university, and it’s just part of our environment.
MT: Right…
CP: It seems a little artificial, though, you know, to…to tell someone “no laptops.” It reminds me a lot of the ivory towers and…I would rather…I would rather come up with more social or community policies of, you know, “this is the proper way of using your laptop in the classroom.” You know, letting the students police themselves.
MT: Got’cha.
Please come back tomorrow for part 5 of my interview with Charles Palmer of Harrisburg University. Thanks for reading!
University Social Media Ban Pt. 3
This is Maura Thomas from RegainYourTime.com. This is part three of my interview with Charles Palmer, the Executive Director of the Center for Advanced Entertainment & Learning Technologies, of Harrisburg University of Science & Technology. Please click the link at the top of the page to read the earlier parts.
Please click below to hear the transcript, and come back tomorrow and in the coming days to read or listen to the rest of the interview.
MT: I interrupted you when you said that you, you were talking about the focus groups and what the result of the focus groups was.
CP: Yeah, we had a number of students that said, “yeah, it didn’t really impact my day-to-day life.” We had a few students who said, “wow, this was really hard.” One student in particular that I spoke with a couple of times said this experience had shown him that he really does check FaceBook about ten…every 10 minutes. Whether through his phone or through his laptop, and that was eye-opening for him to really put it in perspective and say why…our big question was if you did not refrain from it, what was it that you felt the need…why did you feel the need to be so engaged in what was out there and being online and being on FaceBook. Some students openly admitted, some of it was ego. It was being the first to find something and post it to all their friends. Being on top of all the information that was going on in their circle. Just staying connected, and a number of students also said when they weren’t doing it they felt like they were missing something, that something was going on that they were not going to be able to respond to in 30 seconds. So that was very interesting for them. Academically, they were able to get access to everything that they were using in class. We use a content management…um, a learning management system so that didn’t really prevent them from getting access there, but a number of students found that on the opposite side of FaceBook is…at least in my eyes, is LinkedIn, which is a professional network. We had a number of students who said, “hey, wow, I miss LinkedIn…I miss being able to pose questions to my own community of people to get professional-based responses back, or to get feedback on my resume…” or those sorts of things. So we got the spectrum. Myself, I actually, I took it a little further and I cut it out for the entire week. Home, work, smartphone, I did nothing. No social media. And it was very interesting. I definitely got the, “oh my gosh, what’s going on in the world, I have no idea.” I found myself watching local news more often. Just to…I think Twitter is my primary news outlet.
MT: Mine too.
CP: For finding out what’s going on out there. And that was one of the things that I missed considerably. And I realize that I’m not a FaceBook person. I really didn’t miss FaceBook that much and since being back, since the ban, I very rarely post things on FaceBook. But Twitter, Twitter is my tool of choice.
MT: So were there any surprises, or any unexpected results or consequences?
CP: You know, in all honesty, all of it was a surprise. Because we really didn’t know what we would get out of it. Like I said, the students who made a revelation that, “oh my gosh, I’m using FaceBook so much…” I think that was a surprise to us, that students would make that relationship, that connection, between how much they were using it in their life. And another thing was a number of students saying, “wow, I check FaceBook in class very frequently. That’s probably not a good thing.” Faculty as well, seeing that…you know, we’re a laptop campus and when we see a student’s laptop open, we assume that they are following along with the lecture, or looking up additional information related to the lecture and to hear them, you know, spout that that’s not what they’re doing is very eye-opening for us and something that we need to think about as an institution as we build our culture.
MT: Does the university plan anything further as a result of the experiment?
CP: Yeah, we did this and now have said, “ok, there is something there.” We’re trying to plan something nine or ten months out where we’ll take a…this is all…we’re not sure what format this is going take, but we’ll do something a little more rigid, a little more procedural, with a lot of facts in place, and, you know, a little more scientific I guess you could say, of removing people from it and having questionnaires, and doing a lot more in-depth study. Definitely not the entire student body, we’ll probably get volunteers to do it but we’ll probably do it for a much longer period of time. We know, just reading some of the other research, it takes most humans and animals 21 days or so to change a behavior. I was surprised that within a week, we did have some people that would…at least…focused on their habits and were thinking differently about them, but we think in a longer time period we probably could get people to change how they use things and….but I don’t want to push it too far because we’re not sure if we want to change. I think really what we want to do is we want exposure, people to understand what’s out there, what’s available and how it affects them.
MT: So this realization that some students have about how much they check FaceBook in class, do you think that that realization came with…sort of the self-policing to say, “wow, I didn’t realize how much I was doing it, I probably shouldn’t be doing it?” Or do you think there were some students saying, “yeah, I do it all the time because class is boring and I’m so mad that their not letting me do it.” Or, or because, you know, “I can listen and check FaceBook at the same time, I can handle this and I don’t know why they’re not letting me.”
CP: I think the majority of students say, “hey I can handle this.” Or were opened up to the idea of the experiment, but said, you know, “it’s not really a problem for me.” And then we did have a number of students, or a couple of students in the focus group that said, “wow, you know what, I was dividing my attention. Now that I’m not dividing my attention, it really does make a difference in class. You know, I do feel more engaged and I am retaining some of this knowledge better.” I was very happy to hear students vocalize that. And it was a small number of students, but… and sometimes you take it with a grain of salt. These were students…students talking in a forum with other students and sometimes faculty as well, so you can always…actually no, I’m sorry, those were all done just with students, and a facilitator. But I’m always cautious when a student tells you something that you want to hear.
MT: Right.
CP: So it was good to hear a couple students say that and walk away at the end of the week saying, “hey, I think I’ve done a little more focus on my studies this week. Maybe shying away from FaceBook so much during class is a good idea and maybe I’ll check it between classes or lunch or something.”
Please come back tomorrow for part 4 of my interview with Charles Palmer of Harrisburg University. Thanks for reading!
What Happens When a Tech School Bans Social Media?
That’s right, Harrisburg University of Science & Technology did an experiment in the fall semester, banning social media on campus for a week. The goal was to encourage the students to think about their reliance on these communication tools and their impact on relationships. You can read more about the ban here.
The experiment was the subject of hundreds of national media stories, and of course I was dying to hear how it went! I had the pleasure of interviewing Charles Palmer, the Executive Director of the Center for Advanced Entertainment & Learning Technologies. We discussed:
- how the idea came about
- whether or not the goal of challenging people to think about their reliance on social media was achieved
- reactions from students and faculty
- if the experiment facilitated any unexpected results or consequences
- and if the University plans to take any further action based on the results of this experiment.
I’ve got both the audio and the text (similar to my interview with Yale Psychology Professor Dr. John Dovidio) and will post them in bite-sized articles, but I’ll put them all up at the same time next week. You are welcome to subscribe to this blog via email so you don’t have to remember to visit. Just enter your email address in the box in the top right corner of this page.
Thanks for reading and I hope you’ll come back to hear about the social-media-ban-experiment at Harrisburg University! In the meantime, I wish you a joyous holiday season, and a healthy and abundant 2011!
Researcher Interview #1 Part 5 (Conclusion)
Click to Listen (6 1/2 minutes)
MT: This is Maura Thomas from RegainYourTime.com. Thanks for listening to the fifth and final part of my interview with Dr. John Dovidio, psychology professor at Yale University. You can see the previous posts by clicking the link at the top of this page and prior pages. And if you’re interested in reading up on the current research, please visit the “Research and Resources” page of this website.
What do you think about the danger that ah…I’ve read some…some research is suggesting that there is a real benefit in the…the quiet moments that we used to have, the time in between things…waiting in line, or even sitting at a red light, or…you know, just the moments in between other things that we…we used to have an opportunity for our mind to just wander and that time was…our brains sometimes used to process what we had heard, and to create connections among things and really where the learning happens. And now there is some fear that we don’t have those moments of quiet anymore because in every moment of stillness, we whip out our iPhone and check our email, or check our Facebook status, or jump on the internet, or play a game on our phone. And now that we have all this…this stimulation in our pocket, do you think that there’s a danger to losing those moments of..of “mind wandering” that we used to have?
JD: There is a lot of evidence that suggests that ah…part of learning is taking the time to consolidate, to reflect upon things, to make sure that what we know just has to reverberate enough in our head for it to stay there. That’s a simple way of saying it. There’s a lot of work that also shows that there are these times that we develop insights by ah…this kind of…not actively thinking about something, but different pieces, or different elements to the solution of a problem just appear to us through insight, and not in a logical fashion. And this insight comes usually during those periods following a period of consolidation and reflection, where you basically have to see, you have to sort of become inwardly focused to start thinking about the thoughts, and then those thoughts can become, can come to coalesce in some unique, synthetic way that becomes a creative insight. And if we’re always focused outward, we’re not going to do as much of that…we’re going to rely on creativity coming from the outside rather than from the inside. On the other hand, to give you the balance of it, is that the other thing about humans is that when we begin to feel we’ve reached a limit, we almost reflexively back off to gain at least enough solitude to be able to regroup, consolidate, and move forward. So the question becomes, not that we’re not going to have those moments of solitude, we just may have fewer and fewer of them as we go on. But if people need time to think, it’s not like we can’t turn off the machines. It’s not that we don’t go into a shower, where we don’t have our, our cell phone on and our computer on. Maybe when we start losing those private moments we’re in more trouble (laughing). But people will probably structure their day so that they’ll have those private moments at different times.
MT: Do you think that we’ll continue to recognize that we need those moments, and take them? I have people tell me all the time that their best ideas come to them in the shower, just for the exact reason that you just said. And one client even told me that he…he got some crayons…water soluble crayons, so he could write on the shower tiles because that’s when he has his best ideas and that’s what I told him, it’s because it’s the only time that you’re not interrupted. So..but…but that was a surprise to him. You know when I said that, he hadn’t thought about it. “Wow, you’re right,” he said. “Those are the only moments of quiet that I ever get.” So to me that..that raises a concern that…especially children who are constantly exposed to all the stimulation…while they may be capable of…of stepping back and taking those moments, they might not recognize that they need them.
JD: Yeah, I mean that’s…the biggest problem is with kids. I mean part of…of growing up has to do with seeking new stimulations and new information. And so kids tend not to be as reflective anyway. They…they tend not to…even if you give them that free time, doesn’t mean that they’re doing it…using the same kind of consolidation that an adult would…the way an adult would handle that. If in fact you…you don’t even allow them that time, then they’re going to be less likely to be able to do that when they become adults because they won’t know what to do with it. And so I think…again, the issue is probably…it’s not having all the media available. It has to do with things like, training people when to use it, when not to use it, having, you know…I think as adults enforcing a quiet time, a non-electronic time, is not a bad thing. Kids will resent it. Part of what we need to teach kids anyway is a little bit of self-control. “You can’t do what you want, when you want, all the time.” But part of being a kid is wanting to do what you want, whenever you want, as soon as you want.
MT: Right.
JD: So, I mean that’s the age-old challenge we have and now it’s just, the electronic media, which is more seductive, just makes it a little bit more complicated and much more difficult to do.
MT: Hmmm, great point. Well I want to be respectful of your time so while I feel like I could discuss this with you forever I will…I will call it here and say thank you very much for taking the time to speak with me. Dr. John Dovidio from Yale University, thank you very much.
JD: Well thank you!
MT: And thank you, for visiting, and be sure to check this space again for future interviews with researchers in the fields of attention, multitasking, productivity, and technology. This is Maura Thomas with RegainYourTime.com.
Researcher Interview #1 Part 4
Click to Listen (4 1/2 minutes)
MT: This is Maura Thomas from RegainYourTime.com. Thanks for coming back to hear part four of my interview with Dr. John Dovidio, psychology professor at Yale University. You can see the previous posts by clicking the link at the top of this page and prior pages.
…That’s actually a really great perspective. I talk to a lot of people often who are becoming a little bit overwhelmed with the idea that, you know, “there is just too much and I can’t catch up.” And I…I run into people every day who are deciding, in fact they even put it in these terms, “I’m trying to decide what my limit is. And…you know, ok I did email, and now I’ve done Facebook, but I’m not going to do Twitter! That’s just where I’m drawing the line, and anything else that comes out, I’m just all done.” (laughing)
JD: (laughing) Mmm hmmm.
MT: So…and there certainly is an age component to this. But it’s…it’s really interesting to hear you say…talk about how humans have overcome this throughout history and…and…how we’re actually really good at it, and perhaps people should…take heart in that…in that idea.
JD: Oh yeah, I’m mean, we’ve…we’ve overcome worse!
MT: Sure. Sure.
JD: (laughing) We could overcome quite a bit!
MT: (laughing) Right.
JD: But I do…you know, at the same time, I think you’re also right by saying…and the people you quoted are right by saying, you’ve got to be cautious, realizing that whatever benefits might…benefits might be coming with the software and hardware development that we see in communication, we have to always understand that there is probably something that’s going to be lost because we just have a limited amount of time, we have a limited capacity for attention, …we have a limited capacity for being able to think and make decisions. Those are the bounds of being human, just like any other animal. And so how do we actually teach people to use a lot of these media in a way that works to their benefit so that they don’t become overwhelmed or develop those habits so strongly that they’re hard to reverse.
You won’t remember this, and I really don’t remember it personally, but when television came in, you know, that changed everything, right? People said, “well television is taking away from human relations. People are no longer talking to one another, they are no longer looking face-to-face, what they’re doing is they’re sitting side-by-side, and the quality of their relationships is going to go down, and tv is going to be the end of everything because people are going to become sedentary, they’re going to become passive, they’re going to need more stimulation. And they’re going to lose sight between what’s real and what’s everyday life.” And to some extent that was true, but then people adjust to it and now we look at tv and we see that as “how…how benign and passive.”
MT: That was part four of my interview with Dr. John Dovidio, psychology professor at Yale University. I hope you’ll come back tomorrow for the fifth and final portion of the interview where I’ll ask Dr. Dovidio about the value of reflection and quiet moments. Also, if you’re interested in reading up on the current research, please visit the Research and Resources page of this website. This is Maura Thomas from RegainYourTime.com. Thanks for visiting!
(Click here for the conclusion of the interview.)