Category: 42 CR – The way we work today

Quote of the week

It used to be that work was based on a legacy of the reforming of the industrial revolution, 9-5 work with overtime etc. In the last 10 years many of us have taken the leap into a digital working future, which instead of freeing us from this rigid work structure has in fact made working into a 24 / 7 working week and has allowed it to invade every part of our lives. How can we take a step back and regain some balance? The articles in this week’s collection all look at that problem and deal with in very different ways.

– KP

To describe a problem is part of the solution. This implies: not to make creative decisions as promoted by feeling but by intellectual criteria. The more exact and complete these criteria are, the more creative the work becomes. The creative process is to be reduced to an act of selection. Designing means : to pick out determining elements and combining them.

– Karl Gerstner

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VW turns off out-of-hours email

“It’s bad for the individual worker’s performance being online and available 24-7. You do need downtime, you do need periods in which you can actually reflect on something without needing instantaneously to give a reaction,” said Will Hutton, chair of the Big Innovation Centre at The Work Foundation.

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Source : BBC

Multitasking: Switching costs

In experiments published in 2001, Joshua Rubinstein, PhD, Jeffrey Evans, PhD, and David Meyer, PhD, conducted four experiments in which young adults switched between different tasks, such as solving math problems or classifying geometric objects. For all tasks, the participants lost time when they had to switch from one task to another. As tasks got more complex, participants lost more time.

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Source : APA

Top artists reveal how to find creative inspiration

Routine is really important. However late you went to bed the night before, or however much you had to drink, get up at the same time each day and get on with it. When I was composing [the opera] Anna Nicole, I was up at 5 or 6am, and worked through until lunch. The afternoon is the worst time for creativity.

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Source : The Guardian

Untangling the web: attention

Our consciousness is so subjective that our own experience of sentience is all we have to rely on to tell us that we exist. Any apparent modification of this – or even the possibility of something that might affect it negatively – challenges us to face who and what we are. And so, as Bell pointed out in parliament, new technologies get to the very heart of us. How we adapt to the new thing reminds us of our limitations as human beings.

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It’s important to separate the web and technology from the way that we use it. Our literacy around technology is very limited so we use it like a hammer instead of a chisel. The web has only been main stream for the last 10 years. Such a short period of time to judge the effects and the value of something. Humans are addictive, just look at alcohol, drugs, smoking all bad for us and yet it as taken hundreds of years for us to adapt to a somewhat more moderate use of all of them. In small dosses that can all be great for us, just like the web.

KP

Source : The guardian