133: Staffan Nöteberg

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Joe Krebs speaks with Staffan Nöteberg about Monotasking, personal and team productivity, and the psychological research that led to the monotasking method and his book.

Transcript:

Joe Krebs 0:20

Today I'm here with Staffan Noeteberg, who is the author of two books that is mono tasking that was released in 2020. And a little bit earlier, Pomodoro technique illustrated, I believe it was in 2011 that was forwarded by the one of the creators of the Pomodoro Technique, Francesco Cirillo and Henrik Kniberg. So what we have here with Staffan is a person that is very well connected with the Agile community as well as it is super interesting topic of mono tasking, what we want to talk about today, he's an Agile coach. He lives in Stockholm, Sweden, as well as in Istanbul, Turkey. If I'm informed here correctly, he has trained 1000s of people on improving their personal productivity. He has sold over 700,000 copies of his book. I'm super thrilled to have you on the podcast. Thank you for being here.

Staffan Nöteberg 1:22

Thank you for having me.

Joe Krebs 1:23

Yeah, this is this is awesome. We want to talk today really about mono tasking, that is that is obviously your latest book. And we want to connect a few dots because this could be super interesting for everybody listening to this podcast today from two angles. One of them is individually improving productivity as a as a person you know, in everyday life situations as well as professionally at work. But also how we can connect mono tasking maybe to agile teams and agile roles, maybe we can touch on that as well. So I think these are the two angles we want to explore here a little bit today. Mono as part of that title, if I go back in times and I'm like just thinking about audio mono was something that I would now relate with something negative right mono is like it's simple and and everything we're like all thinking about stereo at this point Dolby Stereo. Using mono in terms of tasking is something for the future. What is mono tasking, Staffan?

Joe Krebs 2:30

It is interested that you mentioned that mono mono is something negative, because I think that the in job ads maybe 10 years ago, 20 years ago, there were often the demand for people that were they were looking for property property that said you you can juggle many balls at the same time, that's where our, that's what we're looking for. And nowadays, maybe they say you should be able to finish something to complete something. And that's and in order to do that maybe you shouldn't stop so many things and all these Kanban things that has been popular now for 20 years in software industry is very much about this stop starting and start finishing. So weekly meats and things like that, but I mean the mono tasking method then came out I wrote this Pomodoro technique book which is a personal productivity method. It's a particular concern about focusing on focusing. So, how do you really focus but I wanted to see this broader and I read many many personal productivity books and I think most of them almost everyone or almost none of them consider complexity and cohesion. I will explain what I mean by cohesion they like these books are often create order these books this these methods these processes are often made by engineers people like like you and me programmers or software engineers and the idea in them is often to like keep a list or multiple lists of in like in shipshape and Bristol fashion, you say ship ship in Bristol fashion in the US, or is that a British idiom?

Joe Krebs 3:36

Which one is that?

Staffan Nöteberg 4:28

Ship shape and Bristol fashion is one of my favorite idioms. We are doing everything under control and everything. We need to add the unit at the link in the show notes.

Joe Krebs 4:51

We will definitely be in the data link for that. Yes.

Staffan Nöteberg 4:53

Yeah. So so the idea of most personal productivity method is to have a lot of lists and they should be be perfect all the time. And they should contain a lot of ideas, everything that you you plan to do and why you're doing it. And so, and then there's the processes are often kind of, if else logic. So, if this happened to that, if that happened if this, but they are, I mean, that may work for you and me and other engineers, but for most people, it demands too much discipline. And it doesn't really accept that there are humans that are willing to use these methods, I wanted to create something that is more creative and more suitable for humans. So it's not like you're a silo, and you are fed from the top with the new tasks, and you work on them, and you complete them and just throw them out. Because there is some cohesion, you have your co-workers and, your teammates, and you have your stakeholders, your your product managers, you have your customers, and all these people, they change the mind, sometimes sometimes they say they want something. But they changed, they changed the mind, or they didn't explain it in a way that you understood, really started to do something else. So it's not really only about taking it as completing it. And doing that as fast as possible. And with the highest quality. It's more like you're putting in a big ecosystem. And you need to manage within that ecosystem. And I think that in that way, if you think of personal productivity in that way, it can be hard to have, like saying that you should do exactly like this, and exact like that maybe we should think more in arranging your environment and your circumstances, to have the best the best possibilities to succeed. So I started to read a lot of books and papers about what science says about human cognition, and evolutionary psychology and so on, I tried to create a method, which is little bit different from other methods that like embraces the human intuition and the human cognition and human heuristics, so that you don't have to maintain your there, you don't have to maintain all this list and doing all this documentation, and instead can use your intuition and in most cases, do the correct choices anyway, because we as humans are very good in this complexity, if we use our intuition to see what is most important than what what is not most important.

Joe Krebs 7:52

Right? So it's interesting, right? So first and foremost, I'm thrilled to hear that I'm not the only one who experiences stakeholders changing their minds on things. So I'm kidding. Obviously, I think this is a, this is a huge problem in our, in our, you know, work in general, I think that's typical. But it's also fascinating what I've heard, I don't know if you would second that is that humans are pretty much incapable of multitasking. Right? So it's some basic things we can do. We can walk and talk at the same time, or I don't think that's going to cause a conflict. But we cannot work on two different kinds of systems at the same time, that causes a conflict, obviously. And that's where we're transitioning. So you're saying already with mono tasking, you're saying like, work with a reduced list of task, right? I believe you were mentioning something about like five shortlist or something like that, or like five items, or five tasks or something. And why is that? Why is why is the list? Short? We're not saying we're working on five items at the same time, right? We're just saying there's a list of five items. Where, Why? Why the number five? And why is it so short? Or why does the list exists? What What's your reasoning behind it? I'm just curious.

Staffan Nöteberg 9:12

So you're right about multitasking that most people we cannot multitask if you don't have to pay attention to things like breathing and work at same time. But most people can't pay attention to more than one thing. And when we think that we are doing that, like we're listening to lecture and we're taking notes, were actually task switching. So we're switching back and forth. And when we're task switching, we make more errors, science shows and researchers and we're slower and we forget about good ideas. And in general, it's not the best way to complete things from what we learned in Lean, for example, when we're doing many things and so one one idea here in the book is our in this method is the shortlist as you mentioned, and the shortlist is like, in the morning, from the top of your head, write down five things on a paper on the piece of paper, instead of looking at your, you know, in, in my trainings, I am an exercise where we're asked people to, to, to write down every source of tasks that they have. And they think less about them and say, I have some things in my brain, I have something in my email inbox, I have some things in Trello. And I have some things in JIRA, I have some things on my refrigerator, and I have some post it's on my display. And there's a lot of sources of all these tasks. And then the next step is to look at all these and say, roughly how many tasks do I have in each of these. And usually, it aggregates to something between 80 and 200. So like, if you have 200 tasks there, if you have 100 tasks, it's impossible to make a prioritization to choose the best one because you can think about 100 tasks at the same time and see which one of these is most important right now. So instead, when you start morning, write down maximum five tasks on a piece of paper in front of you. Maximum five, and these are small tasks, so they should estimate them. If you estimate roughly you don't have to write down, it should not be things that takes more than two hours or something like that should be things that the tasks that take 10 minutes, two hours, some something in this, if they're bigger than YouTube, break something out and put them on on your list. And this is not the plan. It's not a competition or some kind of gamification, so that this is the sort of fight that I'm doing to complete today. It's more like moving away the tension of of gamification, instead of saying, These are my five candidates for my next, the one I'm going to pay attention to next, right, and then you don't have to think about anything else, all the other 100 tasks that you have promised someone or that you have thought about that you pressed you do. So because you have in front of you only these five, five is not magic, of course, but five is, is a number that usually we can look at five things and maybe compare them together. If it comes to 6, 7, 8, 9, then we have to make to look at some of them. So maybe you should have have have less than five, but not not more than five, I believe for most people. Yeah. And then then you pick one of these and say, I'm going to focus on this one. And you set an alarm, maybe to the next hour or something like that, to remind you to not stay too long, because maybe when you have worked with at one after an hour, you need to take a break or maybe you should reprioritize because he didn't believe that this was this was going to take this long time that that it took so you need some alarm to wake you up and then use your stop focus on on that that single task. And during the day if if something comes up, you get a new idea, either either you should write it down and put it somewhere else. Or you need to trade away something from your shortlist. You should never have more than five things on your on your shortlist. And this this many people try this and say it works for some people doesn't work but you need to you need to try yourself and be you know you we are different. So it might not be suitable for everyone.

Joe Krebs 14:04

But I think you just answered my next question. I just want to clarify because that is the bridge to my next topic about agility here is so that the list is maximum five, right? Let's say this as a as a number here to work with, right? What would happen if like that stakeholder out there changes his mind and there would be a sixth item or a seventh item, because there is the risk that the list is going to grow. So you're saying like keep it at five, right? Something has to go from there. Yep. Just to keep it manageable,

Staffan Nöteberg 14:35

maximum five, maybe have completed something so you'll have four three. Okay. And of course, these numbers are heuristics. You can use any number but it's good to put the limit and see how much but five is a good starting number. According to me at least.

Joe Krebs 14:54

Yeah, there is also in your book. I don't I don't know the from the top of my head. Add, I don't know the exact details here right now. But you also have some advice on the time-boxing, right? How much time would be dedicated to these tasks. So let's say you're starting a task, let's say at 10.25am. In the morning, that timer would be set to 11 o'clock or something like that, right? So there's some some concrete advice at your book. But the time box is relatively manageable and short too right?. So it's short working increments before you take a break.

Staffan Nöteberg 15:24

Yeah, a break or reprioritize, you looked at your shortlist again, and see, should I continue with this one? Or do that? One, do something else, maybe because I completed that one, or maybe something else became more prioritized. But you trust during that period that time box, your trust, your prioritization, I think that you shouldn't you distinguish between focusing and prioritizing. So when you have decided to focus, then you need to explore it. That and oh, and trust that you have chosen the right one, if something else comes up, write it down or, or something like that, but don't change your business idea. Every few minutes, just because something comes up.

Joe Krebs 16:15

Yeah. Interesting. So so what I what I would like to touch on is and I think that is to connect with you have with the Pomodoro Technique, right, where it's also a time or is involved in time intervals. So time boxing, just in the Agile world, in general is a is a is a good strategy. Now, I do know that let's say in Scrum, the product backlog is not necessarily a list of tasks, why but it's just to see a container of things to be to be worked on eventually, but also the sprint backlog has has items in it. Let's say a product backlog very often has more than five items in it. How would you idea like map to like some some agile teams, you know missing? Some of those mono tasking techniques could be applied to a personal level? Is there anything we can do as a team is anything as an Agile team could do like a scrum team or a kanban team or somewhere that says like, we're gonna start introducing and mono tasking techniques to make us more productive, effective as a team. But also help us with the prioritization ordering effort as well, as you know, just like staying focus is is there any connect between those techniques?

Staffan Nöteberg 17:33

I think so one thing is, of course, you can learn from my monitor skin that and then scale it to the team level and think what would that mean to do the same thing on the team level. But another thing is that what I talked about cohesion, so the team members are part of the same ecosystem as you are. And if you're a team, then you probably have a shared goal, you have the same goal. Otherwise, you're more like a group of people that have the same manager or something like that. But if your team you have the same goal, so So what what you're looking for, is to succeed with the school together. And if you're all skilled in this method, the monitors method, which which is a lot a lot of thing about how to progress and how to cooperate and how to treat stakeholders and recharging and so. But if you're all successful, I think you also responsible since you have a shared goal, to support each other, to help each other to be better at Mono tasking or whatever personal productivity method you're using. So you, as I said, we want to arrange an environment and circumstances so that we can be productive as individuals. But that also, since we have a shared do need that we need to create circumstances environment for teammates, so that they can be successful, then there are, of course, mob programming and pair programming, and then you're working together. But when we work individually, we need to help each other to work individually in a good way. Also, it's not not only that, I take care of my environment and my circumstances so that I can do mono tasking or Pomodoro, or GTD (Getting Things Done) or something else. It's also the issue to help other people with that

Joe Krebs 19:26

Yeah. So one thing I wanted to clarify and this is this is a great connect between the team and the individual and how this technique applies on different kinds of levels. I think that's great. There's obviously a lot to take away from teams have a very long laundry list of things to do, right? And just feel like they are not getting you know, like their time or they're not using their time necessarily wisely. That's what they're thinking and but they might not know like, what is the what's the missing thing and maybe it is something like that to really focus on on a few things. Now, here's something that I want to clarify this with you? If I read this, right, if I heard thi right, it's fascinating because, you know, way, way back when I was running, I did like cross country kind of running myself, there was always this thing of, if there was a hill, let's say, you would always try to run up the hill. And if you if you had to take a break, you know, for whatever reason, it was right on the top of the hill, not before the top of the hill, because you wanted to make sure it's easier to restart running again. So stopping at the hill was always like seeing something like very hard to restart running again, because you're already in the middle of a hill. But it was always when you're on the top of the hill was very easy for you to run. Now you're mono tasking is like by task. The second is don't finish the task at the end of the day. Because it makes it easier to start and transition into the next day. When I saw that, I was like thinking about that. I was like, that is very interesting. Tell me like how, because it's so opposite to how people think. Right? So it's like finishing a task before they go home. And let's say at the end of the day, and might put these 1015 minutes extra in, and then I would just want to finish my tasks, but you're saying mono tasking says don't finish it all by the end of the day? Because it makes it easier to start in the morning. Can you elaborate a little bit on this? Because I think that's great.

Staffan Nöteberg 21:20

Yeah. So there was a researcher 100 years ago in Berlin called Bluma Zeigarnik. I think she came from Russia originally. But she worked in with psychology research in psychology in Berlin. She and her friends went to the coffee shops in Berlin. Every day and sister was psychologist, they had some psychology researchers that had a lot to talk about with each other. And so they stayed there for hours. And they ordered things and they discussed things and then they ordered more and discuss things. And after some hours, they call for the waiter and said, Hey, waiter can can we pay now. And then the waiter always knew exactly how much they had ordered, even though he didn't take any notes. And that was a little bit provocative to a group of psychologists, researchers. So they made an experiment one day. So they they sat there discussing ordering, discussing ordering, and they say hey, can we pay, and the waiter knew exactly how much they had ordered, and they paid. But then they stayed there for another 30 minutes, then the call for the waiter again. And when the waiter came there, they asked him, Hey, how much did we pay 30 minutes ago? And what do you think he answered?

Joe Krebs 22:56

He didn't know.

Staffan Nöteberg 22:58

He didn't know. He said, I've dropped out How could I know now. So he knew about it, as long as it was like an open Task to remember this. But as soon as, as they had paid it dropped it. So it didn't take in place in in his brain. And this was interesting, but this experiment is not very scientific, because it was only one person's very small sample. But Illuma went back to her office and made an experiment with, like, the first 150 people or something like that. And they got 20 tasks each small things like creating a clay finger or translating something from German, to to French, or, or something. And what it didn't know was a part of this experiment was that in 10, out of these 20, they were interrupted. So blue mark came there and said, Oh, I see you're working with task number six. Yeah, stop that and go on and work with task number seven. And afterwards, when when when they had finished everything. Bluma said like, can you write down now all the 20 tasks that you worked on on paper? And you know, if you have 20 things you have done, you won't remember all of them. So then she counted at the fact was that those that are interrupted in the remember twice as many of these compared to those that they had completed. So things that we haven't finished that we have started but we haven't finished demand room in our brain. But you can see in a positive way that we are still analyzing them and working on them and thinking about them. So if we end the day, usually, if you're commuting, and you think that before I go home, I need to complete this. And then I will take a bus or take my car or something home. But if you think in the other way, and think like, before I leave the office, I need to stop something, and leave in the middle I should have a read test if I'm a software engineer. So you stop something and you leave in the middle, then the next morning, you will be much eager to start with that one. And we knew about procrastination, that the hardest time that whatever we procrastinate, most is in the morning, if we can just stop procrastinating in the morning, then we will continue for the whole day because we have started something. So if instead stop something before we go home, then then we will be very eager to start with on that one. Immediately, when we come to the office usually will not tell this in trainings, someone raises their hand and say like, Hey, I'll try that. And if I do that, I can't sleep for the whole night because I have a problem. Of course, you shouldn't try it, you shouldn't do this. But for many people who are trying this, this is really helpful.

Joe Krebs 26:19

Wow, this is this is cool that this is quite interesting that that person had sleep problems by trying this. Why? Because part of mono tasking is also you know, taking care of things like sleep and breaks and, and healthy living. Why? Why is that like part of money? It's an interesting, it's an interesting approach. It's so with all that research and science that goes into something like this. It's also like to do take breaks, and to purposely slow down. I don't know if that's exactly at those time limits of these tasks are describing but also to, to just to sleep, and have a healthy lifestyle that includes nutrition and everything. Why why is that so important?

Staffan Nöteberg 27:05

so the method or the book is divided into six different areas where one is called recharge, creative thinking. So these sorts of things, the six things that I suggest that you should think about to be able to mono task, to be able to focus. And one of these students reached out creative thinking says, I mean, I'm not the expert of all the Healthy Living, I'm personally. But what I found, and I think most people agree on this is that if you are going to be the best version of yourself, if you are going to be the best due tomorrow, then you will have a much better probability or higher probability of being that if you have a healthier living, if you sleep the same hours every night, if you eat fruits and vegetables, if your exercise. And if you don't do that, it will be much harder to focus and focus on one thing.

Joe Krebs 28:11

Yeah, that is that is also important for agile teams, where I would do very often I'm, you know, working with teams or organizations, but that is not part of the ritual, right? And for a variety of reasons, and sometimes it's just like, you know, what the things are in organizations, but it is an important piece to point out like we're humans, we're part of this, of, let's say, any kind of method and recharging is a key thing, right? How is something like that being incorporated into an into an Agile team, right? On an individual level? I think that's a great idea, and probably easier to do, right? Because it's me influencing my own thing, but how does it work on a team? We're not gonna say you guys go into sleeping chambers during the day and taking breaks or anything like that, but how would that look like on a on a team level?

Staffan Nöteberg 29:04

I think first I want to say that it's not that you shouldn't be an Olympic athlete, it's more like, you can always be a bit better than than what you were yesterday. But I think in an Agile team, you know, in extreme programming, there's one of these best practices was first called 40 hours a week, and then it was changed to a sustainable pace. If I remember correctly, it was a long time ago, I read this book. I think it's part of this, it. Ultimately, it's a personal responsibility, of course, but as a team, you can create a culture where it's not cool to stay the whole night to fix some bugs or something like that. You need to have a sustainable base. As Kent Beck pointed out already, and if I think no, this is a credit card, that if you overcharge the credit card, you can buy something right now that you couldn't buy otherwise, but you will have to pay with interest in the long term and that that's the same for teams. I think that if they have a culture where they don't take care of the people in the team, when it comes to breaks, and weekends and other things, then they will have to pay with interest in the long term.

Joe Krebs 30:33

Yeah. Yeah, no, definitely I agree. And that was part of Extreme Programming even before Agile Manifesto. So this is deeply, deeply rooted, sustainable pace and having you know, if there was an overtime in a sprint, or iteration that there wouldn't be one in the following. So there was some form of balancing going on your book itself, which is great. I like visuals in a book, right? You drew them yourself. Which is, which is also great to see those notes and supported by visuals. I just like to read books like this, I think it just reinforces but you also say in this mono tasking, it's better for teams to or individuals to write by hand. Notes in journaling, rather than on a laptop.

Staffan Nöteberg 31:20

I think depends on what you're going to use use it for. If if writing something that you want to distribute to the that you want to save for a long time, it's much better right in a computer, of course. But if you want want your brain to digest things to analyze it, in, we learn from doing things not from listening, when we listen to something like your podcast, you might get inspired but if we don't do something about it, or think about it or discuss it with someone then we will have forgotten about it one week later. So there are a lot of research showing that if if you write down something in need to like, think and that's especially if if you draw something if you make a mind mapping more or try to try to think of it in in pictures, what does this mean all the diagrams connecting,

Joe Krebs 32:25

sketchnoting, for example?

Staffan Nöteberg 32:27

Yeah, exactly. Then you learn more it stays in your head because in the brain the memory in the brain is not like a structured database. It's not like SQL, it's more like many many fragments of associations. And when you have new you learn something new and when you hear something new, you need to connect it to some of these fragments and when you think about it more then maybe some door opens in there are some fried fragment comes up some other Association and you can connect your your new learning to that one. And if you have a discussion about something like something you hear in this podcast or something new you learn that you have written down or so then it's more much more likely that you will save it actually and have it connected to some some other Association Yeah. And as I understand it, it's not an issue that or memory is not big enough we can read would be it would be possible to know a lot more than anyone has known so far. And the problem is that we it's not structured in in the heads we need to it's a different thing than the computer database and we need to connect it so we can pick it up when it when it's suitable.

Joe Krebs 34:00

Yeah very very interesting stuff and obviously the book is filled with lots of material like this a lot of individuals and teams might find useful applying in their in their day to day work. Did you write your book using mono tasking? Did you use some of those techniques like like you basically just you know took your method in your in your own writing.

Staffan Nöteberg 34:24

I did exactly like that. But I'm saying that this doesn't mean that this is the best method for everyone. But I think that if you read something like this, a book like this, then you will learn a lot of things and maybe you can try some some of these and test them and maybe some some will suit you and some will not suit you but you will learn more about your own productivity.

Joe Krebs 34:53

Absolutely. I also see coaches Scrum Masters leaders working within organizations increasing agility, he's taking some of the research you have put together in that book, and providing the evidence to really run some experiments within the organization. Right. So there's continuous improvement going on, within organizations, change management. And some of those concept could be, could be applied to any of these efforts and run some experiments on are they showing the same impact as they will do in an individual productivity improvement also on on other levels, so I think it's might give some food for thought for. For some, some employees in organizations listening to the answers, I'd take a piece of that and run an experiment and see how that goes to just like the task switching or preventing task switching, and possibly do take the breaks and things like that we discussed. We're not finishing a task by the end of the day, things we have discussed here in this podcast together and just like try some experiments, but again, the book has many, many more. You also mentioned in your in your book, someone I think there was a little side story, where somebody actually got a promotion probably not only because of that, but somebody got a promotion and one thing was that somebody started listening to podcasts in their transition time going from home to work. And using that transition time effectively somebody listened to podcasts and got a promotion out of it now I cannot guarantee by listening to Agile FM that you will be getting a promotion out of this thing but you might be listening to this in your car right now while driving so please drive safely. But transition time is also part of mono tasking and and to use that wisely could be having really really good benefits. So thank you Staffan for being my guest today and sharing your thoughts great thoughts on mono tasking here with me? But more importantly with all the listeners out there that possibly already or will be becoming interested in mono tasking. Thank you so much, Staffan.

Staffan Nöteberg 37:02

Thanks, you it's been a pleasure to talk to you.

Joe Krebs 37:06

Thank you for listening to Agile FM, the radio for the Agile community. I'm your host Joe Krebs. If you're interested in more programming and additional podcasts, please go to www.agile.fm. Talk to you soon.