Your random tweets about
Android apps and last night’s Glee are stifling the
economic recovery. At least, that’s the buzz among efficiency mavens,
who seem to spend all their time adding up microblogging’s fiscal toll.
Last year, Nucleus
Research warned that Facebook shaves 1.5 percent off total office
productivity; a Morse survey
estimated that on-the-job social networking costs British companies
$2.2 billion a year.
But for knowledge workers charged with transforming ideas into
products — whether gadgets, code, or even Wired articles —
goofing off isn’t the enemy. In fact, regularly stepping back from the
project at hand can be essential to success. And social networks are
particularly well suited to stoking the creative mind.Studies that accuse social networks of reducing productivity assume that time spent microblogging is time strictly wasted. But that betrays an ignorance of the creative process. Humans weren’t designed to maintain a constant focus on assigned tasks. We need periodic breaks to relieve our conscious minds of the pressure to perform — pressure that can lock us into a single mode of thinking. Musing about something else for a while can clear away the mental detritus, letting us see an issue through fresh eyes, a process that creativity researchers call incubation. “People are more successful if we force them to move away from a problem or distract them temporarily,” observe the authors of Creativity and the Mind, a landmark text in the psychology and neuroscience of creativity. They found that regular breaks enhance problem-solving skills significantly, in part by making it easier for workers to sift through their memories in search of relevant clues.
That doesn’t mean that employees should feel free to play Minesweeper at will, however. According to Don Ambrose, a Rider University professor who studies creative intelligence, incubation is most effective when it involves exposing the mind to entirely novel information rather than just relieving mental pressure. This encourages creative association, the mashing together of seemingly unrelated concepts — a key step in the creative process.
History is full of tales of revelations that were helped along by such conceptual collisions. Alastair Pilkington came up with the idea for float glass, the inexpensive successor to plate glass, while washing dishes; the grease that pooled atop the water inspired him to pour molten glass onto melted tin, resulting in a perfectly smooth pane. And George de Mestral had the initial brainstorm for Velcro during a 1941 hunting trip, when he noticed how difficult it was to pick Alpine burrs off of his clothes.
This means that tweets about Lady Gaga’s lingerie can help someone debugging Perl code. (Or a tweet about Perl code may help Lady Gaga’s underwear stylist.) A random scrap of information can trigger just the right conceptual collision. It’s hard to know which scrap might do the trick, but that’s the beauty of social networks — they constantly produce potential sparks, for free.
The participatory nature of Twitter and Facebook also makes them excellent tools for supercharging creativity. Users finely craft their bons mots to grab people’s attention and perhaps earn a retweet or two.
As football coaches have long preached, you should practice like you play. Twitter and Facebook give knowledge workers the chance to turn downtime into a game where creativity and insight are rewarded, if only with digital pats on the back. Formulating a clever tweet about the latest Clipse record may not have much to do with an engineer’s current project, but it demands far more inspired energy than reading the sports page. And didn’t someone awfully smart once note that excellence, whether intellectual or physical, was a habit?
Ah, right — it was @THE_REAL_SHAQ. Hmm, wonder what he’s tweeting right now? Let me check.