Multi-tasking is seen as a must-have skill in today’s fast-paced environment. In many cases, it has become a necessity rather than a choice. Increasingly though, it is being realized that human beings are incapable of true multitasking and even when we multitask, it is not productive.

Human multitasking

Multi-tasking is defined as the ability to do two or more things at the same time. There is concurrent multitasking, where two or more tasks are done at the same time. Alternatively, context switched multi-tasking involves switching between multiple unfinished tasks. We will talk about the science behind multitasking, the pitfalls and some thoughts on being effective at juggling tasks.

The Science of multitasking

Prefrontal Cortex is the task manager of the human brain. It is split into two hemispheres. Studies have shown that when human beings are dealing with one activity, the entire prefrontal cortex is dedicated to managing this task. When you add a second task, the prefrontal cortex dedicates one hemisphere to each task. Each hemisphere is now theoretically able to handle a task independent of the other. Add a third task and the brain starts to swap things around to accommodate the third task. Humans are imperfect machines and we start forgetting things as we switch between tasks, which leads to a significant increase in errors. (Multitasking splits the brain)

It would seem that with adequate training we could do two tasks effectively at the same time. This would be true if we had no other stimulus around us but these two tasks. In reality, though, there is a constant barrage of things ready to distract us from our two tasks. A door slamming, notification of a new email coming in are all stimuli that will need the attention of our brain to process consciously or subconsciously.

If we cannot do true multitasking, then we are left with the possibility of doing context switched multi-tasking. When we switch tasks, it puts a significant drain on one’s brain to catch up and to get refocused. This can be a few minutes for tactical tasks to over a half an hour for creative or strategic activities. It seems reasonable that humans can handle two or more tactical or repetitive tasks simultaneously, but it’s best to focus on one strategic activity at a time. It is ironic then that it is managers and leaders who have a more strategic focus that get called on to multitask more than staff members who typically are doing one assigned task!!!

Multitasking hurts

It is widely accepted that multitasking leads to lower productivity overall. This is not limited to slowing your activities, thereby reducing overall productivity. Studies have shown that your IQ drops when you multi-task significantly. You go through the motions of a task without thinking it through leading to lower quality outcomes.

There are health impacts as well. A study by the University of Sussex found that heavy multi-taskers have smaller gray matter density. This brain damage can have long lasting implications.

Multi-tasking also lowers your emotional intelligence. Social awareness, empathy, self-esteem etc. drop when you become more machine than a human trying to juggle multiple tasks without emotionally connecting with the activities. It also impacts the way you engage with people affecting relationships.

How to manage tasks more effectively

I would like to share a strategy I use to manage my work. I use a variation of the Eisenhower Matrix to organize my tasks.

I keep assigning tasks as they come into these quadrants. You can use any tool of your choice to model these.

Daily Planner

Every day in the morning, I pull down items from this list into my daily ToDo. I choose one or two tasks that are strategic and important, as well as several tasks that are tactical and urgent. I allocate time slots for the strategic items in my calendar, so I am not disturbed. During the day, I make several passes through the list ticking the tactical-important things off. These sometimes serve as a break for more heavy-lifting strategic activities and I get some satisfaction from striking off these lists. I limit any multitasking to tactical tasks.

There are any number of distractions to take you away from your task but there are some which I consider self inflicted. It is an easy escape when I get stuck or bored. This is especially true at the start of a heavy long activity and my brain needs to be forced to focus. For me, it is checking the news feed to catch up on recent world events. I do this without thinking and before I know it, I have lost time and focus. These can be habit forming and very hard to break.

When it is time to focus on my strategic tasks, I close the door to my office and I give my full attention to the task at hand. It takes time to get my juices flowing, but when it does, my productivity and creativity are at its peak. Often I am surprised by how quickly I am able to get a large task done when I am focused solely on it.

End of the day, I throw out my ToDo to start all over again the next day. It gives me both a sense of achievement and closure. Starting fresh has a more positive impact on me than incrementing the list for the next day. I use a physical spiral binder for my daily ToDo list and keep striking off items when done. At the end of the day, I tear and throw the daily ToDo in the bin.

I hope this gets you thinking about your own task management practices and helps you improve them. All of the above works within a framework of long term planning so you have your strategic and important items prioritized. I will talk about this more in a future blog.

Author: Regi Roy

With over twenty years of experience bringing innovative products to market, Regi Roy, as CEO, provides leadership to all activities at Founding Minds. Regi brings a wealth of expertise, having led large teams developing WordPerfect Suite at Corel, bootstrapping his medical imaging company and recently helping grow TITUS into a Deloitte Fast 500 company.

Software development is constantly evolving in response to shifting customer demands. There is a need to have polished, easy-to-use, and well-rounded solutions rather than stereotypical business solutions that work but are hard to work with.

For software development teams, the product mindset has become an essential factor in recent years to achieve these goals. It involves taking a holistic, iterative approach to the product, looking beyond individual tasks and siloed working arrangements, in order to maximize its value and continuously enhance outcomes.

The Product-Oriented Mindset Explained

The product mindset is a way of thinking that focuses on creating products rather than project outputs. A product-oriented approach to software development prioritizes business needs, targets, and outcomes over timelines and estimates, such as those typically associated with a project-oriented approach. It also emphasizes the importance of looking at the product from a customer’s perspective, allowing teams to create products that truly meet their needs.
It encourages collaboration and communication between team members to identify opportunities for improvement, create products with greater value, and make changes that are beneficial to the product as a whole.

A CIO survey reveals that a whopping 95% of CIOs understand that their roles now extend beyond typical IT requirements, with customer experience at the forefront of their priorities. A product-friendly approach allows teams to similarly shift their focus to create a product meant to enhance the customer experience.

The Project-Oriented Mindset Explained

The project-oriented mindset focuses on individual tasks and working in silos. This approach can lead to inefficiencies and suboptimal results due to a lack of collaboration and communication between team members.

In the context of software development, the traditional project-oriented approach has the primary goal of developing software on time and within budget and scope. It usually follows the waterfall project management approach with well-defined project specifications and deliverables. Unfortunately, this approach can lead to business objectives and user needs being neglected in favor of meeting the budget, scope, and timeline.

Why a Product-Oriented Mindset Is Better

According to Gartner, a staggering 85% of organizations have embraced, or plan to embrace, the product-centric application delivery model due to its ability to enable fast delivery, digital business transformation, and the utilization of agile methods. Companies such as Slack, Apple, and Google are among the biggest advocates of this mindset, and they have reaped the benefits in the form of increased customer satisfaction and loyalty.

A product-oriented mindset focuses on creating value for customers by understanding their needs and delivering solutions that meet those needs effectively. According to Accenture, this mindset is achieved through a continuous process of collecting feedback and making improvements to the product, a process known as iterative feedback loops. Adopting this approach leads to a more agile product development process and significantly enhances the customer experience.

When it comes to building value, a product mindset is an approach that can deliver results multiple folds from the same effort. This is in contrast to a project mindset, which is focused on completing a specific task within a set timeframe. A product mindset is an ongoing concern with a visionary and long-term approach rather than being time-bound and tactical.

How the Product-Oriented Mindset Is Achieved

By keeping a product-oriented mindset at the forefront of the software development process, organizations can create products that are more valuable to customers and position them to succeed in a rapidly changing business environment. However, significant effort is required behind the scenes to make the product mindset rise above the service-oriented mindset or project-oriented mindset. Here are some key elements that help achieve the product-oriented mindset.

User First

If every action you take in the product build process is user-centric, you start to lay the foundations of a product-oriented approach to developing software. Notable questions a product-oriented team will ask are “How will the user use this?”, “Will the use be able to use this intuitively?”, “Will it take too long for the user to do an activity?”. The goal is to make the user happy while using the product, not just to meet the business requirement.

Everyone Has a Part

A product-oriented mindset has to be ingrained into every member of the team. It does not matter if you are a junior tester or a senior architect, everyone needs to think of the activities as leading to a product that human users will use and need to feel happy about. This drives a very different thinking process in terms of polish, intuitiveness, responsiveness, and accuracy. Regi Roy, the CEO of Founding Minds, says,

“A question I ask our teams occasionally is, If this feature were a part of GMail, how would the feature behave ?”.

That is the thought process teams need to have to achieve product outcomes.

Relentless Optimism

One key aspect of a product mindset is relentless optimism. Nothing is set in stone except for the quest for a viable product. This means that the team should always be testing their ideas, learning from them, and modifying or even pivoting them if necessary. A great example of this is Twitter, which started off as a podcast-accessing platform but eventually pivoted to become the leader in microblogging.

Evolve As You Go

A product mindset requires a willingness to take risks and readiness to fail. It is a long-term journey that involves experimenting and pivoting along the way. Building a product requires taking small steps and validating the thinking at every step rather than trying to tackle everything at once.

The Customer Is Not Always King(or Queen)

It is important to remember that the customer is not always king or queen. In many cases, customers do not necessarily know what the true problem is, let alone the right solution. A product builder or team must be bold enough to see opportunities beyond what the customer is talking about and envision a new future.

Believe In Your Instincts but Validate Them

When building a product, it is important to believe in your instincts but also validate them. Not all products have a market gap or problem statement; some create a market. A razor-sharp focus is key, building only to identify problems and just enough to solve them. The development team must avoid generalizing to the point that the problem cannot be solved and not expand into adjacent problems before the core problem is addressed.

Don’t Ask, Show

When approaching a new idea, it is better to show rather than ask. Customers are poor at articulating what they want, even when they are correct. When the team is able to show them something, the customers can provide them with valuable feedback. For this reason, the development team should try to capture mockups that bring the product to life, as this will increase the chances of getting useful feedback.

Be Practical

Finally, it is important to be practical. Software development teams should keep in mind that they are trying to build a product with the least amount of money to create market success. They should not be wasting resources on unnecessary complexity. Even when there is complexity, the goal should be to hide it away and give the customer a chance to use the product and see a benefit very quickly without having to configure and set up a lot of things.

Final Words

The product-oriented mindset has become a key differentiator for software development teams to consider in today’s highly competitive business environment. By incentivizing collaboration, communication, and innovation, this approach puts the customer at the center of the decision-making process. As a result, organizations can create products of greater value that are more differentiated from their competitors and have a greater chance of success.

Partnering with a software product development specialist is key to delivering good quality software products, and many traditional software services firms come up short. They are schooled in requirement analysis, estimation, and planning and delivery but miss the essence of creating products that thousands or millions will use. Founding Minds has helped incubate several new ventures since its inception in 2008. Over the years, we have built a culture of product mindset within our organization. Unlike traditional software service companies, we take time to understand the business our client is in and help build their products. It is a long-term journey, and we become partners, collaborators, and friends along the way.

If you have a product idea and are looking for a software development company to realize your dream, we at Founding Minds would love to hear from you. We offer a comprehensive package to help you build your software products. To learn more, read more about our Incubator-In-A-Box.

Leadership and management are two critical functions that help organizations achieve their goals. Although the two terms are often used interchangeably, they are very distinct. While leaders have people following them, managers have people working for them. At Founding Minds, we believe that anyone can be a leader and encourage our employees to step up. In this article, we’ll look at how a leadership culture can create better outcomes for customers, employees, and the organization.

Leadership and Management

Leadership is the ability to inspire and motivate people toward a common goal. Leaders possess a vision that they communicate to their followers and encourage them to work towards achieving it. They use their charisma, communication skills, and emotional intelligence to inspire and engage their team members. Leaders build and develop the culture which sets the guidelines for managers and the overall team.

On the other hand, management is the process of planning, organizing, and controlling resources to achieve a specific objective. Managers are responsible for setting goals, developing strategies, allocating resources, and ensuring that tasks are completed efficiently and effectively. They focus on the day-to-day operations of the organization and ensure that everything runs smoothly while looking to leadership to set the vision and nurture the movements.

Indicators of a Strong Leader

A strong leader has several indicators that distinguish them from others. They possess a clear vision of what they want to achieve and have the ability to communicate it effectively to their followers. They inspire and motivate their team members to work towards achieving the vision, and they lead by example. Regi Roy, CEO of Founding Minds, adds, “The company and its leadership must create the right circumstances for leaders to emerge. This requires an environment of openness and respect, a willingness to let people experiment without fear. Employees need to know they will be supported.”

Communication skills are also an essential quality of a strong leader. They are excellent communicators and can effectively convey their message to their team members. They are also good listeners and take feedback from their team members seriously.

Integrity and honesty are also critical qualities of a strong leader. They set high ethical standards for themselves and their team members and demonstrate transparency and fairness in their actions.

Indicators of a Strong Manager

A strong manager is someone who can effectively manage processes and resources to achieve a specific objective. Strong execution of a vision is another essential quality of a strong manager. They can take the vision set by the leader and turn it into actionable plans that can be implemented by the team members.

The ability to direct and anticipate needs is also critical for a manager. Leadership will set the expectations and create an ideal environment for communication and clarity, so managers can focus on providing the team with what they need to get the desired results.

Growing your leadership team

While leadership and management are two distinct functions, decision-makers need to combine the best of both worlds to achieve success. A strong leader needs to have a clear vision, communicate it effectively to their team members, and inspire and motivate them towards achieving it. A strong manager, on the other hand, needs to have excellent process management skills, execute the vision set by the leader, and provide the necessary resources to get the job done. One does not have to be a manager to become a leader. At Founding Minds, we believe that leadership culture has to be ingrained in the culture from the top management.

Roy adds here,

“It flows from the top. The CEO and top leadership should nurture the culture which produces strong leadership and great management.”

Creating a strong leadership culture requires a conscious effort. It has to flow from the top. The grounds are set by the leader of the organization so everyone knows it is ok to step up and they will be supported. It is critical to recognize even the simplest achievements. Regi adds, “It is relatively easy to build a habit of recognizing achievements. It is much harder to not ruin initiative by highlighting shortcomings”. Human nature is to undervalue achievements and overstate failures. We need to flip this on its head to create leaders and to be a good leader yourself.

Final Word

Leadership and management are both essential functions that help organizations achieve their goals. While the two are often used interchangeably, they have distinct differences. Leaders inspire and motivate their team members toward achieving a vision, while managers focus on the day-to-day operations of the organization. Combining the best of both worlds requires decision-makers to find a balance between these two functions.

“A leader should be transparent with their team members. Managers/Leaders at Founding Minds are willing to admit when things do not go according to plan and also take accountability, boosting the team’s morale. Here managers trust their team members to perform their duties effectively and delegate tasks accordingly. Clear guidance is provided while empowering team members to make decisions.”

– Sneha Pillai, Technical Lead

At Founding Minds, we encourage our people to find their balance in being leaders. Over the years, we have built a culture of continuously improving and working as individuals and teams within our organization. We encourage our team members to take the initiative and step into leadership roles by providing the environment to experiment with fear. We inculcate openness, respect and a non-hierarchical learning style that enables our members to become leaders.