Damaged by the feed - on multi-tasking in a parallel world

I do many things: Robotics, MedTech, Future of Work Workshops, Children's Books, AI, Community Platforms, Events, Startup, Non-Profit, a tiny bit of art and here and there some writing. I am regularly accused of doing too many things and being stretched too thin because of it. They're right, partially, maybe. But that's just today's prelude.

The world has always been a big place, and as much as I would love to fully understand physics, biology, robotics, math, economics, AI, regulatory affairs, reimbursement, marketing, ... it's impossible. The time, the last scholar has actually managed to know it all is two centuries ago, if we want to believe Andrew Robinsons who wrote a book by that title on Thomas Young. A genius known by most engineers for the Young's Modulus. Tells you how elastic a material is. But I digress, and I strongly suspect that Young's knowledge on the practical sides of for example "smithing" were of very limited nature. Knowing everything has been impossible for centuries and likely there never was a true know-it-all.

Which brings me to my LinkedIn feed and a curious observation I have been making about it.

But first - multi-tasking. We suck at it. You know it, and yet we all do it. I'm just back out of a "hey there must be a ton of literature on that, aside from the usual pop culture explanation of why we suck at it"-rabbit hole, it's deep. I had to yank me out of it. But essentially, we can't focus on multiple things at once, it's much more like an iPhone works. There's one task that is active at a time and the others are kind of sleeping with some background activity allowed (like downloading data on the iPhone). Switching tasks incurs a cognitive load and we lose flow (if we even managed to get into it in the first place) - so rapidly switching makes us inefficient, because the load-unload procedure costs us time and energy and it doesn't get faster just because we switch more often. (See the graphic below that I did to illustrate this point (and to allow my craving mind to switch to a different more interesting looking activity than writing ("Do you properly close multiple brackets like a programmer?"))).

Point in case: switching context is hard. Especially when you're working on hard problems. Be it the current robot architecture we're working on, needing me to think of all the interrelated pieces from hardware over electronics to software to control and user experience - or writing this article ("That graphics has some pixel errors, PowerPoint is a bad program to do graphics in - maybe I should redo it in Illustrator?") - or building a pitch deck that needs me to keep the investor's perspective in mind, at the same time my team, our progress, the research we've done on the problems to understand where and how to focus a product.

So how can I go from robot architecture to pitch deck to writing in seconds? My brain is convinced: "Easy, let me jump in with some ideas on the ExoForce suit that you plan, while you were mentioning 'robot architecture'". I resist. Seconds later, "hey this article, it has relations to the pitch deck you're building on telepresence, did you take this into account?". Good point, brain, let me ... no. I resist. Only to be tempted seconds later after a glance at the watch "it's 9 am, you have a long list of urgent things today - why are you still writing? Let me list you these five things which are more important ..." - Have. to. resist. - and just to make the point for this article.

So to answer the question: I actually can't, while my brain thinks it can and should. So we've essentially become this ever distracted, ever switching, ever "it's more interesting over there", ever "but if you focus you're missing out", ever ("Hey, have you been thinking if LinkedIn is the right platform for this article? you could also put it on the website and link to it? Where do you build audience and why? Let's ... NO") reactive agents. And how did we get here?

Well I found the culprit: Feeds. Scroll through your favourite feed, be it LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok ("Actually, since TikTok are videos, the switches are slower than in Instagram, I wonder what that does ...") and observe. My LinkedIn right now: X, the moonshot factory on Tidal ("ohhhh, interesting, moonshots, what can I learn?"), LCL Data Centers on hybrid and multiclouds (promoted) - ("I don't need cloud info"), Thomas Künzli searches a CFO and further employees ("Hmm, do I know someone?"). To answer this, I load a ton of context: where his company is (I think in Davos, not 100% sure), what they do (Wood Working), then my network of people (Who might be inclined to go to Davos as CFO?) - I know few finance people ("Hey, maybe you should!"), let alone in Switzerland. Can't help. Next. Christian Fenk promotes "UR Solutions Day" - about UR robots, I don't have one. Next. Mariska Koster comments on a dutch article, I know her from an award we've won for our MedTech company, but it's dutch, so: Next. "Know Your Value and Forbes are partnering to celebrate 50 trailblazing women over 50", loved by Dr. Bettina Maisch. Excellent, but right now, my brain doesn't deliver any connections. Next: IBM Sterling Supply Chain is promoting an article in German about the state of modern commerce in Europe. ("Might be relevant, but let's finish this article"). Philip Vollet writes about how he's built a contextual AI assistant ("Oh, should I look? Maybe something to learn for Roboy Bot?"). Turns out it's about rasa, an OS layer that makes it easier to build AI assistants. I dig a bit deeper to see if I this might be of value for my team - Rasa X, a toolset to make it easier to review conversations - sounds useful. I copy the link and send it to the team working on Ravestate at Roboy, our idea of a next-generation dialog system (paper pending).

From venture strategy, to IT infrastructure, to my personal network of people, to robotics, to med tech, to corporate leaders, to state of economy, to AI assistents. And that was just the first eight items in my feed. We scroll through hundreds every day, each item loading enough context to assess if this is relevant and interesting to us. In Instagram, Twitter and Facebook it's even worse, as private mixes with work. It all becomes a never ending stream of information, wanting to be categorised and acted upon, but flowing orders of magnitude faster than what we can process, a torrent pulling us along and drowning us. It leaves a feeling of urgency, of missing out, of not-knowing-enough, of depleting our curiosity with the shallow and destroying our ability to focus on a thing for long enough to create meaningful content.

But when I look at the big picture, how fast all these fields really evolving, it's glacial. X was founded 10 years ago, UR 15 years ago, AI assistants are a thing for a few years now, as is cloud infrastructure. Nothing in this feed was actually urgent, required immediate reaction.

Which leaves just one conclusion: Feeds are evil. They provide information with mixed contexts, thereby force us to do constant expensive context switches and promote this as the norm, training our brain to wanting to switch context ever-faster and thus be ever less productive, all the while giving us a feeling of missing out.

Of course this helps the platforms, because the elicited feeling of missing out conveys the idea that the solution of drowning in information is drinking more of it faster. But it's not. I don't like ranting without suggesting solutions. But I have to go. I get increasingly interrupted by life picking up speed as the morning advances. But maybe you do? So let's jump in the rapids of the day, and let me add this article to yours.