UNC SILS Commencement Address

It is an honor to be here with you today to celebrate this important transition. Thank you for including me. It’s particularly fun for me to be here with you for your commencement because I missed my own. I gave birth to three of my four children while I was still in graduate school, and the middle two, who are twins, were born shortly before I finished up. I actually defended my thesis while pregnant with them. I was on bed rest for preterm labor, as is common when you’re pregnant with twins, and I had to get special permission from my doctor to get up and go to campus for my defense. Turns out that’s a great way to get your committee to not ask you very hard questions – they wanted to get me back home quickly so the twins wouldn’t be born right then and there.

They were born, instead, when they were supposed to be, a month later, and my graduation was a few months after that. By then I had moved to Seattle to work at Microsoft, but I flew back out to Boston, where I was at school, because I love all of the pomp and circumstance commencement. And I brought the twins and my two-year-old with me because I wanted to celebrate my accomplishments with my family. But Friday morning rolled round, which is when graduation was for me, and I just couldn’t figure out how I would manage a toddler and two nursing babies in my robes in the rain for hours and hours. So we ordered in a nice brunch instead and I took an early morning nap. Honestly, it was lovely. But I love finally having a chance to wear my robes. So again, thank you.

I also want to congratulate you, and hope you are using this opportunity to celebrate all that you have accomplished with your family and loved ones in a way that is meaningful to you. You chose your field of study well with the School of Information and Library Sciences. It is an amazing time to be working in the information field. The quantity and variety of information available now is unprecedented, and, what’s more, with recent advances in artificial intelligence and data analysis we’re getting really good at being able to understand and extract patterns from that information so that we can use it in novel ways. The work that you are embarking on is going to impact the way that people create, access, use, and manage information, and fundamentally transform how people experience the world.

My focus in graduate school was information retrieval, which I’m know all of you have studied. I was interested in helping people find and re-find web content, and, in particular, helping them use what they found to get things done. But as I struggled with three – and later four – small children, I became increasingly .. well, tired. But also increasingly interested in how to become really efficient in getting things done so that I could do the work that I love while still enjoying time with the people I love.

Turns out that’s not inherently as hard as you might think. For the next forty-odd years of your life you’re likely to spend eight or more hours a day at the office – but the time that you’ll actually spend working each day will probably be closer to four hours. The trick is figuring out to isolate and make use of those productive four hours in a way that lets you use the rest of your time in a way that is restorative for you. And that’s the piece that’s hard.

My plan today is to share some of what I’ve learned from years of productivity research about how to make good use of your time over the course of a day, and then reflect on how these findings can be extended more generally to how to make good use of your time over a lifetime.

To start with, research suggests it is almost impossible to just sit down and plow through those four productive hours in one go. By now we all know by now that multitasking is a bad plan, but even single-tasking is hard. The typical information worker takes 25 minutes to ramp up to full productivity – but is interrupted every 11 minutes. And even when we are not interrupted by someone else, we self-interrupt to check our emails, visit Facebook, or browse the web. What’s more, many of these applications we go to when we self-interrupt are designed to keep us from getting back to work because they make money from our attention.

We try all sorts of things to fight distraction. We take Facebook vacations, or set out-of-office messages, or make rules like, “No phone at the dinner table!” And the research that we’ve done suggests that this is wise. So this is the first lesson we can take from the productivity research: Shut out distractions when you want to focus. Don’t even let them reach you. This is true during the workday, and also at a macro-scale. Because you are going to encounter a number of distracting opportunities and challenges along whatever path you follow in life, and one solution is to try to protect yourself from too much of this randomizing noise.

But blocking distraction only works so well. For example, I regularly reserve time on my calendar to focus on one task in particular, but pretty much never actually use that time as I intended. Chances are high some other meeting will stomp over it, and even when I do manage to protect the time, I rarely actually use it for the task I intended to – instead, I get drawn into catching up on email or screwing around on the web or responding to a question from a colleague.

Given interruptions will happen, it’s important to know how handle them. Here, research shows that interruptions are least disruptive when they occur at task boundaries, like when you’re switching from one task to another, and it’s easier to get back to work after an interruption when you set a reminder of what you want to return to doing.

You can use these micro-scaled solutions to figure out how to deal with interruptions in your life. Because, you know, you should expect your plans to be interrupted as you move forward. The research suggests you should look to engage with these interruptions during major transitions. Right now, for example, your graduation is a big change, and that means it is a good time to pop your head up, explore, and look around broadly. But be sure to keep track of where you’re going as you do so. A great way to do this is by writing down your goals. So your homework from this commencement – and yes, I’m giving you homework, but it’s probably your last piece of homework ever – is to write down your goals. And then you will have them to revisit in the future as a way to help you return to your path after exploring.

Now thus far I’ve talked about how to reduce distractions and pursue your goals single-mindedly. But in addition to trying to make your environment less fragmented, another approach is to fragment the way you do things so they fit more naturally into the fragmented environment that we actually live in.

Because, you know, one thing I learned after I had kids, is that they fragment everything. Kids take a lot of time, but, honestly, not all of it is valuable – and none of it is predictable. Just like we are at work 8 hours but only work for 4, I can spend hours and hours with my kids but only some of it is actually meaningful. A lot of it is, honestly, pretty boring, especially with babies. Most of you who are graduating don’t know this yet, but your parents who are here with you almost certainly do: Having a new baby is a ridiculous mix of extreme stress and extreme boredom. It’s Mother’s Day, so be sure to thank your mom today for putting up with that for you. I mean, babies are lovely, and cuddly, and they smell amazing, but they also don’t do very much.

The challenge is, you want to be there when they do do something – you want to be there when they need something from you, and you want to enjoy the short bursts of time when they are actually awake and delightful. But their state changes at the drop of a hat. Especially with my first, who was colicky, I found that even when he was happy I spent much of my time just waiting for him to get miserable. And when he slept I had a lot of time that I would have liked to have used productively but wasn’t able to because I was on call. So instead, I mindlessly played Angry Birds. I got to like level 7 million.

Even if you don’t have a new baby, you probably play Angry Birds. And you definitely know the feeling having bits of time that are just too small to do anything with: Be it waiting for commencement to start or waiting in line at Starbucks. These small moments we whittle away on our phones add up to something real. The average American spends hore than half of their day consuming digital media. People spend 200 million minutes a day on Angry Birds alone! Imagine what we could do if we could make productive use of that time instead. J.K. Rowling says it took her 5 years to write Harry Potter. Even at that rate if we could get all the Angry Birds players working together they could write over 300 Harry Potters a day!

This isn’t as far fetched as it sounds. I’ve actually collaboratively written blog posts and even sections of academic research papers in short bursts from my phone. To do this we created software that broke the process of writing down into a series of thirty-second tasks. Some of these tasks were designed to collect ideas. This is pretty easy to imagine doing quickly – you just write down an idea when you come up with one and then move on. Other tasks served to organize the ideas into coherent groups. And others involved turning a small group of related ideas into a coherent paragraph. And then, ta-da, the whole process produces a passable first draft.

We call this general process of taking a large productivity task and transforming it into a set of smaller tasks microproductivity. Research shows that there are number of advantages to microproductivity. For example, it is easier to do a task in small steps versus as a large chunk. And interruptions are less disruptive when doing a task this way because the task is already fragmented. It’s also easier to get started with a task when all you have to do is something simple. I mean, I will put off doing something big and challenging for days and days. But just doing one small thing, well, sure. If it’s easy, I’ll just do it now. And we’ve found once people do several small easy tasks they’re then usually ready to get to work on the larger task.

And I think this is the most relevant lesson from our productivity research for your life: Don’t get overwhelmed always trying to think about the big picture. Graduation can be a really stressful time that way – it feels like the decisions you’re making now are going to influence everything you do forever. But that’s too heavy a burden to carry. Instead, just look at the next step.

Another thing I really like about microproductivity is that fragmenting a task can help give you a new perspective on it. You may be familiar with the notion of the “wisdom of the crowd.” The basic idea is that when you pool information from a bunch of different people you get a better outcome than you would from just one person. For example, a group of people can guess the number of jelly beans in a jar better than an individual. You can replicate some of the wisdom of the crowd yourself by approaching the same task from different contexts. So instead of having two different people guess the number of jelly beans, you can guess it now and then guess it later when you get home. Or, more usefully, you could write down a specific life goal right now, and then again when you get home this evening. Then, after you have lots of goals, you can filter them down to the ones that matter.

There are lots of ways to change your context, waiting for some time to pass and changing your location are just two examples. We’ve found that imaging doing a task from someone else’s perspective is really useful for this, too, especially when the task requires creativity. So as you think out your goals, you could ask yourself: what goal would my mom set for me? What goal would my friend set? What goal would Gary Marchionini set? And in doing so, you bring the wisdom of your imaginary crowd to bear on the problem.

Microproductivity is all about getting where you want by intentionally breaking the process of getting there down into small steps. The purpose of this is not to lose the big picture, but rather to make it easier to go through all of the little transitions you have to go through in order to make progress. In general we all tend do a great job setting ourselves up to thrive in a particular state – in a particular job, or in a particularly relationship, or living in a particular city – but we typically ignore how we transition between these states. And as a result, these transitions are often where things go wrong. But there is also magic in the transitions, they’re where the interesting and unexpected things happen. So my recommendation to you is to intentionally plan for the transitions in your life. And, of course, congratulations on your current transition, I hope it’s magical.