The human brain doesn’t work like a filing system and isn’t good at multi-tasking for some time now, and we should be looking for a better way of working that suits the way the mind naturally works.
Multi-tasking is fine if you don’t care very much about any task. “So tweet while you’re watching TV, listen to podcasts while doing the laundry…But — and this is a big but — you cannot do two things at once if you care much about either task. People are often amazed to find they can write an entire white paper during a 3-hour flight, but it takes them all day at the office. Yep, because there’s Internet access at the office! You truly will get more done if you create blocks of time for the different priorities in your life.” Laura Vanderkam, author of a time management book called 168 Hours. She blames our ability to log on to the world 24/7 for growing feelings of frenzy and agitation.
Mindlab International at The Sussex Innovation Centre,carrie dout a studythat looked into how office workers manage existing data through traditional software and what developments could be made to impact on the efficiency of how it was managed.
Throughout the last few decades , the amount of data we have to process has increased substantially. We’ve made very little movement forward to help our brains to cope with such a huge influx.
In the last 150,000 years, our brain’s structure has developed minimally, yet we’re still expect o cope with more and more , and increasingly complex: documents, spreadsheets, databases, e-mails, social resources, specialist software and much more.
The research suggests:
- When carrying out routine, everyday tasks in the office, that when the data is displayed more visually, such as through visual maps, individuals are 17% more productive and need to use 20% less mental resources.
- What’s more, teams collaborating on a joint project use 10% less mental resources and are a whole 8% more productive when using visualisation tools.
So if we need to use such a lot less mental resources to deal with the same information once displayed in a more visual way, and we’re able to deal with a greater amount of information in a successful and effective manner, then this instantly increases our efficiency levels.
We are told a picture is worth a thousand words,and we’re virtually drowning in words ( information overload!) so companies should be jumping at the chance to condense data visually with mind maps and dashboards. That is why tools like Dundas Dashboards and Mind Manager are used by many of the world’s leading companies.
In an article from O’reilly Radar by Julie Steele, she writes that when it comes to data visualization they can be “at best confusing, and at worst misleading. But the good ones are an absolute revelation…“The best data visualizations are ones that expose something new about the underlying patters and relationships contained within the data” . The real power of data visualization is both interesting and engaging,.Help the readerto easily understand the information, while presenting it in an entertaining and engaging manner .
