“active role of the environment in driving cognitive processes,” end quote.
the environment you’re in makes a big difference in how you think / how well you think?
And as Andy Clark points out, a computer would never have an idea printed out, have to read it with their eyes, make up lots of marks in the margins, and then pass it around to their colleagues and then have a whole new understanding of that idea. That’s not how computers work, but that’s how people work. And so when we think of ourselves as loopy creatures, we can kind of create those loops where we’re passing information and ideas in and out of these different domains — the body, spaces, other people’s minds — and then back through our own heads. And that’s a much more fertile and generative way of dealing with information than just always keeping it inside our own heads where it’s not going to be changed or altered or improved in any way.
the idea of loops is interesting — makes it so much more valuable to get feedback from people
And the best results are produced by those people who have a kind of oscillation between talking with people, going back and having a private space and private time and quiet to think about their own ideas, and then it’s actually another kind of loop.
maybe I should try to do this
And that always struck me as the odd irony of open floor or open office plans. And you tap this in the book, that there’s some evidence that when companies move to being an open plan office, they often see a reduction in the amount of collaboration and conversation that happens. And when I used to do that, I had noise canceling headphones on all the time, and I was simultaneously always over socialized and a little under socialized, which is to say that I couldn’t get away from people. So it’s not like I was yearning for more people. But the interactions I was having were not deep and they were not interactions I often wanted. So at the same time, it wasn’t that I was getting my social needs met. And I thought back to other times when I’ve been in offices or in more cubicles when you’re working and you want to leave the office and talk to people. You want to move to that other modality, which I guess speaks to your idea of looping.
I kinda agree with this. Still to be seen how much collaboration happens once more people start coming to the office, but as of now, I don’t think the open-floor plan contributes to collaboration at Airtable at all.
But really what produces effective work in our own daily lives often involves offloading our mental contents onto physical space, whether that’s a whiteboard or a set of post-it notes, which is my favorite tool, or onto multiple monitors so that we can start using this whole other suite of abilities that are built into the human organism.
I really think I would benefit from having a whiteboard to write ideas on. Some big canvas where I can easily brainstorm things.
even just having a more accurate conception of your own mind allows you to work with it differently
yeah, this is what I’m trying to do, but a ton of people don’t get the opportunity to do this (because they don’t have the luxury of spending 90 minutes on reading articles like “thinking about thinking”
tags: #productivity #insights