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Learning vs. Doing (or why that Ph.D. took 10 years) | Our 2 SNPs

Learning vs. Doing (or why that Ph.D. took 10 years)

Posted on August 15, 2012 by Christophe Lambert

What prevents scientists from being more productive and if we knew, could we do
anything about it?
Id like to look at an often overlooked, but huge productivity inhibitor bad multitasking.
Many people put excellent multitasker on their resume as a badge of honor. We laud the
efficiency of a good multitasker they are rarely idle someone that busy must be
getting a lot of work done, right?
What Multitasking Looks Like, Visually
Let us visually consider the impact of multitasking on task completion, and see why Im tempted to put excellent
multitasker resumes into the round file.
In the figure below, we have 3 tasks which each take the same amount of time to complete say 15 days. If we
perform each task sequentially without interruption, then tasks A, B, and C will be completed at day 15, 30, and
45 respectively.

Consider then, a more typical multitasking workflow where we alternate between tasks A, B, and C doing, say 5
days of work on each before switching to the next one, alternating until all tasks are finished. As shown below,
task A is completed by day 35, task B by day 40, and task C by day 45.

For most projects it is fair to say that the benefits are not realized until the project is complete. That is, the
money, time, and resources invested in project execution is not bringing a return until project completion. In the
first scenario, the benefits of project A could be realized after 15 days, and project B after 30 days. In the
multitasking scenario, the benefits of project A and B were not realized until day 35 and beyond more than
double the time of serially tackling the tasks one by one.
It gets worse. Context switching between tasks causes loss of flow that state of uninterrupted concentration
where we work at our best. And lets also acknowledge that if 10 days elapses before returning our attention to a
task, that we are going to have to spend additional time recalling context and getting back up to speed from
where we left off.
Lets conservatively add a day of switching costs between each task. With this assumption, task A would be
done by day 41, task B by day 47, and task C by day 53. We have almost tripled the time to see the results from
task A!

Instead of 3 tasks, consider the

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Learning vs. Doing (or why that Ph.D. took 10 years) | Our 2 SNPs

dozens of things most of us have going concurrently in our lives it is no wonder we never finish many of the
things we start.
Why Researchers Are the Worst of Multitaskers
I contend that generally, researchers are the worst of multitaskers it would be unusual to find one with less
than 20 different irons in the fire. Like a butterfly or honeybee hopping from flower to flower, a researcher
delights in nothing more than starting something new, getting distracted by something else novel, and hopping
from one thing to the next. The productivity implications are devastating. Why then do we do this?
A very important need is satisfied by being a honeybee: cross-pollination of ideas. Researchers are driven by
curiosity, by learning. Seeking diversity and synergizing ideas across multiple domains is a well-used learning
strategy.
But this strategy puts a researcher into the following dilemma:

An evaporating cloud diagram describing the learn versus do conflict for

researchers.

In order to be a successful researcher, one must both learn and get a lot done, which for those in our field
usually means completing research projects and publishing results. To learn and satisfy the natural drive for
curiosity (B), a researcher naturally jumps from area to area in their intellectual exploration (multitasking) (D). On
the other hand, if a researcher wants to publish and get stuff done (C), they should seek to focus on few projects
and see them through to completion (minimize multitasking) (D).
So how does any doing get done? Professors have a great labor saving device, employed at least since the
time of Isaac Newton: the graduate student! Yet other than for the ber-funded, ideas for new projects can be
generated faster than any army of graduate students could hope to keep pace with. Can you say 10-year
Ph.D.? The multitasking gets transferred to them!
Multitasking and the Reiss Profile
Back to my opening question if we knew better would we do better? I have known about the killer implications
of bad multitasking for over 7 years, yet I have only begun to mend my ways. The curiosity urge is too strong.
I think the core reason we multitask boils down to one simple cause: at this moment I would rather do
something else. What then determines what we would rather do?
A psychology professor, Steven Reiss, did a factor analysis on hundreds of things people said they value and
came up with 16 reasonably orthogonal values that characterize goal-seeking behavior in humans (interestingly
their basis can be traced to evolutionary survival needs). He developed a test, the Reiss Profile, to determine the
extent the 16 values are higher or lower than average for a given person. The values are: acceptance,
romance/beauty, curiosity, eating, honor, family, idealism, independence, order, physical exercise, power,
saving, social contact, status, tranquility, and vengeance. Each of us have lower or higher levels of drive towards
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Learning vs. Doing (or why that Ph.D. took 10 years) | Our 2 SNPs

performing actions that fulfill the above needs. Further, our most dominant behaviors are
driven by attraction to doing more of what we value highly and aversion to doing more of
what we value minimally. I hypothesize that high curiosity is overrepresented among
researchers, and high order is overrepresented among administrators. This might
explain why there is often a fight between these two camps over filling out reports!
We have many values that drive our behavior. To the extent we can do work that fulfills
most or all of our needs simultaneously, we dont need to multitask. When this is not the
case, we multitask to fill up our value tanks as time elapses when we havent had
enough of something else we value, or to stop filling a tank of a value that is satiated.
The real challenge is to construct a career that maximizes action along the lines of what we value, and minimizes
or delegates actions we dont value to those who do value those activities. There are also ways of reframing so
that unvalued activities are seen in light of how they contribute at a higher level context to something we value
reducing the misery and stress of that stuff we just have to do but dont really want to.
Learning vs. Doing
So as researchers, would we rather be learning than doing? But wait a minute is that really possible?
The generation of knowledge occurs in a continuous cycle of forming theories or models that describe the way
the world works, and then testing those models in the arena of action, learning better ones through trial and error.
That is the essence of the scientific method discussed at length in a recent webinar of mine. It is easy to build
castles in the clouds ideas disconnected from reality and action if we only think and rarely do.

Taking the learn/do conflict to an international scale, consider the

positioning of America as a knowledge economy. While we may
differ on what we mean by this term, lurking in there is an idea
something like America will do the thinking and other economies will
do the doing. That is, we will specialize in the superior high-value
knowledge work, and offshore workers will roll up their sleeves and
do the dirty work of manual labor.
There is a key fallacy in positioning a nation exclusively as a knowledge economy. If you disconnect the learning
from the doing, you slow down both of them. Learning occurs fastest with the instant feedback of doing.
Therefore, the economies that roll up their sleeves, make things, and bounce models off of reality will learn an
order of magnitude faster than those who do so through others across an ocean and 12 time zones. The doers
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quickly catch up and become higher value situated knowledge

economies.
Consider that in science, if researchers stop short of trying to falsify
their hypotheses in the laboratory of reality, they dont really learn.
This was discussed at length in my post: Dammit Jim, Im a doctor,
not a bioinformatician! When you abstract a real-world problem into a
model, you reduce the degrees of freedom and then it is more
manageable. According to Ashbys law of requisite variety, if you want
to control a system, the controller has to have more degrees of
freedom than the controlee. Our models have low degrees of
freedom, and messy reality has high degrees of freedom. So it
actually takes more degrees of freedom, more mental horsepower to
translate theory into the world of action. This is the learning loop of
modeling reality and testing against reality.
So to sum up: there is no such thing as learning without doing it is a
false dichotomy!
And Me?
Obeying the maxim Physician heal thyself, Im working on the multitasking thing along with 20 other projects.
When I make some progress, Ill let you know. Fundamentally I think the challenge is making the paradigm shift
from: productivity=activity to productivity=task completion, and figuring out how to do what we love. And I
believe that there is a way to break the assumption that the only way to learn is through unfettered diversity
exploration. There is a 60+ year old body of knowledge, TRIZ, that breaks this assumption, but requires us to
bypass our normal (cherished) modes of thinking. That too represents a paradigm shift. So at the end of the day,
the real challenge is how to make paradigm shifts and not have to wait a generation for them to happen.
Nevertheless, there are simple things we can do short of making a paradigm shift that can give us a significant
productivity boost. Besides our butterfly mind, some of the biggest additional contributors to bad multitasking are
external factors that interrupt our concentrated work. It is pretty bad when we have institutionalized a culture of
automated interruption though email pop-ups with sound reminders on our computers and smartphones. I shut
these off years ago, and it has made a huge difference in creating conditions for uninterrupted flow.
Too much praise has been sung for the open door policy and management by walking around (interrupting)
and not enough attention to setting blocks of time aside that co-workers know are uninterruptible short of a real
emergency and this needs to include both physical and virtual (e.g. text message) interruptions. If the
productivity boost is not motivation enough, Ive discovered after weaning myself from the addiction to
continuous interruption, that the real payoff for uninterrupted flow is more happiness.
And who doesnt want more of that?

About Christophe Lambert

Dr. Christophe Lambert is the Chairman and CEO of Golden Helix, Inc., a bioinformatics software and services company he founded in Bozeman,
MT, USA in 1998. Dr. Lambert graduated with his Bachelors in Computer Science from Montana State University in 1992 and received his Ph.D. in
Computer Science from Duke University in 1997. He has performed interdisciplinary research in the life sciences for over twenty years.
View all posts by Christophe Lambert

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