{"id":4552,"date":"2019-02-08T12:45:05","date_gmt":"2019-02-08T17:45:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lisa.rushworth.us\/?p=4552"},"modified":"2019-02-04T12:59:06","modified_gmt":"2019-02-04T17:59:06","slug":"cognitive-theory-microsoft-teams","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/?p=4552","title":{"rendered":"Cognitive Theory & Microsoft Teams"},"content":{"rendered":"

We’ve been using Microsoft Teams for most of this year, and I find it to be an incredibly efficient<\/em> way to work. That’s not just a personal preference — years ago, I followed research on how human brains multi-task. TL;DR? Rarely well! Performing multiple natural activities, those that don’t put much demand on the prefrontal cortex, did not greatly diminish efficiency (I can<\/em> walk and chew gum at the same time!). But\u00a0fMRI scans performed by the Institut National de la Sant\u00e9 et de la Recherche M\u00e9dicale in Paris<\/a> showed that the prefrontal cortex has a left and right side which cooperate to focus on a single task but work independently when the subject was given two tasks. And when the subject was given three tasks? The rate at which a task was forgotten increased and errors were three times as likely for the tasks that were performed.<\/p>\n

The recommendation was to dedicate chunks of time — 20 or 30 minutes — to a particular subject, then move on to a new subject rather than bounce back and forth between topics. Sounded great in theory, but each morning I’d sit down and start going through e-mail. The epitome of rapid topic shifting — read through something, switch to the next message\/topic, maybe do a little work on that topic, go to the next one.<\/p>\n

Starting my day in Teams is completely different — any channel that has had activity is bold. I can click on a channel, finish everything related to that topic, then move on to the next channel. Instead of jumping from topic to topic, and wasting time mentally “shifting gears”.<\/p>\n

During a busy day, multiple channels light up with activity … but having each topic contained to its own location helps me maintain focus on that topic. Extrapolating — it makes sense to create a new channel or team for different projects instead of having multiple projects discussed within the same channel.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We’ve been using Microsoft Teams for most of this year, and I find it to be an incredibly efficient way to work. That’s not just a personal preference — years ago, I followed research on how human brains multi-task. TL;DR? Rarely well! Performing multiple natural activities, those that don’t put much demand on the prefrontal …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[677],"tags":[675,691,729,666,686],"class_list":["post-4552","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-office-365","tag-did-you-know","tag-microsoft-office","tag-microsoft-office-365","tag-microsoft-teams","tag-ms-teams"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4552","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4552"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4552\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4553,"href":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4552\/revisions\/4553"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4552"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4552"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4552"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}