Tim Harford is someone who is likely to come up a lot here. Between his writings, his podcasts, and his TED talks he blows my mind regularly. His latest TED talk from nearly a year ago is a great example. I came across it this week by way of his podcast Cautionary Tales (which I am sure will come up again another week). In the talk he defines and then explores the idea of slow motion multitasking, where exceedingly creative people seem to keep many projects at a slow boil over a long period of time shifting between them based on frustration, desire, luck, and other factors.
This is a fascinating idea but it isn’t something he discovered, it has been a subject of study before just with a different name, hobbies. Now someone could argue that Darwin’s fascination with earthworms expanded beyond being a hobby but the mechanics are the same. Spending effort at being good to great at something else can pay large creative dividends (among other advantages).
However, time is a zero sum game. There are only so many hours available and if you dedicate significant time to another activity you are making a choice to not focus on the job at hand. Harford would argue that this shift is worth it, assuming you don’t lose your job. But I think another person has some good advice in this area, Yvon Chouinard, the founder of Patagonia. In his book “Let my people go surfing” he says that he never wants to be better than 85% at any one outdoor activity because the work and focus required to get above that isn’t worth it. A lot of time is spent praising unicorns or 10x people, 99% people and certainly in some roles I think it might be worth it. But consider the information here and pick up a hobby, the power of context switching, slow multitasking, or whatever it is termed is real and it may be a powerful force in some of the most creative leaps forward.