Introversion and Solitude Increase Productivity

bonch writes "Author Susan Cain argues that modern society's focus on charisma and group brainstorming has harmed creativity and productivity by removing the quiet, creative process. 'Research strongly suggests that people are more creative when they enjoy privacy and freedom from interruption. And the most spectacularly creative people in many fields are often introverted, according to studies by the psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Gregory Feist. They're extroverted enough to exchange and advance ideas, but see themselves as independent and individualistic. They're not joiners by nature.'"

Comments

Re:Interesting

[Yetihehe]

I've tried working from home, but I'm much more productive when I'm in office. I live alone, but when I'm not in office I just can't force myself to work as efficiently as in office where I know I have to work or someone will see that I'm procrastinating. Everyone is different, don't assume everyone likes what you like.
Also if you don't like your job, change it. I'm changing it tomorrow (setting and working conditions will be similiar, but programming will be closer to hardware, better pay will be nice too ;) ).

Groupthink

[slasho81]

Social groups deter any kind of radical thought or behavior. That's the groupthink phenomenon. The larger the group, the stronger the effect. That's why creativity never thrives in large organizations, and that's the reason the most creative social construct is the single person who does not need to compromise his or her ideas for the harmony of the group.

I roll my eyes every time I hear an organization of thousands of people is proclaiming it fosters innovation (or diversity, but that's another story).

Re:Not sure about this one.

[anubi]

I have never been able to "keep at" anything continuously for that long. Maybe a couple of hours. Then something will inevitably block me. I end up making things far more complicated than they need be,

At this point, I realize I am just digging in deeper and deeper, and making a mess.

By this time, I have fleshed out what has to be done, but the implementation I have so far really stinks.

That's when I do something else for a while. "Socialization", aka "Bullschitt Session".

I never married because I was always so addicted to my horsing around with my toys. ( No, I never played much with them, I ended up taking them apart to find out how they worked, and if I learned enough to reassemble it into something else, well that was good.).

I could never get anything "done" at the office. It was almost like trying to do ALU operations at the I/O port.

The office is where I do I/O. I find it very hard to be creative at the office. Its difficult to keep a chain of thought intact. I figure out how to do it somewhere else.

Lately, its been the local pizza parlor. I know the owner, He makes me a special pizza, and I will often sit all afternoon there, enjoying pizza, refining my designs in spiral-bound notebooks ( 10 cents each from Wal-Mart during their back-to-school special ). There is usually no-one there in the middle of the afternoon.

At home, I have all my computers with everything I need to try out any DSP algorithms, and its easy for me to quickie-prototype some code on an arduino, netburner, or propeller ( Andre LaMothe's "Chameleon", )

I can't do that kind of stuff at the office. Especially in management-laden businesses. I do this at home, where I have peace and quiet, and no-one cares if I "make a clutter". If I were married, the wife would certainly make me trash it.

I've been psychologically tested for social skills. I am INTP. Asperger too. So, I am apparently incapable of knowing what I am missing ( wifery, sports, concerts, etc. ). I highly enjoy technical discussions, but it is hard for me to find others who would rather discuss thermodynamics than football.

You can see where I work best in a small company who is struggling to survive, rather than large companies sailing on inertia. I have little to offer companies who have hundreds of thousands of dollars to hire managers who evaluate me by how well I conform to office politics... as I perform quite poorly at the desk. I run like WIN95 on 4 Meg of ram in an office environment.