Unleashing the Multimind – What’s next – or could be – in our most personal daily experience and utilization of all this stuff

Session Topic: Multimind

Tuesday 4C

Convener: Estee Solomon Gray, mmindd labs, @estee

Notes-taker(s): Darren Lancaster, mmindd labs, @thecommunityguy

Tags for the session - technology discussed/ideas considered:

• UX

• user experience

• user value

• multiminding

• personal data Discussion notes, key understandings, outstanding questions, observations, and, if appropriate to this discussion: action items, next steps:

Opening thoughts

• Transactional value vs. use value

• Multi-device world is assumed, 2 often at the same time on the same task

• Think about how you orchestrate your life, the tools you use, your digital and non-digital tools, how you achieve, how you manage your productivity, time, attention.

• The opportunity: shift modes from multitasking to multiminding

• Parents have one mind per kid. Minding a child isn’t tasking, it’s meeting and responding to needs, achieving outcomes.

• Work mind: multiple minds per team member, projects, customers.

• All these minds are open and active in parallel.

• We’re doing work that requires minding, not tasking. Achieving anything requires working through others, interdependent work, not solo work.

Discussion

• Why minding vs. roles? Health or self minds exist, but are not quite the same as a role.

• Is this based on academic research? No, based on gender-based research and interviews. The background started from the perspective of reinventing health clubs. Surfaced tons of differences between how the genders manage their lives. Different attention patterns.

• Design and discovery experience is required.

• Mary: How men & women communicate, research in how women’s vs. men’s minds develop. Men killed the beast and communicated it. Women were exploring and gathering, communicating a longer story to other women to assist them. There was value in the different style of communications. Their survival depended on these various communication styles. Premise of mmindd labs is providing a more sociological identity; faceted identities. Going beyond just the technical terms of identity. Tools for men & women need to reflect our different operating principles and communication styles.

• Drummond: Use a Word Doc to do my task orientations. How do I go from multitasking to multiminding?

• Instead of a list, it’s a bubble diagram. This is about what is my life’s work?

• We want to activate the visual mind vs. lists.

• Is it about a better goal-setting mechanism vs. living in tasks? GTD (Getting Things Done) is about acting sequentially on a single task at a time. Assume “I” am the engine, but today, most often you achieve through others. We’re embedded in teams and families. Loops allow you to achieve a higher intent and assume others are likely involved.

• Can you populate the user interface passively? Calendar and tasking is most important personal data, secondary are contacts and relationships.

• “You’re almost an engine of nothing by yourself”

• Drummond: Loops are called personal channels in the Internet Identity world.

• Karen: people have told me that talking to me is like ping-pong. What gets lost is where I spend my time, real life patterns, helping surface where I WANT to spend my time. Is this the way I want to spend my life?

• The biggest hurdle is inputting data. My data resides in lots of locations, but it’s all probably accessible.

• I have 13 different projects that I can’t handle by myself. We’ve hit the wall on multi-tasking. Switching minds takes effort.

• It’s hard to stay in the flow state; easy to get into rabbit holes. Multiminding is tolerating living outside of the flow state as best as we can.

• Others know your state, or mind, are you in maker mind, would be extremely useful.

• Karen: I get into a better flow state if I’m able to hop around quickly.

• Experience layers: will you be partnering with others soon to build these layers? Will you partner with others, like in real estate, to help people know they should consider a new location to move where they will be more productive. This is where this usage case meets transactional layers.

• Why loops? Loops circle back, but it’s not clear that’s the right UI paradigm giving “moving forward”. Loops are not specifically interdependent.