Not only do we have, for the first time in history, five generations actively working in the workplace, but thanks to social media and digital innovations, we have unfiltered access to information. We can gather insights and opinions from around the world. Couple that information with the megaphone of social media giving everyone a voice and we were bound to run into some disappointments. Some of these disappointments surfaced in the shape of tweeting from the toilet, cat gifs going viral and getting access to people’s thoughts that we wish we hadn’t.
But as digital emerged, the generational divide seemed to expand. Older generations were focused on blaming technology for ruining society. They dug their heads into the sand and hoped that this use of technology was just a fad. All the while, the younger generation took the technology to an extreme and lost sight of “soft skills” (a set of skills that are very important to older generations).
Fast forward to 2020 and I feel the digital divide has been closed. Those who were trying to stop innovation and believed social media was a passing fad have now embraced it. In many cases, they're even more reliant and connected to technology than the younger generations they detested for so long. At the same time, the younger generation has realized that there’s so much to learn and that when it comes to human behaviors and understanding what works, technology and social media amplify and scale, but don’t replace the needed skills.
The days of having one tv channel for entertainment and a daily newspaper for your news are long gone. We are living in an on-demand, real-time world where we have endless options for entertainment. Our news is updated as it happens and is provided to us in every format possible from written to audio to video to even augmented and virtual realities.
Embracing the Chaos
We must learn to embrace the chaos.
The change will continue to happen and it will continue to happen at the speed of light. It will be up to each and every one of us to understand our individual workflows and how they work into the chaos. No two people work in the exact same way, but we are all working in a noisy environment. We need to be able to define a workflow we can rely on and understand the points that can be flexible to the landscape.
It’s all about what works for you and how you are going to organize the chaos.
Want an example? I breakdown what works for me when it comes to productivity and process in this episode of the FOMOFanz podcast that you can listen to here.
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