Open Thread: Are You a Nibbler or a Gulper?
July 11th, 2007 (10:30am) Mike Gunderloy 16 CommentsTweet This
We’ve talked before about one of the big divisions in web workerdom, the one between pilers and filers. But how you do your work is at least as important as how you put things away when you’re done, and there’s a potential personality clash lurking here that can be the undoing of otherwise-strong teams. I’m referring to the gap between nibblers and gulpers.
The distinction is easiest to see when you’re faced with a long-running task made up of numerous smaller subtasks – anything from writing a software application to cleaning your house.
The nibbler embraces the principles of continuous partial attention and burst, and doesn’t necessarily stay “on task” for one long, continuous stretch. Faced with a 5 day task and a deadline two weeks in the future, the nibbler will figure out how to fit in twenty two-hour sessions to get the job done. In between, there are distractions, emergencies, and pieces of other tasks, all intermingled to form a day that hops from one thing to another without apparent pattern.
The gulper, on the other hand, takes to heart the evidence on the cost of context-switching. They know that our brains are not designed to hope efficiently from one thing to another, and that work gets done faster if you stay focused without interruptions. Given a five-day task, the gulper prefers to check their calendar, find an open slot, and work on it for five days straight, getting one thing done before starting another.
Problems can arise in an organization that has a mix of nibblers and gulpers. It’s easy for gulpers to see nibblers as lazy and irresponsible types who never get things done as quickly as they could, and nibblers to see gulpers and inflexible people who stand in the way of being able to work at the speed of the web. As with other personality clashes, there’s no quick fix to this, but recognizing the syndrome is the first step towards being able to acknowledge the value of both approaches.
I’m a nibbler myself, and I have a sneaking suspicion that runs in the web worker family, due to our life on the net. But you tell me – where do you fall on this one?
Web Work 101: How To Escape The Cubicle
100% nibbler. It’s a good thing that I switched from Business to Computer Science, huh?
Nibbler here. I take any task and break it up into many many different parts, then I get those tasks compelted. I think that Gulpers will never get anything doen if they had to find a string of days where they are doing nothing.
Gulper becoming a Nibbler when required ;-)
not to be picky, but there is a typo here. I think you meant “hop” not “hope efficiently from one thing to another”
nibbler, but gulper under crunch.
I like “gulping” but I end up “nibbling” most of the time. Nibbling allows time for an idea to “fester” on the back-burner while I’m working on another thing. That’s good for generating creative ideas.
Foo Foo
I saw this post title in my RSS feeds and thought WWD was moving into porn related coverage.
Big time linear doer here! Multi-tasking only means that it is very difficult to get so focused on finishing one thing that you can give it 100% of your attention when you are working on it. So I guess that means that I am a gulper.
I am a nibbler, but I am trying to act as gulper.
Hard stuff! :)
I nibble in the morning start gulping around noon. if I finish what I’m trying to gulp, I’ll polish the day off with some nibblin’
I think my gulping to nibbling ratio has a lot to do with whether or not I’m doing a flow-type of task. When I’m painting, I gulp, although detail work at the end of the painting tends to be in nibble doses since I need to keep re-approaching my work with fresh eyes. And I have occassionally hit flow with my primary job (running my startup with my husband) and can work in fairly productive gulps. But if I’m unable to hit flow, I work in nibbles, which can be good, but in general is less productive for me personally. My web working style is the antithesis of my painting style. Early stage projects for me work great with nibbles, but for me to finish a task, I need to gulp. With a toddler and a soon to be one-year-old in the house, flow is very hard to come by. So I guess I’ll continue to nibble overall and gulp when I can ;)
as the deadline approaches, my tiny nibbles spontaneously turn into gargantuan gulps.
This resonates with me. I’m a gulper who is forced into nibbling given the blessing/curse of ubiquitous connectivity.
I’m a gulper, married to a nibbler (this post’s author). As long as we work on distinctly separate pieces of a given project, it seems to work ok, but whenever there’s overlap it can be a little stressful. Maybe gulpers are more suited to certain types of work or development, and nibblers are more suited to others?
Gulp!!!
I’m a nibbler, and find that the biggest productivity drain is not the context switching but worrying about the context swtiching. Nibbling for me is about “work on a project until you’re stuck then switch to something else,” where occasionally I do get in flow and take a big gulp. On the other hand, when I get stuck quickly I tend to feel guilty about it and waste time checking e-mail over and over instead of just switching to the next important task I’m not stuck on.