Open Thread: Are You a Nibbler or a Gulper?

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?

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