Why More Isn’t Always Better
Everyone is consumed with wanting more, and doing more, knowing more, using more. This is the overall obsession for a lot of people when looking at what they do. Theory doing more is going to be better. Unfortunately there are trade offs with doing more that should be recognized.
“Doing More” can be broken down in to two areas for me personally. There is adding more to the number of items that you do in a particular day. While the other part of “Doing More” refers to how you complete the tasks that you are focused on.
One of the things that you need to realize is that if you are going to add things to your task list unfortunately something will get pushed to the side. If you do more, you have less time. If you have more to focus on, your attention is spread. If you do more you have to take time away from other areas which are important. Opportunity Cost is at play with every decision that you make, realizing this should help us to make better decisions.
Adding things is not always a net positive for people. The biggest takeaway when someone decides that they will want to do more come in the cost of both TIME and ATTENTION. To me controlling your own time and attention is the biggest area of value going forward with people. Everyone is so very distracted by so many things in their lives. Some coaches might say that they want to use Blast, and Rapsodo, and K-Vest, and TrackMan and Force Plates! Which is great. But I don’t think that you if you used everything you would be using everything to its fullest instructional strength.
To make an analogy its like the Restaurant that has 6 pages of food items to choose from. Unfortunately not every item can be that good (Sorry Cheese Cake Factory). The point is that there is so much pressure to always be adding that we often don’t ask ourselves some key questions like “Am I using this to its full capacity?” or “How can I improve my instruction while using this technology?” questions that probably need to be asked more often than they are currently being asked. The list goes on. Often we think great I’ll just use it all, and we will figure it out later on.
Obviously the flip side of this isn’t great either. The person who says that they don’t want to use any technology or devices, or data in their own instruction is just as bad off as the person who decides that they will use everything and ends up poor instruction. There is a middle area that should be addressed. Carefully selecting the pieces of technology that will be leveraged effectively should be the goal. Implementation of these technology are often messy. We often forget that because you have access to everything doesn’t mean that you should be using everything everyday.
Understanding the limitations both positive, and negative when it comes to these technologies take time, and trial and error. Being effective with them takes both experience and experimentation.Considering how you use these pieces of technology, when you use, how you use them, and why you use them is overlooked. Seeking out best practices, and a deeper understanding of both how they can be used, and what they tell us about athletes should be the goal. Building a set of best practices that we can lean on, and distribute to others within an organization is an area of improvement for all.
You might actually be better off cutting down on the things that you do in order to spend more energy on the things that are truly going to get you the results that you want. Deciding what you value, or what your organization values should be the first steps in the process. How you use the technology is much more important than how many different technologies you use.
