Driven to Distraction by Technology 261
Ant writes "CNET News.com says 'The typical office worker is interrupted every three minutes by a phone call, e-mail, instant message or other distraction. The problem is that it takes about eight uninterrupted minutes for the brains to get into a really creative state. The result, says Carl Honore, journalist and author of "In Praise of Slowness," is a situation where the digital communications that were supposed to make working lives run more smoothly are actually preventing people from getting critical tasks accomplished.'"
Open offices (Score:5, Interesting)
Especially this is difficult when I cannot give an instant answer and have to think about it for a minute. I first need to change my way of thinking into the model of the interrupting project and then back to the original project that I'm supposed to be working on. Afterwards I probably have to figure out some things for the second time because they were lost in the process.
E-mails or IM's aren't so bad, they just pop up a little square in the lower left corner of the screen and I can deal with them later. Other people or phonecalls are harder to ignore.
Re:Only if you pay attention (Score:5, Interesting)
+1 Damn Straight, that article (Score:0, Interesting)
Operating Room support (Score:3, Interesting)
My strategy is to ignore eamil and my personal phone line and just worry about the emergencies for the first 5 hours of my day, then try to do the actual engineering work with whatever time is left. Works ok, but it would be nice to have more free time. Unfortunately, I just can turn off my pager.
If you're distracted during the week... (Score:2, Interesting)
Works for me.
Compulsive Email (Score:3, Interesting)
This is quite terrible, given that most stuff can be ignored, yet we get emails and voice mails all the time.
I think this is one reason why people totally despise spam.
I remember in '91 there was a guy who would go on "vacation" (with the vacation program) even when in the office. You'd mail him and get a note that he was realy busy, and would respond later. If you went and interrupted him, it needed to be really, really urgent, or he'd have a fit.
I thought it was odd then, but now it makes perfect sense.
We're not yet accustomed to it (Score:2, Interesting)
Just read the article: more and more companies are realizing that they cannot continue with all of the information management like they have used to. At first, these little tricks will seem pretty odd, but once we filter out those that work for everyone involved, they will be strategies commonly used across entire industries.
Use your head... (Score:2, Interesting)
I myself will simply ignore the email and focus on what I must accomplish. Then when I'm at a breaking point, I'll look at the email.
Simple old-fashioned prioritization.
All thing fall under:
- Urgent or Not Urgent
- Important or not Important
That forms a 2x2 matrix, and all problems should be ranked accordingly. Then, it becomes clear what the most efficient way to deal with the issues are.Telecommute (Score:4, Interesting)
Next day did not show up at the office and logged on from home through VPN and shut off my phones. Worked my 8 hours and got back to work next day. They had a problem with it, but I said it was billable time and I had to allocate the entire day to one client that was basically a convoluted research project.
The reason why I was surprised at the reaction? I live 3 miles from my office. Any urgent ticket, for which I have real-time notification, would have same speed of response if not quicker than calling me in the office.
Some people just don't get it, but it's a good option if you can make it work. I much prefer working in my home office with a high end sound system rather than the open-doored office in subzero temperatures.
I've been successful another 2 times so far to work remotely and converted most customers for remote access.
Re:Org problem, not tech problem (Score:4, Interesting)
I find that Outlooks "Display a notification message when a new mail arrives" option is a substantial productivily killer because not only does it flash a window up in your face, but it taunts you to stop working on your current thing by giving you a one button press to view the email.
With this off, the only way to tell that you have email is a small icon in the system tray. If that is still too much then you can either exit Outlook completely or use something like Knockout [sunflowerhead.com] to remove the icon.
Re:Org problem, not tech problem (Score:2, Interesting)
It is interesting to note the case of Donald E Knuth (of The Art of Computer Programming fame), no doubt one of the most productive and eminent scientists of our age. He stopped using email 15+ years ago!!
http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.h
And the point is well made. Email can be a distraction and the solution has to come from the consumer of the technology in terms of deciding how to use it.
But what do we do to the itch for checking slashdot every 3 minutes
Telephones are the worst. (Score:2, Interesting)
No news for me (Score:3, Interesting)
Microsoft is already there (Score:2, Interesting)
Welcome to the Machine (Score:3, Interesting)
But the main defense is not just computers, or even personal discipline like "concentration". Mainly, we need to care more about our jobs. When our work itself is engrossing, we aren't as distracted by mere "wazzup?" messages from friends when we're busy. The real best use of the technology will be to keep all the administrivia of our jobs from sucking up our time, where we're most vulnerable to pleasant distractions.
Personally, since my work is even more fun that posting to Slashdot, I get in my time only during the interstices between work tasks. Makes task switching seem like a social break. So I can work many hours at a time, without leaving the keyboard. On second thought, maybe I should be taking a walk to talk F2F with some real humans...
Re:I don't believe it (Score:3, Interesting)
I guess that depends on what you're doing...things can easily still "get done," but one has to wonder about the negative influence that these distractions might be having- not just on the end results, but on the overall well-being of those involved (think "stress").
Now, we have people like Bill Gates, who fancies himself as some kind of sociological genius. To wit:
Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates has tried to make the case that however overwhelmed workers may feel, they are actually suffering from "information underload." The problem, he says, is that today's software doesn't do an adequate job of filtering information and presenting it in more useful ways.
This is part of the problem, not the solution. At the end of the day, humans are still human, and as such, there are limitations. I tend to favor the other side of the fence, where you're not forcing people to deal with more information (no matter how it's packaged), but encouraging people to maximize conditions which lead to good productiivty. Stress and overload are not where it
's at. I remember reading a few years ago about a company that completely unplugged their e-mail system, and productivity shot through the roof.