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The Downside of 'Hypertasking'
Combuchan writes "An interesting article from AZ Central expounds upon the downside of 'hypertasking,' doing far too much at once, such as talking on the phone while doing office work at the Starbuck's has a whole host of negative side effects: irritability, impatience, sleeplessness, an overly extended workweek, and is largely unproductive. With wi-fi hotspots popping up everywhere and computing power shrinking, are we all doomed? Or, as the article indicates, it's possibily evolution of the mind at work."
I think to some extent we've got more technology than society has learned how to put to good use yet. E-mail in the workplace, for example, can be very destructive to productivity. I personally don't get that many e-mails at work but i've heard the Finance director saying he gets 400 e-mails a week. I fail to accept that reading all these e-mail is a productive use of his time and companies ran just fine before e-mail. Only uses the technology if it helps you work more efficiently. Being connected for the sake of being connected is no good.
I've found that when someone gets a text message in a pub it takes the priority over the guy sat across from the table. This is the technology working badly for you.. the guy who sent you the text message can wait.. the guy infront of you is more important.
My dad is around 50 years old but he's no technophobe. He says that the trick is to make the technology work for you . Make it your slave rather than your master. He doesn't leave his mobile phone on all the time but he turns it on to make a phone-call. He doesn't want to be contactable all the time but he wants to be able to contact others at any time. That's making the technology work for him!
Simon.
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Driving and talking on the phone. Obviously doing too much for the brain to handle.
Thank you for not posting a story that talks about Kerry vs. Bush, Republicans vs. Democrats, or US vs. Europe.
Anyone else misread this? If the amount of computing power were shrinking, I'd say we're all doomed...
Karma: Bad (mostly due to all those "In Soviet Russia" jokes)
The more they stay the same. This is no different from problems that can result from any other use of productivity-enhancing technology. IM clients can result in someone being overloaded with messages from friends who just want to talk, without realizing that the person at the other end of the line is also trying to work as well, for example.
The problem I have with all of these "doomsday" views of such technology is that they make the assumption that a person will invariably overdose themselves with connectivity, and continue to do so. In reality, just as with all things in nature, they more typically find an equilibrium, from which a beneficial balance can result. Those who do not find this equilibrium fail to keep up, and thus a form of evolution takes place as they end up being less productive than their co-workers (the 21st century version of competition among hunter-gatherers).
In short, over the years I've seen all sorts of communications technology (email, IM, cell phones, and so on) being blamed for various social maladies. But the only thing these connecting technologies give us are options; whatever good or bad comes from their use is our decision, not an inevitable result of the existence of the technology.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
I go to a school with WLAN and free use of laptops in class. I have experienced sleeplessness from the days where I was too much online, and it has been a little bit harder to remember what the teacher said.
On the other hand, I have found that my laptop is great for taking notes on, and that it makes my classes a lots easier.
This is only anecdotal evidence, of course, but I have a lot of trouble concentrating on tasks other that coding or the like using a computer - essays spring to mind. /. springs to mind - I was able to concentrate on the task at hand much more effectively.
I actually cranked out a typewriter the other day to cut down on distractions, and I found it did work.
With no instant distractions -
Maybe it just means we have lots of power to do things differently, and manage time effectively, but we never learned how.
Just because we can work at the Starbucks doesn't necessarily mean we should, but on the other hand, because we can, we can pick it as a regular place of work, and decide save an employer some dollars in office space, increasing our employee value.
There are lots of new disruptive technologies out there that can benefit both employers and employees, but only if the employees embrace them, as ways to get themselves more flexibility and other advantages. That means good things, provided we're all willing to become entrepreneurs of a sort, last I checked it was a minority that was ok with being responsible of all their own work conditions. (Lots of people are ok with being responsible for the benefits, but not of the tradeoffs.)
The proportion of it going on is however, likely to increase. The biggest problem we are facing will be effective management of people, we have effective clone management down to an art, and effective management of sheep too, but much more rarely of individuals. A good place to study this, for the researchers reading, would be to poll those successful game company managers, finding out how those who not only make games that rock the players, but mostly, finding the rare few, who make games on time, by feeding and stroking the egos of designers and creators, to get them to overaccomplish themselves instead of being at cross-purposes.
I'm not sure hypertaskers get stuff done faster. However they probably do have more fun doing several things at the same time. (How many of you are on IRC when you write code?)
[old fogey] It was 'more fun' to use a timesharing system, even though it was slower than an equivalently powered batch processing system. On those you had to wait for days before your turn came.[/old fogey]
Today's instant-gratification culture means it's more satisfying if your family/SO can contact you and communicate even when at work. Of course, some jobs (emergency medical respond teams etc) demand a high level of focus, but given the kind of desk jobs that abound today, it isn't surprising even technophobic folk are choosing to value connectedness over undistracted work.
Go somewhere random
is that the technology gives some people give the appearance the are doing huge amounts of work, bombarding you with phone/email questions and updates, producing meaningless charts to indicate something or other, when really they are negatively impacting your productivity by increasing the noise to signal ratio.
I often find the only way I can get some solid work done is to get in early before the morning email rounds kick off. I have also found it benificial on occasion to switch off my phone and physically disconnect my machine from the network. It pisses the some of the PHBs off but I am paid to produce results not provide running commentary and endless reports.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
wait, my cell phone's ringing ...
...] "You've got mail!"
"Hello, er, hold on, my crackberry is buzzing"
[Check's ema,
In my experience, managers are well aware of the negative effects of hypertasking and therefore require it of people they want to reduce the efficiacy of.
If they dicover you can do the "geek hyperfocus trick", they will immediately burden you with parallel and interrupting tasks to stop you working so efficiently that you challenge them and "show up" other's relative lack of ability. If they see that you have prioritised and serialised the tasks and are hyperfocusing on each one sequentially, they will interrupt you every few minutes - even when you are completing each task before its deadline.
Reminds me of the last school I worked at (as Network Admin.) Various support departments were e-mailing teachers a kabillion times a week, and as a result the teachers stopped reading the e-mails - there were too many. I told each department, "Hey, why don't we set up a web page, and each of you can have one paragraph on it. Then we just tell the teachers to check the web page once a day!" They would not consent to it - they said they had "too much information to share." When I pointed out that no one was reading their e-mails anyway at this point in time, they just looked at me. I'm pretty sure they were thinking "Don't confuse us with the facts!"
Music - www.richardmac.com
In my not so humble opinion, people that don't know when it makes sense to use technology and when it doesn't aren't the type that are going to be the most productive anyways.
Research suggests that people with IBS seem to have a colon that is more sensitive and reactive than usual to a variety of things, including certain foods and stress...
The colon responds strongly to stimuli (for example, foods or stress) that would not bother most people...
In people with IBS, stress and emotions can strongly affect the colon...
The following have been associated with a worsening of IBS symptoms... drinks with caffeine, such as coffee, tea, or colas; stress, conflict, or emotional upsets
http://digestive.niddk.nih.gov/ddiseases/pubs/ibs/ #whatcauses
PS: As most of you know, you can't get any real work done in an atmosphere of "hypertasking," i.e. if you're trying to do physics, math, or symbolic logic, then get yourself a cabin in the mountains.
You can hypertask fine as long as you're on internet time.
I hate to not discuss the article, but is anyone else having problems getting the page to render correctly in IE 6? Right now, it looks like two narrow columns superimposed over each other. Must be an excercise to hypertasking by reading two articles at once.
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
Just when I was starting to become confortable with the idea that extreme technological transhumanism is a kook philosophy, something like this comes around and points out a very real demand for computational implants and other data processing aids. Johnny Mnemonic here we come.
. . .as this new trend I've seen of people driving and text messaging at the same time.
Now there is the factor of adaptation. The MTV effect and all whereby we all learn to accept sub-second images in our commercials and music videos, lots of jump cuts, and so on. The brain does adapt, no question. So it wouldn't surprise me a bit to hear anecdotally of people who love this sort of hypertasking, and prove to be very productive at it. Good for them. But if you find yourself feeling stressed as you continually do three things at once, keep in mind that the brain is the brain and there is a limit to how far you can push it and still be productive and happy. We are all just rats in the corporate maze of life and sometimes we get irritated by the stresses.
When that happens, remember that many of you have the option to step back a bit. OK, so don't read the company email while sitting at Starbucks with an iPod blaring in your ear while you text your buddies on your cell phone. Makes you jumpy? Then pull out the ear plugs, sit in a quiet area instead of Starbucks, whatever you need to do. Leave the cell phone behind now and again. You are in control of your world, right, not the other way around?
Now I said "many of you" have that option so that I don't get flamed by the "you insensitive clod" types who feel trapped in a job that forces them into stressful circumstances. Do what you can. But remember, you do not have to feel like an experiment in evolution to see how far your brain can be stretched to cope with stress. Step back now and then and enjoy life.
While I agree with the article overall, their results are over-stated because, in my experience, the people foolish enough to do office work in a Starbucks while talking on their cellphones are also the type that have trouble walking and chewing gum at the same time as well.
The story quotes someone from MIT who did a study on something fairly simple; timing one's recognition response to colors and letters. The article tries to sensationalize it into a broad swath of "multitasking is inefficient.". Just what this means is totally unclear.
Be wary of anyone trying to simplify how humans think and work. No one understands the mind to any substantive degree--we have a hard time just figuring out how an ant's neurons fire when it walks.
Violate propriety
I use mobile communications to implement responsiveness rather than hypertasking. It's great to be able to check work email and get back to people quickly, either with an answer or at least a courtesy response.
Just yesterday I handled two minor issues while waiting at the automobile dealership service department. Two people got answers within minutes rather than waiting over a (USA) holiday weekend, and I cleared two tasks from next week's to-do list. Abosuletly joyful.
So I use the task-switching capability of mobile communications rather than the hypertasking capability, to the benefit of my coworkers and hopefully my career.
org.slashdot.post.SignatureNotFoundException: ewg
I've said this before, but I feel it bears repeating.
There is a difference between "being busy" and "being productive", and too damn many people don't know the difference.
I work with a guy who cannot go five minutes without being on the phone. He will be on business trips and call me to tell me how well a demo went. If there were no problems I really DON'T need to be interrupted in my work - it can wait until you get back, Rob. He will call me as he is driving in to work (a 10 minute drive) to tell me he wants to talk to me when he gets in.
He is the sort of person who feels that, if he is not talking to someone, writing a proposal, reading a proposal, etc., that he is not being productive.
Now, when he and I travel, I use the time waiting in the airport to review in my mind the things that will need to happen when we get to the customer, or long-range design plans, or just plain relax - so that when I need to work, I can do so at 100%.
All these people "hypertasking" - driving down the road making business calls that they have to "follow up on" because they cannot make proper notes, or don't have access to their information - in other words, wasting time. Wait until you can make the call, and resolve the issue with one call.
In short, be smart-lazy. Go read Heinlein's "The man who was too lazy to fail" in Time Enough For Love and be like him. When you do something, do it so as to spend as little work as possible to achive as much gain as possible. Sometimes, putting something off till tomorrow is better than doing it today (if putting it off will allow you to solve it once and for all, and trying to do it today means revisiting it tomorrow anyway).
People bitch about not having any "free time", yet every study done shows that we actually do have more "leasure time", but we fill it with so much crap that we have no "free time" left. If you feel overworked, if you feel like you have no free time, then examine all the things you do, and ask yourself "Do I *really* need to be doing this now, or am I just trying to be busy?"
www.eFax.com are spammers
I can quite happily do the opposite, going into a "coding trance", but lately it has become important to be able to multitask well (moved to a somewhat more sysadminny job involving running linux clusters). So I started to investigate ways to improve my ability there. The most fun thing to do was to write two different things at the same time, one pen in each hand. It feels very strange, but I'm getting better and better at it, and the exercise seems to have helped with other mental multitasking as well.
The strangest thing (apart from doing it itself), is just how much your handwriting changes compared to either hand alone.
Choice of masters is not freedom.
Hundreds of emails, floods of text messages, loads of IM buddies, PDA bulging with contacts, etc. Self importance and self worth are the order of the day. Kind of pathetic really.
This may sound like an odd thing to say but realizing one has options is a prerequist to taking the option. If one doesn't realize they have the option of just sitting in Starbucks without doing work then how are they supposed to stop hypertasking?
This isn't as simple as it sounds especially in a sectors of the economy that put the emphisis on "a lot is less is a lot more!" Like IT, if one person can manage 5 machines is there a way to make one person manage 10? Off the bat I would usually say "Yes, make them work twice as much". This is how you start down the path of hypertasking. You load up workers with abnormal but do able amounts of work. You find yourself having to do things at every possible moment of your day. It becomes habitial that you must be busy else you are doing something wrong. And once it becomes habitual it becomes harder to think "should I be doing this?" Worse yet is that your boss starts behaving and expecting high workloads as the norm. Your boss doesn't see any good reason why he should have people maintain five machines when they can maintain ten.
So sure you can say "just back off" but there are behavioral and monetary reasons they can't just back off. Striving to make operational units do more work with less reason is a good thing. However if they are already as efficient as possible, the only way to boost productivity is to make them hypertask. As the article points out this productivity really isn't an improvement since it costs the "sanity" of your workers.
In fact, my understanding (small though it be) of Zen philosophy says that we should concentrate excluseivly on one thing at a time, thus the value of meditation. Always seemed like it might actualy make for better multi-tsking, but I've never been able to find the time to do it.
Maybe we need a book: The Zen of Hyper-tasking.
Wait, I should rite that down.
irritability, impatience, sleeplessness, an overly extended workweek, and is largely unproductive
In other words, the modern workplace.
It probably wouldn't be a problem if it weren't expected. Well, expected up to the point where everyone is laid off, the company is loaded into trucks and the office building is bulldozed.
A lot of it also has to do with attention span. People, for the most part, simply cannot focus on one idea for more than about the interval between commercials in a sitcom. The whole "eyes glaze over" metaphor is nothing but a built-in excuse for everyone to be intellectually lazy. In the commercial culture, people who take the time to say anything remotely well-thought-out are ALWAYS looked at with some combination of alarm and revulsion by people around them.
Basically, as far as advertisers are concerned, life is a theme park. Commercials want people to just start running through the park and not stop to look at all the distractions. Oh, and spend money. LOTS of money.
Technology isn't the only factor driving the need to do more things at once. The workplace is demanding it.
Well, the workplace is full of shit.
Employers don't want to hire anyone who doesn't want to multitask, says Deborah Keary of the Society for Human Resource Management.
Well boo-fuckin-hoo.
They want people who can juggle multiple jobs, prioritize and handle multiple media, she says.
Yeah? I want a convertible. So what?
"That's how business is conducted these days, and there's no going back."
Well, maybe business is full of shit too.
"Society is kind of in meltdown," she says.
And management moves on to the bread course.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
Like France and some other European countries, who mandate a 35 hour work week, maximum. No more velvet sweat shops....
eat shiat and bark at the moon
Post bubble, be more concerned about the effects of Hyper Ass Kissing in the workplace.
"Prof Marois said that a VSTM capacity of four was probably not much of a problem in the relatively slower-paced lives of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Not so today, however. The fast pace of modern life is stretching our Stone Age brains to the limit." The article is here.
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it's from 01, but it's pretty intersting.
Creationists are a lot like zombies. Slow, but powerful and numerous. And they all want to eat our brains.
Sometimes Hypertasking is not about being faster, for example when I program to get one thing done I have to add three things, then notice 2 other things that I should fix or that could be cleaned up.
So Hypertasking becomes a routine, and adding another distraction to it isn't noticeable at first.
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
Aint the New Economy wonderful!?
Because people no longer talk to each other about politics much, the only political thoughts that cross their minds are the ones they hear in the car listening to talk radio and the ones they hear on teevee. And guess who control those political thoughts? The Man, the corporations, The Massa. And so not surprisingly the political ideas we get from those sources support the wonderful new "multitasking workplace". Gee, I wonder why?
Hey, didn't I hear President Bush talk about this "Economy of Today" during his convention nomination acceptance speech?
eat shiat and bark at the moon
Yeah, it worked for Ted Kaczynski! Harvard, Berkeley, PhD mathematics! Isolation isn't the cure - Technology is like any other aspect of your life. It needs balance.
No. All devices have an off switch somewhere; learn to use it from time to time.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
It's interesting to think of this as an opportunity for the "survival of the fittest" to apply. I have a co-worker who simply cannot focus without having several sensory inputs going on at once. By doing so, he can focus without distraction for long periods of time. He regularly works on 2-3 projects at once, and seems able to juggle an incredible number of simultaneous tasks. He's been diagnosed as ADHD.
Similarly, a good friend of mine (also diagnosed adult ADD/ADHD) who telecommutes by editing/publishing online comments keeps music blaring, and rarely has fewer than 10 windows open at a given time. She is constantly waiting for the computer (primarily the web server on the far side and/or her high-speed connection) to render results pages, and [Alt][Tab]s back and forth so fast it's almost impossible to keep up with what she's doing. If she's had caffiene... you'll get tired just watching her.
Perhaps we'll see people who have been labled "hyperactive" or "lacking focus" as the ones who will be magically productive in such environments. We may find that they're not distracted by such sensory overload--they may even be empowered by it.
If so, this will surely be a satisfying development for a large segment of the population that has traditionally been medicated toward being "normal." It may be that by allowing their brains to function the way they do without medication, they'll leave the rest of us in the technological dust.
Tim
There is one notable point in the article that actually persons are more productive when they perform one task. I could say that from the experience this is a fact which I would easily admit. And also would say that the way to resolve is better planning of activity and here - where most people would fail - just because they are not about to be self controlled and self motivated, and rather most are driven by outer stimulus. And taking the last fact for truth it is logical that to organize one person there is need in someone else that performs organizational tasks - and here it is automatically less efficient than two unorganized persons.
I think that either we should live with the fact and accept the stress under modern demands or somehow teach people to be more self organized and more efficient.
Personally ( again as I learn by experience that doing things as it described in article one per one is really MUCH more efficient than chasing few tasks altogether) I prefer make one task and be more efficient - the problem is that sometimes managers tend to overload me ( as there are quite a bit of my skills to use ;) ( maybe more correct to say abuse in this context ;) including ability to proces a lot of information fast) ) and give number of tasks to perform simultaneously. And really if skills are abused -
I become inefficient - but rarely people would allow me to run efficient way when I tell them I could run better in things are better sorted out.
So - being really useful and efficient for company and submission to manager's will to move faster in many tasks simulataneously are contradictory goals which could not be achieved.
And there is a difficult situation which requires to make decisions. One thing unfortunate things here in Russia that job market is very demanding and thus one has almost no way to affect management decisions being a specialist ( so no feedback is taken)but fortunately in russia things are less formal in job market and I could keep to be efficient without destroying myself just changing work ( though sometimes after investing all the efforts during several years to develop something it is a very tought decision).
So for me as a software developer and a foreigner it is really very interesting related question - how in US software developers could deal with demands which actually stifle their productivity still keeping relations with managers to be OK ? What is the practise? Are managers ready to move to plan things better? Or accept planned things which are planned to be implemented in order one by one?
The trick is not to let your life be run by the outside world, but interface with the outside world in a way that works best for you.
You get too many people calling you on the phone, or e-mailing you more than you have time to spend on answering them all? Get a secretary, and let him/her filter phone calls, e-mail or paperwork.
You want to focus on a particular activity? Tell people you work with, and don't ALLOW any interruptions during that activity. Business meetings are an example. Another example: I don't like being on the phone while I'm in busy traffic, or in the middle of shopping in a supermarket. Solution: I just leave my phone at home when I go out to buy groceries.
Don't let people grab your time whenever THEY feel like it, but give people the opportunity to do so when YOU're ready for them. In CPU terms: it might work better for you not to work in an interrupt-driven style, but use a polling method instead.
Lots of research has been done in the area of multitasking. One of the more insightful results is that much of what passes as "multitasking" is in fact task-switching. Each switch exacts a cost as we reorient ourselves to the new/old task. If you are really interested heres enough info to write your own thesis on the topic.
No, I disagree. Isolation IS the cure. Set aside part of the day to be uninterrupted, and the rest to "do email." Need to plow through a difficult paper? Take a seat in the bottom floor of the library, where nobody goes and there's no WiFi. Maybe I'm the only one who's too easily distracted, but I doubt it.
Just do a search on +multitasking +productivity You'll find articles like this one: Study: Multitasking is counterproductive. (published in 2001)
Also Zen Buddhists have known this for a long time. In fact they claim that spending every day some time doing nothing (meditating) increases your productivity. See: Zen and the Art of Corporate Productivity
Fine. If that works for you, have fun. Personally, I don't need to be totally isolated.
This is a nice idea, but the current trends in workplace design frequently make it impractical. For instance, my employer (Fortune 100 Corporation) recently renovated our building so that all of the programmers, managers, and technical people (everyone) lost private offices and went to cubes (53" walls on two sides, 60" wall on one). Our GM said we would be "surprised by the increase in productivity." He's right. If there's ever an increase in productivity, I'll be surprised.
My desk is now at a crossroads in the office, with our IT Admin behind me, and another project manager to my left. The cube design is such that ANYONE can lean over the main cube wall and start up a conversation. It matters not if I'm reading a complex technical spec, talking on a conference call, or simply staring at some code--anyone and everyone will strike up a conversation (that is, pull a non-maskable interrupt) about various topics.
To make matters worse, I'm a social person, who hates to seem rude or unsociable. In this environment, my willingness to socialize is my worst enemy. I have considered making a "DO NOT DISTURB" sign and putting it on the top edge of the cube wall. However, I'm quite certain our GM will have a fit over that, since by doing so, I'll be stifling "teaming opportunities."
I'd love to be back in a polling mode, but the new motherboard design allows no prioritization of NMI's, so I'm stuck.
Tim
You speak as if everyone else has as much trouble walking and chewing gum at the same time as you do.
I don't know about a cabin in the mountains, thats kind of expensive. For ~$7 US you can make a 24 oz Red Bull and Pepto Bismol shake (2 cans of red bull, 1 bottle of Pepto Bismol, vodka to taste)* and sip it all day while sitting on the toilet in a public restroom (free!) and working on your Wi-Fi enabled laptop (sadly, not free).
*this milkshake is not recommended for consumption by children under 10, adults, dogs, cats, gerbils, pre-teens, or teenagers. May cause unspecified cramping, swelling or acute ADHD of the butt. May cause testicular retraction, lactating, and uncontrollable vomiting. Studies on lab rats have shown links to cannabalism, twitching, lesions, goatse, and talking like a pirate. Not for internal use.
-
I don't really think so.. See, I can't exactly see the evolutionary advantage in being able perform lots of work tasks at the same time. There isn't such a strong link between work performance and survival anymore.
Now.. a mutation enabling you to work, talk on the phone, and have sex at the same time, that would be an evolutionary advantage!
But I'll agree it'd be nice knowing these stress problems were only temporary.. solving themselves in a million years or so.
Indignant male driver reports:
"I was driving to work the other morning, when I looked over to the car in the next lane. There was this woman, going over the speed limit at least 70 miles an hour, with her face right up against the rear view mirror putting on her makeup.
"I looked away a moment, and when I looked back, she was still at it, and drifting into my lane. It scared me so bad I dropped my electric shaver. Trying to catch both it and my doughnut which I had been holding in my other hand, and while trying to straighten out the car with my knees on the steering wheel, I dropped my cell phone into my coffee, which I was holding between my legs, scalding my crotch and also losing a very important call.
"I somehow got control of the car, mopped up the coffee, brushed off the doughnut crumbs, got the shaver off the floor and dialed the person back that I had been talking with. When I looked over, there was that woman, oblivious to it all, now combing her hair and still crowding into my lane.
"Darned women drivers!!!"
From the article:
I agree with you that the above observation is not new. Adam Smith in his Wealth of Nations commented on the very same phenomenon. In fact, his observation appears in the very first chapter of the book:
This observation no doubt appears even earlier in literature. I just happened to recall reading it in Smith.
quiquid id est, timeo puellas et oscula dantes.
I think the trend is a vente mocha valencia with soy ip doubleclick [return] Tuesday at 9? Yah, I'm free.
rewriting history since 2109
I haven't been part of the main workforce yet, due to the fact im still in highschool. The problems we face with having alot of tech are similar, but for me, its a huge blessing.
Personaly, im the kind of guy, who gets off on full focused crunch. Not that I don't plan ahdad (usualy), but i get the most done at 4 am. What happens when your working on a group project? somthing worth 15+% of your term mark?
being able to deligate to my group members every 20 mins, and bounce off any thing new ive created, really helps, especialy when i can see the gain right away.
For me, i wouldn't be able to get this stuff done, without these tools. I'd be sitting in my basment, at 3 am, wondering whats getting done, and what to do. Plus my spelling is horrible, and to have 3 freinds to check my work, is really helpful. (this is highschool, some peopls just don't sleep).
To be fair, ive lerned i have to turn of my music when i really need to get some work done. the funny/hard part, is figuring out how difficult the work is, this is highschool, rember.
Hotspots and computing power have nothing to do with how unproductive people are. It's always been true that people with a task list need to organize it and focus on the current task at hand. The coming tasks will get their focus in turn, and worrying about them while working on something else causes you to forget steps, rush things out, and rush other people that might be associated with it (causing irritation ripples through time). The trick is getting other people who are unorganized and rushed into recognizing that you don't have time for their issue at this exact moment but they are in the queue. Realistic priorities must be respected: making everything priority 1 means nothing has priority over anything else, defeating the system. If things really were priority 1, that's a sure sign that things around you have broken down due to lack of resources and it's time to get out of that situation.
Technology like PDAs, most of which is now built into cell phones, can help by making a todo list, even if it is just a text file that you edit with a priority number. The rest is up to you to coordinate with fellow humans, and has nothing to do with technology. Most of us seem to lack those skills because you just don't get that sort of training in school.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
As anyone who has played Starcraft while trying to keep your Mom thinking you're actually talking to her at the same time will testify, both tasks suffer.
The value of pervasive connectiveity, IMO, is that it permits you to do work at times when circumstances require you to be away from your desktop. The only way I stay atop my 300 email a week inbox and still stay productive is by using my laptop in cabs, on planes, even in the subway. I recently decided to invest in a PDA because it will permit me to at least read my email when I not able use a laptop (like when I am waiting in an airplane boarding queue, when the flight is taxing, while waiting for a cab/bus/subway and even while my wife is in some womens clothing store).
The point is mutlitasking can sometimes be usefull and efficient provided it is done at times where you are performing a task that involves litmited stimuli and pervesive connectivity will only assist that.
Kristoph
I currently work anywhere from 60 to 90 hours every week. This is on-the-clock time, not including time I spend doing paperwork, reading and studying for certifications, and answering calls from technicians that are in the field that have questions.
The first month it was hard getting myself into that schedule and way of life...now, if I take a day off in the week, my body wants to go and do things....
It's really sad...at one point in time, I worked to relieve stress....and now my secondary stress reliever is stressing me out.
I disable sigs...do you?
I used to go to coffee shops to do productive work away from my email, etc... however, nowadays almost all of the coffee shops offer WiFi. Especially, the non-corporate shops seem to use free WiFi to draw people away from Starbucks. I guess now I have to rely on my "will-power" to prevent myself to get on the 'net, check Slashdot, read my email etc..., while "forcing" myself to relax and enjoy a Mocha. -ingo
Oh god ...
:)
I wish I had some mod points to spare right now
I'm gonna print this sucker off & tape it
to my cube at work
Thank you, you just made my day
This story was a bit of a wakeup call for me.
I got a laptop at start of this year & thought "great now I can use those hours I was losing on the ferry and the bus between classes, home & work". So I enrolled for a full study load as well as working 34 hours a week. 1/2 a semester later I have to drop half the subjects & take some time off work cause I was starting to lose it. I was getting snappy with friends & customers, not sleeping & trying to do much more than I could handle.
The scary thing for me was realising how much I was denying that it was a problem.
I've experiments to run, there is research to be done on the people who are still alive.
"I have considered making a "DO NOT DISTURB" sign and putting it on the top edge of the cube wall."
People who just dont even get it when you're turning headphones up and pointedly ignore taps on the shoulder sometimes actually do pause for a second when you put up a sign.
But I'm starting to consider electrified concertina wire.
When I'm in this situation I just wear headphones. It's a "do not disturb" sign that says "I'm doing something" without saying "you're not important enough to disturb me."
I work at Starbuck's!
Say it right: "Nuc-le-ah Powah".
Go to small, local diners. Sit by yourself. Bring a laptop, notebook, pen, etc. Have lunch. Have coffee. Take your time. Work at your leisure, but _do_ do work. Talk to the staff. Don't worry about distractions -- they're far fewer than, for example, the distractions of working at home (TV, games, family, hobbies like a guitar, etc.), and they're a LOT less likely to offer free WiFi access, which is a GOOD thing.
Also, the distractions caused by other human beings doing things around you are good. Embrace them, and it'll mean you're actually interacting with other _real_ human beings. That what life's about anyway. Community, family. Starbucks et al don't have that.
I go to work at the diner down the street every chance I get. It costs me lunch every time, and I'm sure it's not the healthiest food, but I accomplish far more that way, and I know when it's time to call it quits when my laptop battery is just about up. Then when I get home, I check my email, answer questions, and then my work day is done. Before I go, I check my email also. You don't have to have your email on all the time. You also don't need to work all the time. The amazing thing is that I used to work like crazy, because that's what small business owners do. Since I decided to stop that, because the lifestyle isn't sustainable, nor enjoyable, I'm much happier, and I get more done than I was before, both work-wise and in my personal life. I read again. I talk to my family. I see my friends. A world of difference.
Not to say I'm perfect or anything like that, or that I've got all the answers (yeah right! the only thing I know for sure is I ain't got a clue!), but it came down to the choice of living to work or working to live. And as much as I enjoy what I do, I don't live for it.
putfwd.com - 1GB Free file storage with a twist
My dad gave me that story to read when I was a young, unproductive slacker. Now I'm an older, wiser, and productive slacker. Go figure.
:P
Re: your coworker- I have the dubious joy of suffering two of those, both prone to mood swings and verbal ejaculation at me of shit that has nothing whatsoever to do with me... because I'm THERE. I have another "friend" who has anxiety attacks and psychotic episodes if he's alone for more than a few hours- his deal is if he doesn't have anybody to hang out with, then NOBODY LIKES HIM. Weirdass worldview if you ask me- and calling me at work at ten PM to whine me questions that are in the documentation is a great way to prove your paranoia.
People who have a seemingly inconceivable NEED to communicate annoy the everloving SHIT out of me, since this is largely not my personality type. The proposal bit you mention is definitely related to productivity- the leghumping need for communication, on the other hand, I believe is a psychological issue.
As for free time... I wanted some more of that, so I quit smoking. Gave me an extra seventeen hours a week.
Some people might consider a full inbox, answering machine, PDA, etceteras to be bragging rights. Good for them- I put it in the same category as the hundreds of people I overhear in Pittsburgh whining "I'M SOOOO TIRED...." on the street, on the bus, etceteras. I don't fucking care. You're tired? DRINK SOME COFFEE. STOP WHINING.
:|
It's a "look at me!" sort of thing. If they were in my office and doped up on coffee, they'd be whining about how much spam they have in their inbox.
Me, I get too much email for it to be useful anymore. I can't run AIM without getting all three of my monitors loaded with messages within minutes. The desire of people to communicate with me and my desire to be communicated with, I've found, are inversely proportionate.
On the one hand, I find it amusing that a couple of term windows running irssi and tcpdump makes me look extremely busy on otherwise slow days.
:|
On the other hand, I have a very narrow, very easily broken attention span. You might call it a "one track mind", whereby I can only give one thing my full attention at once. Can't background processes. One of the reasons why I fucking HATE the telephone- not only am I talking, I have to figure out how to manage a banana-shaped hunk of plastic.... and I can't fucking DO anything. I get a phone call and I'm stuck staring at my monitor, unable to get anything done. I can't. The conversation competely disables that part of my brain.
Naturally, I have a concentration-intensive job in an open, too-accessible office. I have afternoon and evening hours (12-8 compared to the usual 9-5), and I get damned near all of my work done between five and eight. Assuming my coworkers actually leave. The last year or so, they've been hanging around after work more and more and more because they're somebody THERE to hang out WITH (even if I have my headphones clamped on blasting Whitehouse...).... which pushes the hours I can actually Get Work Done to past ten PM, or on certain weekends, or when certain people aren't in the office.
Most work shit I can handle, but subtitling (pacing/keying) requires a level of focus I can't get most of the time.
As for the phone.... I pull the plug on it after five, and plug it back in before I leave. That's a relic of giving my work number to the wrong people a long time ago more than it is work sanity.
I've noticed that for a lot of people, Work Is Life.
I have a dream T-Shirt I want to make to wear to work. On the front, it will say, "Does not play well with idiots." On the back it will say, "I'm not deaf, I'm ignoring you."
Yes, it is, and that's the point. Being "contactable all the time" is just friggin' stupid. There's not enough time in the day and not enough patience in the soul to deal with all the world's idiots.
That is: if all the world's idiots have your number. My phone number is only known by family, friends and maybe other people that I would not mind contacting me. My phone is on most of the time. Deliberately turning it off to avoid being called by people I like would be a bit odd. Unless on occasions where I want to dedicate my time exclusively to one of them in person.
Z
They give us options, but also they give options to employers, PHBs, cients and such; who expect to be able to contact you, at the time they want, even on non bussines hours.
Damn Slashdot!
WiFi at a place to relax (coffee/drug house? relaxed? suspend disbeleif) is for Slashdot, porn, and gaming. You play Counter-Strike at Starbucks cuz your boss would kill you if you did it at work. Sounds like some people need to rethink their priorities.
But by all means, keep the volume up. Starbucks baristas seem to love the sounds of gunfire and explosions.
As the ancient Greeks codified oral tradition -- cradle of their intellectual development -- into written words, conservatives lamented that writing would cause men to forget how to memorize and recite the odes of blind Homer.
And so it was: Hellas forgot the skill of epic poetry.
Who today -- even an Icelander? -- memorizes a hundred lines of saga
And why is this so? Because writing is more efficient -- more efficacious -- than oral tradition. Writing gets things done. Writing matters, in the sense of ideas represented by material tokens.
So it is with tranquility in our time: a forgotten art, made obsolete by our intellectual technology.
So hypertask, damn you -- hypertask! This world is dog-eat-dog, and Devil take the hindmost!
-kgj
-kgj
Anybody who's actually been to the edge of hypertasking knows that when you finish you've been used and abused... so fuck it, I'm finished... time for somebody else to prove they've got what it takes. And good luck being in a rational enough state when your finished to actually prove you're a "hyper tasker".
||| I still can't believe Parkay's not butter.
This multitasking issue is akin to the division of labor argument made by Adam Smith a few centuries ago. The productivity increases of the industrial age came by allowing people to concentrate on their piece of the puzzle. The tech boom is largely about speed and access to information...however, to solidify the gains we need to answer the scaling issue.
This situation seems to me to the perfect application of AI technology. If we could each have our own intelligent digital assistant that managed our email and phone calls for us, screened crap and prioritized for us we could eliminate a lot of stress and probably increase productivity. Really, it'd be as if each worker had their own personal secretary to screen calls, sort email and set schedules.
:-)
Actually come to think of it, I wonder if current Bayesian filter techniques could be applied to managing legitimate email instead of just filtering spam? During the filters training period you just set your own priority to each message and eventually it could develope it's own rules for which senders are important, which keywords in the subject/body elevate it's importance, how the content of the TO:, CC: and BCC: headers affect it's importance etc... Damn if I were a programmer I'd start work on that... any programmers out there wanna tackle this one? You can have the idea royalty and patent free!
"Listen: We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different!" - Kurt Vonnegut
At my job instant digital communication is used to get permission for every little thing you do to cover your rear. It really kills productivity, especially when you have to explain to some idiot why he shouldn't do the dumb thing he wants permission for. Better to let them get burned a few times.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Tech workers are misused and abused and then laid off. I have had it. I have lived and worked my entire life in NYC (in Unix) and my wife and I have enough friends who have started new lives in New Mexico, Colorado and other far less stressful states to show us that this is completely unecessary. Time to go into teaching (which I have done before in NYC and even that's less stressful) somewhere in Northern NM. Salaries are weak there, but so is the cost of living. Our friend's house has a living room the size of our entire apartment and their place cost $250K in Santa Fe. I have a high salary now, so time to save and start a 5 year plan to move.
-- "You can lead a yak to water, but you can't teach an old dog to make a silk purse out of a pig in a poke" - Opus
One of the hard truths I've learned over the years is that if you work more then 40 hours a week (on average, occasional OT is fine), you accomplish LESS then if you had worked say 35.
People who regularly work long days and weekends aren't working harder than the guys working regular hours, they're usually working poorly, or are just plan incompetant.
The fact is most of us really only do about 4 to 6 hours of work in a day, and unless you let yourself get put in a job that should be done by two people, you should be able to get your work done in that amount of time.
The problems arise from bad work habits, too many pointless meetings, and phone meetings (which are almost always worthless).
As a professional with 20 years in technology under my belt I almost NEVER work OT anymore. I could care less about 'Face time' and 30 to 35 hours a week is often all I will come into the office for. And I still outperform most 50 to 60 hour guys. Managers who are more concerned with hours than production should be fired, along with people who plan so poorly that all hell always breaks loose at the end of the production cycle.
Having actually worked in jobs that meant the life or death of people, I find it hard to get terribly excited or worried about 'end of the world' claims and other excess hype from upper managers when some little widget breaks. Running around like your head is on fire never solves anything.
When I manage I compt time all my workers, sometimes telling them to stay out of the office for a few days and go have some fun. Oddly enough my groups always get more work done, are more relaxed and happier, then those groups led by those 'hard working' managers who never go home.
Go figure.
Doing far too much at once... kind of like that sentence?
Or is the article claiming that working on a holiday is a defining characteristic of "hypertasking"? Lots of people work on holidays without attempting to do multiple things at once. Is there any alleged linkage between these two disparate ideas?
Having a dog around definitely does not qualify as multitasking. I've worked with and without dogs, and did not find them to impose a cognitive burden. I'm less sure about the child, but wouldn't it be more accurate to say that he's distracting his Mom than to say she's "multitasking"?
How does this differ from "multitasking"? Is hypertasking merely excessive multitasking? Then what is its relation to Starbucks and 802.11? A person can spend hours in Starbucks immersed in a single task (such as reading Slashdot) via 802.11. The article fails to articulate this alleged link.
Really? Who believes that? It looks to me as if business continues to run on a scale of days and weeks, not microseconds or nanonseconds. If you want someone to review a document, for example, you always have to allow at least a week, usually more. Does that sound like an "instantaneous world"?
There's actually an interesting point buried under this nonsense - the research of Yuhong Jiang corresponds to the experience of most programmers that distractions lower efficiency. But then we find this:Damaging? Brain damage via distraction? That's quite a claim, and should have at least a quote.
If you are keeping up with your MSwindows updates, your computing power is indeed shrinking... the software's bloating faster than the hardware is speeding up!
If you are running Red Hat or SUSE, you are breaking even, and if you are running Slack or Gentoo affordable computing power is increasing.
Our GM said we would be "surprised by the increase in productivity."
It sounds better than saying that he would be surprised by the decrease in the cost of office space. Companies use cube farms for one reason: it's cheaper. You can put more people in the space and spend less money to do it. This must be sold to the employee as somehow being beneficial, so that's where the "increased productivity" line of BS comes from.
I think a lot of people who will agree that doing a million things at once is bad for you will find themselves doing that anyway. When everything around you encourages "hypertasking", it's easy to fall into it without even realizing what you are doing.
I try to meditate at least once a day, and it is a great cure. When the mind starts racing, it may be difficult to reign it back in and get it out of the "hypertasking" mode. Meditating is a great way to slow it down, provide some peace and let you either relax or truly focus for whatever work needs to be done. When I meditate on my lunch break, I find that I spend the afternoon much more focused, productive, AND relaxed than usual.
Have you seen the patent examiners' complaints about Image File Wrapper? The interesting thing is that examiners are more likely to complain about lost productivity because their productivity is very closely measured, which is unusual in white collar jobs.
But, we are limited in 'understanding how the mind is performing' by our understanding of the mind. To use your example, mechanical engineers. Yes, you can design a car or bridge without understanding the atom. But, can you build a nano-scale robot without understanding the atom? Or a space elevator? (think carbon nanotubes?)
Our understanding of the mind limits our understanding of how the mind performs. The real question is, how much? What can/can't we understand now?
Laws are horrible moral guides, moral guides make even worse laws.
GUY SITTING ACROSS FROM YOU IS A DOUBLE AGENT STOP DO NOT TRUST HIM STOP
The above is facetious, but the point I wanted to make is, when you're talking to a guy at a pub, you're pretty sure that there's nothing life threatening or emergency-related about your conversation. The text message, on the other hand, could be telling you that someone died or that your house is on fire, your stocks have tanked, your wife left you, or who knows what else. It takes all of 2 seconds to read it, and if it needs a response, maybe another 30 to compose and send it. If it doesn't, you can safely ignore it and continue with your conversation, only minimally disrupted.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
because it's the only way she can get thru to you...I see it all the time lately...people ignoring the people around them for another "meaningless" business call. Untill one day the people "around" them get the hint and go away...they call when they really want something!!!
I have nothing to add, just saw your uid... Teh ivil number, written rightside/flipside. Sweet.
Am I the only one who remembers the movies where a big shot is talking on two phones, yelling "Buy!" and "Sell!" into them, chomping on a cigar and watching the output of his stock market ticker tape machine???
Being the title of one of my favorite books, about a Dutch guy who seeks the meaning of life in a Zen monastary in Kyoto. The monks did not use the term "hypertasking", but they did suggest that the guy was pushing too hard when he tried to combine brushing his teeth with urinating. This is an image that will always stay with me!
I find myself doing this at work quite a bit.
I work in an office environment where 6 people including my boss can look up and ask me something. Since I handle just about everything at this completely internet-based company that has to do with our websites or servers, I generally rarely get to do the tasks I need to do since there is always something more important happening that needs to get done. It sucks, and until recently it really was getting to me. I had never felt job stress before since working with computers has always been a hobby and even work was fun. I rarely had less than 10 browsers and 15 ssh sessions open and less than 3 things going on at the same time.
The people who watch me work say "holy crap how can you alt-tab so fast, slow down.." They're right its really counter productive. Even now I've made it a point to get one task done, if someone asks me to do something I write it down if it can wait an hour and if possible I close everything I am finished working with. But it's only working to a point because I still am still answering questions and getting new things to do.
I thought this was how everyone worked, until we started hiring some guys who have been around for a while (10 years in their field) these guys work slower than hell, now I know why. I don't think I can keep at the pace I'm going now before my head explodes.
Obviously, you haven't heard of eXtreme Programming. It requires you to run test suites before checking in code changes. That means you can read /. without any loss of productivity, because you (well, actually, your machine) continues to work.
I work as the CTO of a small educational software company. I'm one of 4 partners in the company. I make it a point to start late, and work late. This is because:
1) Customers call during business hours;
2) Customers rarely need to be contacted immediately - but need software delivered on time,
3) Customers stop calling at around 3:00, and
4) I need several hours in a day without interruptions in order to focus and write quality software. I get this time typically between 3:00 and 8:00, I'm available for "customer relations" from about 11:00 or noon on, and this lets me provide a satisfactory customer experience, while still allowing me to optimize my schedule for software development.
The bottom line is that customers pay for software, not for questions answered. Questions answered is part of the sales cycle, but if software doesn't get written, customers will not buy. Send me an email, and you'll generally get a response in 24-48 hours.
If I were to shift my schedule back to something "normal", I'd probably see a 50% reduction in software development from all the interruptions I'd get...
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
avoided making the phone call. I just asked the secretary point blank if I could call so she'd talk to me instead of the phone. She got the idea. I got her to place the rest of the lines on hold and she talked to me.
..........FULL STOP.
Of course everyone has to fit around your schedule, and it forces you to make choices of what you want to do. I stopped watching TV entirely for 5 years, except for an occasional rented DVD. Rehearse with my band once a week, only date a girl more than once if I really liked her., etc.
Many people can do this, you'd be surprised how much time most people spend d*cking around, wasting it.
..........FULL STOP.
P.S. Want a gmail invite? Email me: tropavantgarde att gmail.com
--A witty sig proves nothing.--
Ward's Wiki has a whole page on what to do with cubicle envrionments:
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?LordOfTheFlies
The only caveat is at least one person involved has to be indispensible.
My favorite one is to build a fort out of the cube walls, and when maintenance comes to put them back, paint your faces with highlighters, go in the fort, and beat on the desks like jungle drums until they go away. I chuckle every time I think about it.
I went on the offensive. I found about 8 copies of Visual SlickEdit and put them across the top of the most commonly abused cube wall. People stopped looking over to say "Hi," and suddenly, the empty cube across and down one space was suggested as an alternative location.
I think most people got the hint, but there are still a few hold-outs. I make them stand there now for at least 10 seconds, even if it means that I read and re-read the same e-mail message several times. If they start to interrupt, I hold up one hand to quiet them, and finish counting to 10.
I'm starting to enjoy this...
Tim