Slashdot Mirror
Life Interrupted
sch7572 writes "Seattle Times carried this story which may be of interest to those addicted to checking Slashdot for new stories every minute. Scientists are concerned that the Information Age is nurturing 'cognitive overload,' an umbrella term for the malaise people feel as a result of distraction, stress, multitasking, and data congestion related to increasingly sophisticated technologies. People multitask because it is expected, encouraged, and considered vital, yet cognitive scientist David Meyer reports that truly effective multitasking is beyond people's capabilities."
"David Meyer reports that truly effective multitasking is beyond people's capabilities"...
I wish he had some time to come over and talk to my employers.
cognitive scientist David Meyer reports that truly effective multitasking is beyond people's capabilities
Not yet, but I think eventually it might not be beyond our capabilities, just like learning how to produce heat from wood, and now from splitting atoms.
I spent some time working in the support department for one of my previous companies. After a full day of answering phones, answering questions, problem solving, and tracking things down, I would come home and be absolutely exhausted. All of the constant context switching was very bad for my mental health. Sure, I was able to do the job, but it totally numbed my brain out and made me a tired, frustrated person.
Now as a software engineer I try to work on only one thing at a time. If I try to do more than that then all of my efforts fall behind. If I can focus on one task though, it gets done and done right.
42 - So long and thanks for all the fish.
People multitask because it is expected, encouraged, and considered vital, yet cognitive scientist David Meyer reports that truly effective multitasking is beyond people's capabilities."
I suspect this is where the problem lies. The difference between "effective multitasking" and "bumming on the internet" is the crucial point. Both are attempting jumping from one task to another, the first for a pupose say doing your job. The second doesnt have a purpose or a structure so it has no more purpose than doing it itself.
It is almost as if you are addicted to performing a task (browsing the internet) and the performing of the task becomes the goal, instead of working towards, something at the end.
Net Online Anime Gallery's
Maybe eventually you'll want to do your own thinking, instead of regurgitating the factoids you "learn" on websites to impress your friends.
is that I can see the fnords!
It's not like we read the stories...
Just look at the comments people leave. It's pretty obvious that the average Slashdotters attention span is about that of a -Oh look a bunny!
However, speaking (sadly enough) as a member of the "older generation" who actually implmented some of the changes in technology and communication you discuss in the far-distant 1980s and 90s, let me offer this: I used to work in industrial facilities designed and built in the 1920-1940 time period. Along with my "young people", "progressive" coworkers I spent a lot of time, effort, and money "upgrading" these facilities to what we considered "better" technology. All fully computerized of course.
Looking back on what we did, I now realize that those engineers from the 1940s were a lot smarter than we were, and thought about the problems they were assigned a lot more deeply than we did (you see this all the time in VoIP today). The "improvements" that we installed to replace that "archiac" technology were not, in retrospect, necessarily improvements, and may not have done anyone any good.
E-mail is another good example. I have been using it since the late 1970s. During the 1985-1995 time frame it may have actually been a net productivity gain. Today? Probably the biggest productivity destroyer out there.
Be careful what you wish for. You may get it.
sPh
I think the article is generalizing too much. Firstly, multi-tasking is the wrong word to use as we're not simultaneously doing two or more activities, but are doing it in a round-robin, pre-emptive, or time-sharing kind of way. Again, one's ability to successfully pull this off depends on one's temperament, prioritization ability, and the kind of work involved. Repetitive work can easily be done in this way, for example, simply because after sufficient practise, the work itself becomes mechanical and doesn't need any cognitive ability. On the other hand, work that requires genuine thinking effort is done best without interruption, especially when one is in the "flow" or "zone". Again, if a person has the mental discipline to ignore other interruptions or re-priorotize the distractions, it's not too much of a problem.
In another vein, we've always had distractions, and the ones posed by technology are just a new form of it. What separates an efficient individual from an inefficient one is the ability to block out these distractions when needed, and only focus on the goal at hand. The rest is all FUD that these so-called cognitive experts throw in to justify their existence. I'm fedup of these experts extrapolating some extreme cases and generalizing them to create non-existent issues.
Cognitive overload. Bah. We've always had cognitive overload. Only the jingo is new. I think i should change my profession and start bullshitting my way into some real money.
This article is yet another apologist for neoliberalism. See these quotes from the story:
"It's hard to take time off. Competition on a global level -- the company's bottom line and your job -- is fierce.
But WHY is competition so fierce? Why not MAKE our government dampen and control the leverage that competitive forces have on us? Why not adopt some of the lush welfare state facets of the Scandanavian social democracies? If your govt provides a solid welfare state to back you up if you fail, then you do not feel as harsh a grip when it comes to fear of competition. Hey, it works in Europe. France, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, etc., they mostly all work an average of 1500 hours a year (mandatory 35 hours weeks and 5-6 week vacations in most of those countries), and if you get fired/laid off, you can get years of unemployment. Competition is less of a threat, also because their trade law are not so....ahem..."free". They do not have the threat of third world IT workers coming at them. Like we do, right?
Why is that? Why do their protect them from the harshest competition, and ours exposes us to as much competition as possible?
Shelly Lundberg, a labor economist who teaches at the University of Washington, studies how families behave. The economy is about time, she says, not money. And as an economist, she takes a dispassionate view.
In other words, she is an apologist for neoliberalism and globalization!
"If you're feeling pressed for time and too busy, well, that's your choice," Lundberg says. "This isn't a poverty-stricken country; there is freedom of action. Time is of the essence . . . And what you spend your time on reflects your values."
In other words, TOUGH IT OUT, slave!
eat shiat and bark at the moon
Ah but are you truly watching the TV and listening and typing?
Try to sing a song while you type something completely unrelated and then tell me what the guy on TV was saying while you were doing it.
Most of us probably feel that way, but the larger question is why do we want to multitask so much, and when we do multitask are we actually losing something in the process? Looking back on the time in my life before I became jacked in to the Net (my teens and early 20s), I realize that I spent a lot more time actually *thinking deeply* about things than I do now. These days I am aware of a broad range of interesting and useful information, and I consider myself fairly capable of filtering it well.
But even with filtering, the sheer mass of information moving through my consciousness is enough to keep me from sitting for any length of time and truly pondering something in detail. The times when I am able to unplug and think are the times I feel the most relaxed and at peace.
That's one reason some people cling to analog methods - they want to maintain a sense of cognitive equilibrium. Although I'm immersed in the Net almost every day, I prefer paper books to eBooks for the simple reason that I can detach from bits and pixels. Outdoor exercise does the same thing for me, and although I love my iPod, I don't use it when I'm out enjoying nature.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
I've told management: "I don't want to run an instant messenger, it hurts my productivity and is very stressful"
They replied: "It's the way we're doing business as a team"
Now I'm looking for a job elsewhere, because exactly as described in the article, I'm exhausted at the end of the day, I have a backlog of projects like you wouldn't imagine, it's stupid.
I've found myself reluctant to focus on complex tasks because I expect to be interrupted. Interruptions from instant messaging are often emergencies which occupy a whole day with stupid little updates and inappropriate prioritization. It seems the A-hole bugging you on IM is more important than the person silently and patiently waiting for the scheduled deadline.
I forget things, I can't read a document to completion or properly compose replies to email. Infact... right now, I'm avoiding a complex task... my IM will crackle to life any second with some stupid emergency. It feels futile to even get started when it takes an hour just to set things up to start working on it. Four times in the past two weeks, my instant messenger has dragged me into some emergency which has prevented me from working on it.
I'm trying to push management back to a usenet-style system for "I need help!" emergencies and a careful analysis of timelines and responsibility (i.e. fault and impact) before anyone picks up a phone. There's nothing wrong with interrupting people if there's an emergency, but management should be able to prevent it from reaching that point.
(Hey look, I got an instant message! and it should only take about two hours to deal with. Glad I didn't get started on that project.)
If you had RTFA you would know that you are a dellusioned individual. You "WANT to" because you are addicted to the dopamine that is released each time you learn "new stuff" or "expand [your] understanding of the world".
Tell me, do you feel down, or groggy, or in any way sad, when you do not monitor your couple of dozen sites? What happens when you go for a day or two without internet access? These would be withdrawal symptoms.
So, you show a prime example of the problem -- no, in fact your are the very epidome. You think you are using every conceivable second of your life to the fullest. You have this push to experience everything immediately and constantly. But for what reason? Why do they have to all occur simultaneously? More importantly, how did you come about the decision that doing only one thing at a time is "complete waste of precious time"!?
Logically following your views to their conclusion would mean that the moment you focus on anything it becomes a waste of time. This is so absolutely flawed, I am now speechless.
Please take an objective view of yourself, and discover what your motives (if any) are for feeling the way you do. Then please respond and tell me how they are not in any way related to your dopamine addiction.
Looking at the comments I can see that everyone's attention span is on par with a dog. Did anyone here actually RTFA? The article obviously is very valid since everyone here is trying to do like 4+ things at the same time and doesn't have the attention span to actually get through the article.
... that's actually really sad. I'd like to think that I can actually focus on some code for more than 12 minutes on occasion.
"So far, she's found that the average employee switches tasks every three minutes, is interrupted every two minutes and has a maximum focus stretch of 12 minutes."
Well I guess maybe the article took more than 3 minutes to read for most or they were interrupted by IM, email, coworker, phone, blackberry or whatever else. I don't think I get interrupted every two minutes, but a maximum focus stretch of 12 minutes
Just as a thought, has anyone studied gender differences in this? From my experience, women are more used to multitasking than men. They've had to mind the kids, watch dinner on the stove, and do other household tasks all at the same time. Men tend to like to focus on one task at a time as they'd have had to do to hunt successfully.
;-)
Nothing against either gender, but just something I've noticed. I know both my husband and my father get very annoyed when the females of the family carry on two or more conversations at once - they feel we're not listening to them when in reality, we heard them & will answer them when we've finished the comment we're making in the other conversation
I call bullshit. If you think that younger people don't have about the same context switching costs as older people, or can store more than the 7 +/- 2 pieces of information in their head at once, please post a cite showing this. I doubt you will be able to.
Your post may be true for something, but it certainly isn't true for what this article talks about, which is the dangers of multitasking.
According to the article we should focus on only one task at a time and not switch between tasks.
/.ish things to say:
This leaves me with two
1) I will then focus all my attention on this thread until such time as I deem the task complete
or
2) As I focus myself on this threa . . . Oh look a new thingy to work on!
This leads me to wonder if ADD / ADHD are actually coping mechanisms of the human mind? It kind of makes sense, as our brains are programmed for task switching at an early age with most kids being babysat by the TV and commercials being 30 seconds in length. Anybody know how long the feature program is between commercial breaks? 12 minutes perhaps?
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
You no doubt get anxious or sleepy watching television not because of your constant exposure to technology, but because nothing on TV is intellectually satisfying. Except for football.
Unfortunately, wanting to does not protect your brain from damage caused by prolonged exposure to stress hormones. Those getting hit by stress burnout are often the ones that want to and enjoy what they do.
I'm reminded of a note on Dr. Donald Knuth's web page. Dr. Knuth apparently ditched e-mail in 1990 after 15 years of use.
Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration.
I don't really think this is true multitasking. You are talking about context switching....or switching between different tasks at a rapid rate. Tell me, can you listen to a leacture, take notes on it, and read /. at the SAME EXACT MOMENT? I'm not talking about looking up, listening, then writing..I am talking about doing it all at once (true multitasking). So, can you?
More than likely you cannot, as most humans generally find. The problem this article is mainly discussing, is summed up in two words: 'information overload'. When you are inundated with information that you cannot process fast enough, some people may end up switching from one to the other in confusion/struggle/etc and end up not getting much done (because true multi-tasking is not built into us).
I'd say this is a big problem in our information centric world now...and the cure? Push the off button, stretch your muscles, relax, take one step at a time...and most importantly one step at a time in one direction at a time. I think you might find you get more done, are happier, and generally more care free (IMO). Don't let yourself get distracted, focus on whats at hand rather than being a slave to everything around you. Breath, and just go forward. Learn to say no when it matters, and learn to not bother saying no when you shouldn't have to.
Just my humble opinion, take it with a truckload of salt...but it works for me.
/* sig */
ind it interesting that, at least in the studies I've read about this, that it affects mostly adults, and younger people are largely immune to it.
Hmm, first, which studies?
Secondly, and more to the point, "younger people are largely immune to it" so far. Youth implies a shorter exposure to the hazards of multitasking, not neccesarily a greater inherent resistance to it's ill effects.
In fact, Human Resource departments and therapists are seeing more and more people are burning out in their mid-twenties. Stress releated conditions, such as ulcers, hypertension, etc, normally seen in middle age, are becoming increasingly common in younger and younger individuals.
So you can't state "younger people are largely immune" until you have actually seen them grow older without ill effect, and the early evidence is not on your side.
suppose it's simply that older people, not being used to this mass of information
It's been decades since an average person could first easily recieve vastly more information in a day than they could ever process. (For an interesting historical sidetrip, look up the 19th century origins of the hypothysised medical condition "neurasthesia," attributed to the prevalance of the telegraph and telephone and how they sped up the pace of life. Even if neurasthesia is a bogus condition, it tells you something about how long information overload has been an issue.) Don't fall victim to an intellectual version of the same "immortality syndrome" that convinces teenagers they can engage in any reckless physical behavior they choose, because they, unlike all the old people, will never die.
"Just once, I'd like to meet an alien menace that wasn't immune to bullets." -- The Brigadier, Dr. Who
I really don't spend much time on TV but when I'm ready for sleep I sometimes surf the cable offerings. I've noticed because of my ability to multitask that some cable channels have about 7 minutes between commercials.
That is why I hate TV. If you took the commercials out of commercial TV it would be a big improvement to even the worst shows.
I have something better: Terminal Ennui . There's cognitive overload, but that's not the real problem. The real problem today is that because of cognitive overload, we're made too objectively aware of the world. The traditional motivation to struggle to become the best at something is basically short-circuited today, as well can instantly see not only many other people doing the same things we're doing, but maybe better. Or, we can all too well see it having *already been done*. Leaving the sensation that there's no point in trying to do much of anything at all. Cognitive overload is just a precursor. Terminal ennui.
It kind of makes sense, as our brains are programmed for task switching at an early age with most kids being babysat by the TV and commercials being 30 seconds in length.
:)
That explains why I can focus for long periods of time, and in fact it seems that unlike everyone else, I have a hard time multitasking.
I preferred public television as a child.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert