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."
For a while now I've been anti-interruption. I shun any kind of unsolicited alert about events such as new email arriving, a friend signing on to an IM network or the phone ringing. I find I enjoy activities a lot more now that I can see them through to completion without beeping and flashing alerts interrupting me at arbitrary moments.
I don't multi-task because I HAVE to, but often because I WANT to. I monitor a couple of dozen sites and I enjoy reading them. I like learning new stuff, constantly expanding my understanding of the world and of myself. Maybe it works for some and not others, but I wouldn't have it any other way. It just seems boring to me to do one thing at a time, not to mention a complete waste of precious time.
A blog like any other.
I find 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.
The young techno-elite grew (and are growing) up immersed in this sea of information, and are adapting to it. The older generations, having grown up in a much slower-paced environment, have difficulty adapting to the rapid change in the information channels available to them.
Personally, I love having this information available. I crave it. I'm constantly aware of the state of the world around me. When something of note happens to one of my friends, that knowledge circulates throughout our social circle almost immediately.
For anyone who's read Snow Crash, there are people referred to as "Gargoyles." They are connected to the net 100% of the time, interacting with it through wearable computing and visual overlays, streaming and feeding information as fast as possible concurrently with their physical life.
The idea might scare some people, but I find it fascinating.
I suppose it's simply that older people, not being used to this mass of information, are not ready to cope with the fact that most information is useless. Part of the ability to accept the input is the ability to filter the wheat from the chaff.
I read slashdot several times a day, but I don't read every comment or every article. I read the ones that will be useful to me in some way. I'm connected to the net most of the time, but I ignore an incoming IM if I'm busy doing something else.
People who aren't used to this environment have trouble ingoring things. You know the type. People who insist on answering the phone no matter how busy they are at that moment. People who check their email immediately whenever they reveive a "new mail" notification. These people can't cope with the available information, and are overwhelmed by it.
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If you knew how to manage your base while fighting, you would be more effective in battle. This carried over to Starcraft and Warcraft3 where I was vastly superior to other players. Its critical to multitask in games like that, but its helped me learn how to multitask other things.
One thing multitasking isn't good for is programming complex things while doing other things. When we're programming, we need to use our memory to keep track of all the variables and threads going on. If we start doing others things, we can be distracted because our brain has trouble with the memory and it impairs our coding.
Another thing that's not good to multitask is driving with a cell phone. If you get too caught up in the conversation, your attention can be diverted from the road. You can normally drive like a zombie, but in times of emergency response you could be screwed. Also if someone does something stupid to cause a wreck, people may blame your cell phone even if you weren't at fault.
God spoke to me.
It leads to wasted effort and stress, which leads to sloppy work.
Work hard, play hard, but not simultaneously.
When I'm working, coding or debugging or whatever, I'm like a dog with a bone, and I don't leave the task at hand until it's done. If anyone comes into my office and asks me for something, I tell them "when I'm done".
I accomplish a whole lot more this way, the code I write is better, so I spend less time debugging and testing, and in turn spend less time supporting it in the field (small company, we all wear lots of different hats).
One of my colleagues is the opposite, he tries to do 100 things at once. He's always stressed out, one of those "the sky is falling!" idiots. The work he does is invariably half-assed.
Also, since I'm always focused on one aspect of a system at a time, I wind up with a much, much better understanding of the ins and outs of our software than he has. I pretty much know the name, scope, and purpose of every variable, class, function, constant or subroutine in the code.
The other guy wastes tons of time looking up the same thing over and over again. He constantly pesters me with the same questions. "What does the AddressParse class do?" And I have to say: "it parses addresses you fucking chimp".
The rub is, he always looks like he's really busy because he's so stressed out, which is why he's still here. Whereas I'm generally pretty relaxed and laid back, and don't get upset about anything that happens at work, it just isn't worth it.
I get more work done, and of a better quality, but to a couple dopes around here, the fact that I'm not yanking my hair out with stress equates to me being lazy or slacking off, or whatever.
I'd never survive in a big corporate setting for that very reason. PHB's think that if you're not giving yourself an ulcer you aren't working hard enough. Fuck 'em, I'm not going to shorten my life for their bottom line.
Luckily it's a small company with common sense. I've unofficially become the lead developer, while he's unofficially been relegated to answering the phones and doing support.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
People have known about this for a long time, and it's been studied to death. I know that for those that see my posts I often mention aviation, but here we go again;
During flight training, one of the first things that you're taught is to focus on the important stuff first, and prioritize. Don't let an interruption from air traffic control interrupt the flow involved in actually flying the plane... don't let an attempt at navigation/location get in the way of flying the plane... in fact set your priorities so that you will be SAFE above all. I guess my training was a bit of a reality check for me... it taught me that "cognitive overload" can actually kill me quicker than you might think. As a result I focus on one task at a time until I complete that task. If workload is too high (say multiple interruptions at once), always remember to AVIATE, NAVIGATE, then COMMUNICATE. Anything else is fluff.
After I'd finished learning to fly, I found that I was unconsciously doing the same thing in my day-job. Although an email promising larger genitalia and better stock market tips might annoy on occasion, it isn't likely to kill me in that job. I took the principles of flying a plane and turned them to my day job (systems engineering, development etc.) At first it was tricky since everyone around me was attempting the same "multi-tasking" tricks that I had done before... on occasion it seemed that I was falling behind. Once I got into "the groove" so to speak I found that I completed projects more quickly, more accurately and actually found that I was happier with the results.
Maybe I should require that employees take flight training to ensure they prioritize and focus correctly...
I guess my point is; learn to prioritize those things that matter. If you have multiple projects that need completed, then prioritize those too. Work on one at a time... don't jump around and try to finish them all at once. You won't. I've seen too many people burn out early because they try to do everything at once... a lot of them are younger than me... and I'm not exactly old either!!!!
I cant speak for everyone with ADD. But as someone who was diagnosed in the 5th grade. I must say that if I am not doing atleast 3 things at once my brain shuts down. If I am doing only one thing I get really bored and quit. I function best when I have a ton of things going on. Email + refershing 3 different forums + irc + /. + gaim + groklaw(loading it always takes forever) + purevolume(playing a band) + RSS feeds coming in + emerge -u world on test machine. My machine doesnt go 20 seconds without some sort of noise/alert going off. And I love it that way!
As an adult with ADD, the only way I can function somewhat normally is if I multi-task. I become extremely bored and stiff with inaction without handle numerous things at once.
I question if this is common with others with ADD. Perhaps ADD is an evolutionary offspring.
Around Spring of 2003, an article came out showing that people who multi-task are actually less efficient then people who do not multi-task. A number of tests were done and what it boiled down to is that every time you switch from one task to the next your brain has to reorganize. This wastes (noticeable) time. Also, even though you might be able to start working - your brain may not be finished reorganizing itself so you may not remember everything you do at the start.
I kind of agree and use some real life examples. For those of us who program - you sit down, you get in your grove and you start to code. Then someone calls. I generally have to unfocus from what I am doing and take a couple of seconds before I can even understand what the person wants. Then, when I am finished with the call, it takes me a few seconds to get back into my work (and hell I might of lost my grove).
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
an RSS feed will do the job nicely; you're using firefox* of course?!
at the slashdot home page, just click on the orange rectangle on the bottom status bar and add the RSS feed to your bookmarks toolbar folder.
*thunderbird also supports RSS, but I'm not impressed with it too much. Opera's RSS client is also quite reasonable. If someone knows of a *free* RSS client for Palm, I'd be grateful to know, I haven't found one yet.
Here's a few reasons why multitasking is generally necessary for some aspects of life:
1) 24 hours in the day, approx 8 of which are downtime/sleep. Most of us also portion out 9 or so to earning our keep, and a couple hours get lost due to necessary evils (travel, taking a breather, movement in general). That usually leaves about 5 hours of time during which you can do your own thing. You can push that figure upwards (scrape off hours of sleep, skip work, arrange things so that your wasted couple of hours are more like 30 minutes). However, when you think about it, 5 hours really isn't that long a time to do much during the week.
2) Multiple interests. Myself, I love to play music (piano, clarinet, guitar -- still learning the last one), play video games (PC, PS2), program applications, maintain my network, watch some TV shows, etc. Not the least of those interests is keeping up with friends and going out to do things with them. Now, of course there is the whole 'priority' thing going on here of which I want to do more, but regardless, the list is fairly expansive.
These two things lead to a problem. How do I do as many things as I want to do in the limited time that I have available? It's true that my 'weekday' listing only allows roughly 5 hours of free time to myself, and that it ignores the roughly 14 hours I get on a weekend day, it still shows that the time that I have available to me to do all the things I want to do is limited. Some things take more time than I can allow for on a weekday. Some things that I want to do are low priority because they're new and atypical, yet I still really want to do them.
This can be summed up very easily in a bastardized phrase I learned from Economics. Limited Resources for Unlimited Wants. I want to do far more than I have time for, if I were to do them back to back. As some of those wants are even time dependant (keeping up with friends is a good one for that), if those are not done, then the opportunity is lost. The only answer that I can come up with is multitasking. Be it combining tasks into one (a simple method) or doing multiple tasks at once (true multitasking), that seems to me to be the only way to attend to as many of the wants as I can for the given time period.
Even with multitasking, I know I will not have time for everything I want to do, but at least I will be able to do more of them and not miss out on time-dependant tasks. I personally do not see this view as delusional or logically flawed. My approach to the problem may be different than the one you may choose, but it is still valid.
P.S. Dispite being a different individual than the parent of your post, while doing one thing at a time is not (to me) a 'complete waste of precious time', it is not using that time to it's fullest, either. If you have the capacity to do multiple things at once, and you do not do that, it can be viewed as wasting time.
Speaking as a psychology student who has recently taken a few classes in cognitive psyc. Humans are very bad at multi tasking. Alot of research points to this. The majority of these studies examined humans driving and talking on the cell phone at the same time. Let me just say, NEVER do that. Its a good way to die.
.. or top for you linux guys). Your main cognitive energies are then used for talking on the phone. Now this is fine as long as the road is straight and nothing happens. Throw a deer jumping onto the road, or a car ahead of you suddenly swearving into your lane and its over.
Now before you say "What? I can multitask like nobody's business! I can drive and talk on the cell phone no problem!", what you are really doing is relying on automacity. You are so practiced at driving that it takes less room in your cognitive processor (think task manager in xp
Being on the leading edge of the boomer generation I grew up in the 50's. My early childhood was spent hanging with the kids in the nieghborhood. I can remember when the first TV showed up. It was this huge cabinet and a small round screen. There was only one TV station at the time. Through most of my childhood we had only 3 stations and by my teenage years there were a handful more.
Fast forward to the 70's I was taking advantage of the GI bill (thanks to being drafted) and getting a master degree in clinical psychology. I used to wonder why I could drive a car, remember the roads I was on, overlay that with the topography of the city I was in and use that to find alternate routes. This is a practice I still use today. In retrospect I would infer that from the article that I had the ability to multitask.
Fast forward again to the late 80's. I was a firefighter who in the early 80's got interested in computers as a hobby. I ended up at one of the top ten CompSci schools and got my degree at the age of 44.
Being a firefighter I learned not to be stressed because not only is your life on the line but the lives and welfare of your co-workers and the victims of the current crisis depends on you making the right choices. I found this to come fairly easy for me.
Now my present job as a senior programmer I find that doing multiple tasks is not that big of a deal. I've got time for this post because I'm compiling the application I work on and it takes about 20 minutes to run the ant scripts on my machine.
The observation that I'm trying to make is that some people just have a knack at doing many things at once and I'm fortunate to be one of those people. Based on my 58 laps around the sun I would say that most people do not have this ability. I think that this is what the article is trying to get at.
http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.ht ml
This is slightly off topic, but there was a line in the article about getting customized news: if all your information is tailored to what you want to know, you may miss that which you don't know you want to know, and should. I often worry about this from reading slashdot too much. (Am I really becoming just a paranoid liberal geek?) The problem that I have is that I can't find news sources that are evenly balanced. All of the news sources seem to be so focused on telling people what they want to hear that you can't find out what you should be hearing. Wether it's conservative vs liberal, Microsoft vs Open Source, this company or that company. Every news source seems to have an agenda and I have to pick my sources based on the least of all evils or read 10 different sources to get the news. It may be lazy, but I shouldn't have to work this hard to get a balanced source of news.
Anyway, anyone else feel this way and have some options?
THIS SPACE FOR RENT
Look, I know where you are coming from. I had much the same ideas 10 years ago. I hardly know where to start with my reply to you, as it took me 10 years to unlearn all that crap I ingested.
One viewpoint might be to try and see govt as a machine. There are many types of machines, and in my life I have studied, operated and designed many types of machines,from nuclear power plant, to cars, to analog and digital circuits to software systems. Sometimes machines need to be complicated if we want to be able to accomplish a goal.
Another perspective might be to understand that culture may be evolved and formed through outside forces, and that there are forces in this world which may in general gain if you and I lose.
Here ya go. Read these:
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eat shiat and bark at the moon