PC Users Fight Distractions to Work

prostoalex writes "When someone buys a computer, they expect noticeable increases in productivity and ability to perform routine tasks more efficiently. At least that's what the commercials say. The New York Times talks about the dire reality: software applications do an excellent job of distracting us from doing the tasks. An e-mail notification here, an application popup there, a sound effect telling you the download has been completed and a popup window asking whether you would like to download the latest updates. Much of this distraction is self-enforced, such as taking a break from work to check the weather forecast, read the news headlines, or yet again check the e-mail inbox. NYT talks about various ways people are fighting distractions and points to some cognitive technology research done at Microsoft."

Comments

Re:The worst one

[SteveX]

I had this bad habit of checking a bunch of websites constantly.. so a few years ago I set up a little bookmark site that I use as my homepage.

http://www.stevex.org/linky

What's just slightly unique about it (or was in 1999) is it lets you specify a timeout for sites you add, and sites whose timeout has expired are shown in bold.

So when I bring up Firefox, I right-click on the links that are bold (to open them all in tabs), read 'em, and I'm back to work. The various timeouts mean I spend less time looking at sites that I just looked at 5 minutes ago.. (yes, I used to do that. And you probably do too, don't you?)

An Interupted Workflow is Natural

[superultra]

I'm a historian, and I've learned that this kind of interupted work flow is nothing new. In fact, for most of our history, humans have worked this kind of "interuptive" work flow as opposed to straight working. Rural work often meant short periods of hard work punctuated by frequent but shorter periods of rest. Many times, another task demanded priority, and the workflow would change again . Labor historian Herbert Gutman has written some fantastic essays on how people carried over these agrarian work habits into industrialization. For example, workers would pool money to hire someone to read the newspaper to them while they worked, they would drink on the job, or sing songs while on the line. Here's a typical work day for a New York City dock worker in the 1840s that Gutman dug up:

Begin work about 7:00am?.
8:30-9:30am - "Aunt Arlie McVane" arrives selling baked goods. (Work stops or slows during her visit).
10:30-11:00am - "Johnnie Gogean, an English candyman arrives to peddle his sweets. (15 minute break to consume candy),br> 11:00am - Whiskey break for the majority of the crew. (Length of break is not specified)
3:30pm "Uncle Jack Gridder" shows up to distribute a "cake lunch" to workers. (Length of break is not specified)
5:00pm "Johnnie Gogean" returns with more candy. (10 minute break to consume)
Continue work until sunset

The basic problem is that in a postindustrial society, we are told to associate this kind of workflow as unproductive or even lazy. It's not. It's how humans have been working for thousands of years. To work uninterupted, straight for 8 hours, is hard for us to do because it's an abnormal practice.

Keeping a "busy" screen

[TwoPumpChump]

In addition to those fine 7 points, I'd add that to sucessfully web browse (or whatever) while doing those tricks you should keep Firefox un-Maximized, with whatever important-seeming app a mere task-switch, or quick mouse click away. Failing that, remember in Windows you can quickly minimize any app (Firefox, IE if so unfortunate) with a quick ALT+SPACE+N. Practice it. Get good with it. You'll be able to minimize that browser without the tell-tale mouse "wrist jerk and click" that people can see as they approach. (Everyone knows ALT+F4 but sometimes you want to finish what you're reading later, so you don't necessarily want to close the browser.)

Re:Keeping a "busy" screen

[GonerDoug]

'windows key'-D is fewer keys (and avoids that noisy spacebar...) other helpful 'windows key' key combo's include: -E (explorer window) -M (similar to -D but -D is more of a toggle-able thing...) wait.. someone's coming! Gotta go!

Re:Keeping a "busy" screen

[wheany]

One tip for Opera users is using mouse gestures. If you have some legitimate page to browse, or at least a legitimate looking page, keep it in the background, and when someone approaches, hold down the right mouse button and roll the scroll wheel down one notch.

This will bring the legitimate looking page to the front without the ctrl-tab twitch. You will probably have your hand on the mouse anyway if you're browsing the web, so the gesture will be practically unnoticeable.

Or, you could close the tab. Gesture down-right. And when the person leaves, press ctrl-alt-z to re-open the tab.

If you want to increase the effect, hide the page bar. This will hide the tabs and nobody can tell that you have some other pages in the background.

Re:The very worst distraction...

[spectecjr]

I know I saw that in one of the Firefox betas long before I saw it in IE ... definitely long before XP SP2, but I can't remember which update brought the feature to IE, if it was before SP2 or not ... can anyone confirm who copied who?

The Firefox developers can confirm that they copied IE. It appeared in the XP SP2 betas, and the Firefox guys copied it while XP SP2 was still in beta. I should know; I was on the XP SP2 beta.

They were added to the nightly builds on July 13th of last year.

XP SP2 was in beta in February of last year.

But hey, don't take my word for it... ask the Mozilla/Firefox developers:

http://www.mozillazine.org/talkback.html?article=4 997

The most recent Firefox nightlies feature a new user-interface to manage the XPInstall whitelist. When a user tries to install software from a site that is not on the whitelist, a thin non-modal yellow bar appears at the top of the content area, informing the user that the install has been blocked (bug 241705). A button allows the user to add the site to the whitelist if they choose. Testers of the beta release of Windows XP Service Pack 2 will probably find the yellow bar familiar: it's almost a carbon copy of the new Internet Explorer Information Bar that appears when an ActiveX control is blocked. If you cannot wait for Firefox 1.0 to try this feature, grab a nightly build from the 0.9 branch but remember that there may be bugs.

Re:The antidesktop

[lsmeg]

I currently use a IBM Model-M on my desktop, and I love it, Im assuming the keyboard you linked is not buckling spring, I would like a buckling spring space saver keyboard (no func keys) like that, would be better without the numpad.

Check out http://www.pckeyboard.com/. They have some buckling spring keyboards like the Model-M, and one of them has a mouse nub in the middle like the other poster mentioned. But it is a full sized keyboard, with function keys and num pad. And be warned, they aren't cheap...