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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."
I'd have to agree that all those little popups that you get from different applications are really a bother; you get side tracked from what you are doing, and then getting back to what you were doing takes a minute or 2, or longer depending on what you were doing. This time tends to add up quickly.
I make it a point, with any program that has popup or notifications of any kind, I do my best to turn them off. Like Outlook 2000. It has a sound beep and an Icon that appears in the systray when you get new mail. Well, disable the sounds, and set Windows to always hide that new email icon (You can't turn off the notification in Outlook 2000, but you can in 2003).
The information the provide is nice, but I'm busy right now, get back to me when I'm not trying to figure out why this code is seg faulting 56 hours into a a 72 hour test.
Its not what it is, its something else.
This is why I use ratpoison+screen, that and because keyboard input is much faster and more efficient than the rodent.
This is also why I stopped using multiple monitors, just too distracting and not a huge benefit.
"The United States has no right, no desire, and no intention to impose our form of government on anyone else." - Bush 05
Custom-build the worker's PC to have only apps that the job requires.
Back when I was in the army, in the computer department, everything was removed but the programming language and the simulator we were working on. And when I say everything, that included things like defrag and scandisk, that people used to use all day long to pretend they had time to go get a cuppa and slack off. Similarly, the secretary only had Office, and email was internal-only for everybody
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
is any app that steals the cursor focus from where I'm currently typing (or clicking) in order to show me some alert or dialog. And when I get 2 or 3 follow-on alerts yanking me back for more clicks, I want to put my boot throught the keyboard. I think whoever came up with that scheme did some bad human engineering.
Evil is the money of root.
You think, then, that we should become nothing more than machines at work? Perhaps we should just eliminate all offices - especially those with windows - because they allow for more distractions. And if we are to be machines, certainly we can police ourselves not to talk to even our cubicle neighbors. We could just eliminate walls and pack in even more people.
I'm not advocating that people slack off. They're being paid to work, but little distractions here and there - like quickly checking the weather - should hardly be a problem.
If you disagree then please explain why.
My manager is pretty cool. He pretty much lets me do what I want, AS LONG as I get my stuff done. And I always get my stuff done. Sure, sometimes a few mistakes slip by, but of course management is there to bitch me out, to which I always respond with, "Hrm, maybe I should control my distracting habits a bit." Management thru self government works for everybody.
an economics is often characterized as the study of how groups allocate scarce resources.
Today information is anything but scarce; why people decided to call it the "information economy" is beyond me.
What's really scarce, now that information availability has exploded, is the *attention* needed to perceive and process information. That's why the fad today is "attention deficit disorder".
"Attention economy" would be a more descriptive term.
When computers were computers were computers, they were there to automate the processing of information so that we could conserve our attention for other things - like communicating with others. Now, the Internet has turned computers into something entirely different - they're now *communicators*, not "computers". When your average net user says they get online mostly to "surf the web and check their email", they're talking about communications, not computing.
The computer just happens to hang on because it happens to give those in control of it (ie, the people who write the software - NOT the user) a more efficient platform for managing users' attentions than they ever had before.