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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."
So now I have one distraction providing an article about other distractions?!
is there something ironic about me reading this article while I am at work?
I've noticed the same thing, but I turned the distractions off, the little sounds, the popups, the notifications.
;)
Some people can focus in a crowded busy lecture hall, some people can't even focus alone in their rooms.
People are as focussed as they want to be it seems, take this with a grain of salt, given that it's the middle of the work day, and i'm posting on slashdot.....
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I had an incredibly witty thought that I wanted to share with the rest of the world, so I launched ecto, my blog client. An update was available, so I downloaded and installed it. That reminded me that I hadn't run versiontracker pro for a while, so I proceeded to launch that. Of course, an update to the software I use to check for updates with was available, so I downloaded and installed the update. Then Acrobat, BitTorrent, LimeWire, Poisoned, etc. While everything was downloading, I checked on the make install status of glibc on my Pepper Pad. Halfway done.
Why the heck was ecto open again?
PepperHacks - Hacking the Pepper Pad
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.
Was when I changed every audio program event on my system to play the original Star Trek red alert klaxon. I have been on state assistance ever since.
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
Yes, let's eliminate all distractions so that 5 seconds of happiness that you receive from an email popup regarding a personal email doesn't become a problem. Eliminate checks on weather sites to see how the weather will be when traveling home and planning accordingly. Eliminate everything that could possibly take away from becoming a machine that probably takes no more than 20 minutes in an entire day.
We are not machines, we are people. Doing repetitive tasks all day is the work of machines and can cause injury in humans. Should we not have that brief hallway chat with our friends and colleagues to satisfy the need of humans? Or should our interactions also become that of machines: necessary and nothing more.
The distractions listed here seem rather silly and mostly harmless to most people. If a particular person is distracted too much, then fix the problem for them. For example, if someone has a window office and can't stop staring outside all day, stick them in a cubicle or something. For the most part, however, these sort of distractions are what humans often require - a quick brak.
How I appear busy at work while fulfilling myself with my "distractions":
1.) Keep a floating command prompt open running netstat. It makes it look busy and important.
2.) Once in a while, ping 127.0.0.1. This makes me look like I'm typing something really important and examining very important output.
3.) Fire up a new browser window that opens the company website, then randomly click shit with an intense frown on your face as though looking for something important.
4.) Keep random sticky notes and papers sprawled around your keyboard, and randomly look over at them as though for reference. This is particularly useful when typing messageboard posts where people can hear your keyboard clacking away. You're not slacking; you're doing something important. You have scattered papers you keep looking at!
5.) Keep a spindle for your paper messages. Collect them on this spindle and situate it beside your monitor for a quick and easy "busily cluttered" look to your desk that makes you look slightly more busy.
6.) Have an old keyboard or other computer peripherals lying around at home? Bring them to the office and place them out of the way but in visible sight around your office/cubicle computer. Various important-looking computer parts, like an old non-functioning printer or a second keyboard "connected" to nothing, make you look like you're doing lots of crazy and important computer shit. For an added bonus, occasionally move your chair over and start clacking away on the non-functioning keyboard while looking at your monitor. Do an intense frown, say "hmm" importantly, and move back to your real keyboard and browse Slashdot some more.
7.) Try walking around a lot in a hurry. This makes you look busy and determined. The best strategy is to go the bathroom a lot and just pace for a minute inside. My strategy is to go to the water cooler a lot. Not only does this saturate me, but I'm seen moving all over the office busily and importantly when really I'm just taking a mental break at the water cooler and fantasizing about a life that doesn't so closely resemble Hell.
I have more tips, and I'm sure you do, so let's share.
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.
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.