Slashdot Mirror
Driven to Distraction by Technology
Ant writes "CNET News.com says 'The typical office worker is interrupted every three minutes by a phone call, e-mail, instant message or other distraction. The problem is that it takes about eight uninterrupted minutes for the brains to get into a really creative state. The result, says Carl Honore, journalist and author of "In Praise of Slowness," is a situation where the digital communications that were supposed to make working lives run more smoothly are actually preventing people from getting critical tasks accomplished.'"
That sounds about right where I wor...
Hold on, I just got an IM.
Where I work, it's not the e-mail or instant message interrupting me so much as it's the person stopping by your cubicle *in person* to ask a question.
Quit being so quick to find evil in technology.
If I ignore (for the moment) an interruption, then it has less of an impact on my productivity. And some of us multi-task fairly well, which would also reduce the impact.
I do believe that there are many distractions that may take our minds of our work. The phone ringing, the pager going off, the bright blue sky outside with flocks of geese slowly migrating back to their Canadian homes. All these things are distractions that may harm productivity.
But I don't think that productivity is being harmed to such an extent that a fuss must be raised over it. Projects are still being finished, people are still getting paid, and products are still being sold. It's not that there are so many more distractions than before, it's simply that we can quantify (and villify) one particular set of distractions.
Maybe it's just me, but sometimes taking a time out to stare out the window at the horizon helps me feel a lot better about sitting in front of the computer.
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
... hones the creative brain to a razor's edge.
Or at least, it's distorting the facts. :)
Work keepy interrupting my IMing, not the other way around
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
That's why I just ignore all of it and sit in my office playing Nethack and reading slashdot. Occasionally somebody will pop their head in, but I just tell them I'm busy and I'll come find them in a few minutes. They usually just go bother someone else.
I'll turn into a supernova and burn up everything. Well I'll turn into a black little hole and you'll turn into string.
This is exactly what my boss doesn't seem to get, however often I try to explain it to him. I do software development for a living in an open office without even cubicles. I have very hard time to concentrate on my tasks when other people - my boss included - come around every half a minute to ask me when I will have time to do something or just keep having meetings one meter (a little over three feet for those of you who are not familiar with the metric system) behind my back.
Especially this is difficult when I cannot give an instant answer and have to think about it for a minute. I first need to change my way of thinking into the model of the interrupting project and then back to the original project that I'm supposed to be working on. Afterwards I probably have to figure out some things for the second time because they were lost in the process.
E-mails or IM's aren't so bad, they just pop up a little square in the lower left corner of the screen and I can deal with them later. Other people or phonecalls are harder to ignore.
Set your IM to busy.
Set your mail client to check for new email once an hour.
Switch your phone to voicemail.
If your boss won't let you, then it's an organisation problem, because your boss absolutely needs to understand that this is how to get you to work most efficiently.
...is the average time between each time I read /.
Just run a silent system. No bells or chimes to signal when new email comes in. Have your phone light up, not ring. I never IM, as it annoys the hell out of me in general, so my distractions rarely, if ever, register enough to take me away from my work.
Also, the same studies that say you need eight minutes to charge up say that your brain is only good for about twenty minutes at a clip, and then processing effectivness takes a big dive. Therefore, you can surface every half hour or so to check up on what you've missed.
But the people stopping by... There's now way to fix that, except maybe not showing or begin collecting rare cheeses.
I'm a clinical engineer in a very large US hospital, in the operating room. In addition to the distractions above, we also have the old fashioned overhead pager to deal with. I used to have a pretty long attention span, but I think I have acquired ADD. I can't work on anything longer than a minute at a time and usually try to be doing two things at once so I'm not waiting. Ever. It gets better at the end of the day, but when cases are getting started, there are usually 3 things I have to do at any one time.
My strategy is to ignore eamil and my personal phone line and just worry about the emergencies for the first 5 hours of my day, then try to do the actual engineering work with whatever time is left. Works ok, but it would be nice to have more free time. Unfortunately, I just can turn off my pager.
>:]
And that is why I simply don't answer the phone 80% of the time unless it is a call from somebody that I know would be needing help with a priority project/subproject/whatever. Ditto with emails - however I appreciate that email makes it easier to screen incoming information and quickly decide whether it is worth reading right away.
If I'm deep in thought, off goes the email, and the phone certainly gets ignored.
Work on the stuff you know is important, or at the very least work on the stuff your boss tells you is important. Don't just switch tasks every time somebody adds something to your to-do list. The guy calling on the phone will get taken care of in time. Time management gurus call this taking care of the important rather than just the "urgent." This is the only way things get fixed in the long-term - often the guy screaming for help on the phone is looking for a short term solution.
In fact, I normally prefer email to phone calls. It is less interrupting, and it forces the person who is contacting you to organize their thoughts rather than just randomly spilling them out. Phone is GREAT for conversations, but TERRIBLE for just making requests. Unless you know that the call is going to be very high priority for both parties, I think you're better off just sending an email to schedule a time to make the call, or better still a visit.
But that is just my two cents...
Works for me.
The owls are not what they seem
We had this problem in our office, where telephone calls were routed to groups of people. Everybody got distracted and decided upon looking at the caller ID wether to pick up the phone.
Favourite office sport became being the last one to pick up, before the answering machine answered.We descarded the old system and routed all calls directly, forwarding the call quickly (after two rings) to one other phone, if it wasn't picked up. If that one also wasn't picked up within two rings, the call got forwarded to the boss.
We blocked IM at the same time. The changes are appreciated by the employees, who say it's way less stressful.
Gotta check out responses to my /. posting.
There are no loopholes. It's either legal or it's not.
It's been documented that if someone knows he's got an email/voicemail, he'll go crazy if he can't at least see who sent it, or knowing that, what it is about.
This is quite terrible, given that most stuff can be ignored, yet we get emails and voice mails all the time.
I think this is one reason why people totally despise spam.
I remember in '91 there was a guy who would go on "vacation" (with the vacation program) even when in the office. You'd mail him and get a note that he was realy busy, and would respond later. If you went and interrupted him, it needed to be really, really urgent, or he'd have a fit.
I thought it was odd then, but now it makes perfect sense.
http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_law/when_to_
Where's the problem? Just disable interrupts while you're managing one, and re-enable when ended. People will keep calling until they don't get some CPU share. Else, the overhead for context switching is known to be terrible. Just be sure to schedule calls from your boss in real time priority, if you don't want to get fired.
42.
Tech causes problem because we haven't yet learned to handle it. Sure, we use it all the time, but that doesn't mean that we're using sound strategies to handle all the information and requests from colleagues.
Just read the article: more and more companies are realizing that they cannot continue with all of the information management like they have used to. At first, these little tricks will seem pretty odd, but once we filter out those that work for everyone involved, they will be strategies commonly used across entire industries.
YMMV, but I find that if I, for any longer period of time, turn off notifications for e-mail etc (or if I am forced to use my webmail instead of a fat IMAP client or so) I will spend a lot more time polling my webmail than I would have lost due to "push" interruptions. The same goes for slashdot and the like.
I suppose there are parameters that I could vary (get a more interesting job, for one;).
"The problem is that it takes about eight uninterrupted minutes for the brains to get into a really creative state."
Hey, I won't disagree that it is very difficult to work with constant distraction. As a Programmer, a SysAdmin, sometimes you have to sit and _think_ about the big picture.
You must pause and consider.
However, the above quote shows quite aptly one of the major flaws with Western Medicine. It seems to think that all human beings are identical.
8 minutes? Clearly this is some sort of average, and an average likely deduced by dubious means. It could be 1 minute for some, 16 minutes for others.. and the type of creativity could make as much of a difference as the person involved!
Of course, let's just boil it all down into a neat figure, instead...
I myself will simply ignore the email and focus on what I must accomplish. Then when I'm at a breaking point, I'll look at the email.
Simple old-fashioned prioritization.
All thing fall under:
- Urgent or Not Urgent
- Important or not Important
That forms a 2x2 matrix, and all problems should be ranked accordingly. Then, it becomes clear what the most efficient way to deal with the issues are.Ruby Neural Evolution of Augmenting Topologies
I once had an urgent high priority matter and got sick of interruptions. I normally wear high quality headphones (office music is well...), but...
Next day did not show up at the office and logged on from home through VPN and shut off my phones. Worked my 8 hours and got back to work next day. They had a problem with it, but I said it was billable time and I had to allocate the entire day to one client that was basically a convoluted research project.
The reason why I was surprised at the reaction? I live 3 miles from my office. Any urgent ticket, for which I have real-time notification, would have same speed of response if not quicker than calling me in the office.
Some people just don't get it, but it's a good option if you can make it work. I much prefer working in my home office with a high end sound system rather than the open-doored office in subzero temperatures.
I've been successful another 2 times so far to work remotely and converted most customers for remote access.
Leonid S. Knyshov
Find me on Quora
I had an employee a few years ago who didn't seem to understand the idea of uninterrupted work. I regularly close my door and get work done - research, coding, whatever - and the rule around the lab is, if the door is closed, you leave the person alone. This one guy didn't seem to understand this - I mean, he didn't WANT to have this apply to him...
He would come up with really annoying ways to interrupt, like hammering on my door really hard, or standing in front of the door talking loudly. The final straw, that resulted in his near-decapitation, was one incident where he emailed me, emailed me five minutes later to complain I hadn't responded, then borrowed a security key to let himself in to my office to ask why I wasn't answering email.
Sigh.
I get it, you're working on something and you're trying to concentrate, come up with the next block of code for an intricate function, and some popup email notification for shonky viagra salesman comes up and throws your concentration a little, annoying.
I don't however think that the best solution is to "unplug" so to speak, because I've had the reverse to, deeply entranced in something complex for hours on end, only to find out that it was useless work because I was emailed twenty minutes into the task and notified we'd be taking a different task, that is similiarily annoying.
It'd be ideal if you could set the computer to know what you're working on, say a project tag for incoming communication attempts, and anything related to what you were working on got through instantly with the potential for interruption otherwise it was stowed away without notification until later. I achieve this now just by making assumptions about who will be contacting me with regards to what, but it's a kludge, and the people you expect to not bug you with something unless it's important aren't always worthy of such faith.
A way to let people know that need to know what you're working on without interrupting you, and giving them the potential to interrupt you if they really ought to anyway, that'd be nice. Unplugging is just taking a step back, and there was a good reason we got to where we are to begin with.
These things only bother the ignorant and the self-important. Anyone that's dealt with an office environment where you have 5 ways of being contacted knows that if you want to be highly focused on a project or whatever, you turn all that crap off and deal with it later.
Personally I only answer the phone if it's my wife (w/ small baby at home) or a number I don't recognize which is rare. As for email, IM, etc., they are turned off and only checked twice a day.
And by the way, for any low functioning PHBs that read slashdot: none of that other shit is any more distracting than you walking by my desk, pulling up a chair and asking "so, where are we" every couple of hours. In fact, probably all of them combined are less distracting because I can ignore them easily and don't get pissed off every time they interrupt me. You on the other hand...
Of course, The ultimate way to get around this is to go nocturnal. "Real programmers do their best work between 1 and 6 am" -- C for dummies :D
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
ohmmm...not now Lumberg...I am real busy
Besides, I've got a meeting with the Bobs in a few minutes.
(1) the three minute average is silly. You can work uninterrupted or be in a meeting for an hour - this means you'd need other spans of near constant interruption to hit that average. Most likely this was a survey, "3 minutes" was a choice and it came up most often. People like to complain to inquisitive strangers who are paying attention to them, and you see the events, not the space between them.
(Same problem accurately estimating cloud cover. Here's an exercise: Take a sheet of plain paper. Fold it in half the short way, tear a big circle out of the middle. Open it back up. You have a rectangular paper donut. Tear the round piece in half. Put one half in your pocket, tear the other into about a dozen random shapes and sizes. Lay the donut down. Lay the random pieces into the open hole. Ask passers-by to tell you how much of the hole is filled. You'll get big numbers. 70-80 % coverage. You can prove it's really only 50% - you have exactly half the hole in your pocket untouched.)
(2) the 8 minute ramp-up is almost as silly. Suppose it's roughly right. Office workers are required to be in "a really creative state" to get any work done? Nonsense.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
I just ordered the book on Amazon. One of the options was to have it rush shipped to me by tomorrow.
That is why some people use methods like timeboxing (check your e-mail twice a day), deliberately do not run message programs, and really extreme: Let the voicemail enter the phone, if they do not leave a voicemail, it is not important.
My wife's sketchblog Blob[p]: Gastrono-me
There's an interesting article (pdf here) in the January 2005 Scientific American about this very problem and one company's solution...apparently, Microsoft is test-driving a system called Bestcom that uses Bayesian decision-making incorporating information about keyboard & mouse usage, recent calls, recent emails, and other markers such as whether or not the caller is listed in the recipient's address book. After evaluating all the parameters, it decides whether or not a phone call/email/whatever (including, interestingly enough, application alerts/dialogs) is important enough to disturb the employee.
The messaging interrupt problem is one of complexity. If we had a single "inbox" for all messages, showing their subject, sender, and suggested priority, we could manage them better. We could whitelist/blacklist their real priority against a complete directory of senders, including "friend of a friend" associations. We could cross-reference our calendar, blocking out "solitary" time and blocking in "collaboration" time, for weighting message announcement priorities. Services like Spotlight and Dashboard could show prioritized messages' context of other messages/work/status, to quickly dismiss messages. All that technology would use all our information, automatically, to "defend" against incoming information distracting us.
But the main defense is not just computers, or even personal discipline like "concentration". Mainly, we need to care more about our jobs. When our work itself is engrossing, we aren't as distracted by mere "wazzup?" messages from friends when we're busy. The real best use of the technology will be to keep all the administrivia of our jobs from sucking up our time, where we're most vulnerable to pleasant distractions.
Personally, since my work is even more fun that posting to Slashdot, I get in my time only during the interstices between work tasks. Makes task switching seem like a social break. So I can work many hours at a time, without leaving the keyboard. On second thought, maybe I should be taking a walk to talk F2F with some real humans...
--
make install -not war
At Kinko's was the boss (and co-workers) who decided that since I knew how to do everything, anything they didn't know how or couldn't be bothered to do, they would dump on me. Eventually I started telling them things like "you're number 3 in the queue. It's gonna be awhile." They backed off after awhile when I made it clear that once you're in the queue, you stay in the queue until your turn comes, however long that is. I was valuable enough that they couldn't just fire me (though the next manager tried, and he got his ass handed to him by HR when I gave them a heads-up).
At my current job the main problem was people ambushing me as soon as I walk in the door with every little question they've come up with that morning. I've gotten them trained to where they know if I walk in and go straight from my mailbox to my office, I have something to work on already; if I come into the lobby area where they are after checking my box, they're free to drop whatever on my plate. The new trouble ticket system we just installed helps too, as they can enter a ticket as soon as they think of a question or encounter a problem, instead of feeling frustration until I get there. I'm working on getting them trained to realize that instead of coming down 3 floors to change someone's default e-mail client or whatever, I can do almost anything software-based that needs to be done right from my office (and probably do it better since I have all my reference materials and tools for various things right in front of me, to say nothing of direct access to the servers if something server-based needs to be done).
It's slow work, but we're making progress. Next up will be getting them to plug their own Ethernet cables back in when they've been pulled out from the wall (no, I'm not kidding).
-- Old Man Kensey
Unplug your phone. Log out of your IM. Close your mail client. It's so easy. Free yourself.