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Rick Zeman writes "The New York Times Magazine has a fascinating article dissecting all of the myriad ways that people are distracted from their computers in the workplace, and 'how hi-tech devices affect our behavior.' From the article: 'Information is no longer a scarce resource - attention is. David Rose, a Cambridge, Mass.-based expert on computer interfaces, likes to point out that 20 years ago, an office worker had only two types of communication technology: a phone, which required an instant answer, and postal mail, which took days. "Now we have dozens of possibilities between those poles," Rose says. How fast are you supposed to reply to an e-mail message? Or an instant message? Computer-based interruptions fall into a sort of Heisenbergian uncertainty trap: it is difficult to know whether an e-mail message is worth interrupting your work for unless you open and read it - at which point you have, of course, interrupted yourself.' What could be done to change computing to help mitigate this multitasking?"
Some emails trigger different sounds, letting you know they're important. Look into it.
is using Instant Messaging when I'm working. All the other distractions are bad enough without a bunch of little windows popping up all the time. I don't know how people who use it stand it.
Hmmm. I suddenly have this mental image of me yelling, "Get off my lawn, you kids!" while waving my cane.
Whenever it's appropriate to. Some emails are more pressing than others. Use your judgement - if a collegue is asking a question about the current project you're working on, prioritise it a little higher than a message asking if you're up for a game of pool later.
And tomorrow the stock exchange will be the human race
At work, I always answer e-mails immediately after receiving them.
:p
At home, I answer e-mails when I get around to it.
As for IMs... if I don't answer you in a few minutes most of the time, you can usually assume you're not someone I like to talk to.
I usually get distracted BY my computer, not FROM it.
*Dilbert walks into his cubicle, presses button on his answering machine* Machine: You have 2,804 messages. 2,804 are marked "urgent". First urgent message: *beep* Todd: Hey Dilbert, this is Todd. I just called you to tell you that I sent you an email. Okay, bye. *Dilbert hits button* Machine: Messages deleted.
Etiquette is etiquette. He kills his mother but he can't wear grey trousers.
I wouldn't say e-mail interrupts much - I can read it when I want to. The most disruptive is someone walking into my office - you can't get away from that, although you can tell the person you're busy. A phone call is second to that, although you can just not pick up the phone. It also takes longer to punch in your access code and listen to a voice message then to quickly read an e-mail. Instant messenging would be next in line, although you can wait a few minutes (or hours) to respond to those. To me, e-mail is the least disruptive.
..sorry but i got distracted by an email. What was your question?
work. Give me 24 hours a day to F'off and I'm happy. Oh wait... Now if I can only get that job in the Sunday paper I'm golden.
This was a clear problem for one company.
What was done is that the normal distractions, which for this company was e-mail and instant messaging, were either banned outright, or controlled. In the case of e-mail, it was queued up and held, then released on the half-hour. So that was 2 interruptions from e-mail per hour, at most. The net result was actually a good thing, people actually got up and interacted with each other and kept it on-topic since everyone could hear the conversation. The caveat, of course, was if there was an immediate need. This was handled through the normal ticketing system, which was heavily monitored anyway. Obviously, executives were immune to these measures. They were permitted to be as distracted and distractive as they always have been.
Instant messaging was disallowed, except for IRC, which their IT department monitored. Each group had a channel, and since it's open source, private messaging was disabled. At first, there was much noise about all of this. But people adapted, and, according to the HR team, productivity clearly went up.
The problem is, this doesn't work for everyone. It doesn't work for all groups either.
A little creativity is still necessary.
This company claimed 16 hours a week was spent rifling through e-mail, and 8 hours a week using instant messaging. That left roughly 16 hours a week for these "worst offenders" of actual work. Not nearly an "Office Space" situation, but pretty bad nonetheless.
My ZooLoo
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The little semi-opaque window that appears in the corner with a mini-blurb as to who just sent you an email and why you should care is quite useful, as are the search folders (from whom did MS rip off those ideas?)
Personally, I don't interrupt my day to deal with emails: I get to the email when I get to the email and not a second earlier. I have a few dozen filtering rules set up then several times a day I quickly scan through and prioritize. Personally, I leave messages flagged unread until I have dealt with them (a function I wish Thunderbird, which I use at home would give me) which helps keep track of things I still have yet to do.
If the g'vt kept the data on you that google does you'd better believe you'd be calling it "doing evil"
The reason I fear it is because as it is I already get too many communications a day. Technology isn't helping us lead less stressful worklives, its just increasing the pace of business and increasing efficiency....which means you end up doing more work and much more gets done...all to stay ahead of the competition of course. If anything I yearn for old times before all this when everything was sent via post. At least you had a chance to breath rather than being reamed out because you did not check your email 2 minutes ago and JUST found out about the extremely urget request to email something somewhere.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
Well, for starters, we could stop reading slashdot at work.
Yeaahhhh, I just read slashdot, but it looks like I'm working. I do that for probably another hour after lunch too. I'd say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work.
What's short-lived about Dilbert?
Ewige Blumenkraft.
Wow, what a unique phenomenon. Er, yeah ok, my browser has integrated RSS feeds and an e-mail client. I found that after adding newsforge & digg, + my spam e-mail address, I found myself being interrupted w/ tens of messages every 10 minutes (just got one as I clicked reply: anyone getting 'The Truth from Kavkaz Center'?). It began to annoy me and distract me. So I changed my message checking settings to once every 24/hours/week whatever. Problem solved.
People at work are so ready to be interrupted because they're bored.
"You know you don't act like a scientist, you're more like a game show host." Dana Barret
One of the most valuable one-day seminars I attended talked about some of these things. Basically (and though I didn't always adhere), the gist is no matter what the potential interruptions, you map your day and set your own schedule. If something is important enough for immediate interruption you will discover that soon enough.
Some of the highlights included:
As for determining whether to immediately respond to e-mail or phone calls, these today pretty much provide the interface to allow you to at least filter at the "arrival" moment, e.g., an e-mail client that enunciates the "sender" and the subject, or caller-id on the phone indicates if it's someone you NEED to answer.
I don't see a corrolation between the Heisenburg uncertainty princible and e-mail. Sure both have uncertain qualities, but one is concerning electron orbitals and the other communication. That's a dumb comparison if i've ever seen one. But for the whole e-mail is the devil argument, what exactly is the difference between answering a phone, e-mailing or IM'ing someone? I can't understand the mentality of people that think that the internet makes us less productive. The average telephone call takes much longer than answering and reading e-mails. Sure the internet has distractions. But so does everything else!
public class null extends java applet { System.out.print ("Tabula Rasa"); }
Computer-based interruptions fall into a sort of Heisenbergian uncertainty trap: it is difficult to know whether an e-mail message is worth interrupting your work for unless you open and read it - at which point you have, of course, interrupted yourself.
Hmm, maybe 'Mark as Unread' is not the efficient solution I had thought it was..worse still, maybe it could cause a temporal paradox..
seems pretty simple to me... you add a function where you can block off time slots. So from 12pm-1pm, the computer will not interrupt you with any functions. Emails, instant messages, etc etc are all dropped into the background, you're in a virtual shell. During that time, you cannot be interrupted. And better still would be if it wouldn't let you out of the shell short of rebooting the computer once you dipped into the shell... in essence forcing you to stay in until the time was up (obviously you should be able to modify this part of it as you please). Suprised nobody has come up with it yet really.
He probably means the animated series.
it is difficult to know whether an e-mail message is worth interrupting your work for unless you open and read it - at which point you have, of course, interrupted yourself.' What could be done to change computing to help mitigate this multitasking?"
At work, I've taken the approach of turning off all notifications that I have new mail. That way I avoid the problem above - I don't know there's anything to interrupt me, so no interruption occurs. Higher priority is given to (work-related) IM and higher priority is given to a phone call. Note that 'higher' doesn't automatically guarantee I'll drop what I'm doing to answer, but you have the second-best chance of getting my attention. The very best method? Be at my desk and speak to me. That's not practical for all situations of course, working from home springs to mind as do remote offices etc., but for my normal work-day that's a fine approach.
My following the order above has resulted in me getting time to concentrate and think a lot more, and and I'm working better for it I feel.
Cheers,
Ian
www.boredloser.com
full downloads and scripts under the DOWNLOADS section
When I go to answer an IM, alot of the time I end up doing other computer activities like checking some website or my email, or vice versa. Having specialized devices would make it harder for a person to fall into such habits. I shouldn't have to resist the urge everytime I get a message to go check some website, play a video game, or just listen to some music. When I'm doing work on the computer maybe it's not so good the internet is a only a click away.
I would say the solution to being distracted by email etc, is to plan specific times during the day to check it and respond to email. If you are in a job that requires you respond quickly, set to check your email once every hour, or once every day if your job is less time sensitive. The key thing not to do is to have your mail client constantly open alerting you to newly arrived mail and tempting you to lose focus on what you're doing.
...respond immediately
The grass is always greener on the other side of the light cone.
That was 1985, and plenty of us were being distracted by email and usenet! No IM'ing though, that I can remember.
Perhaps a Bayesian filter could be trained to alert you to "urgent" emails and none other just the same as they can be trained to flag/delete UCE messages?
:(
Procmail could be used to send a text message to your phone when someone from your whitelist sends you a message (people from your department, the president of your company, your broker, your brother/dad, but not Jim the annoying guy down the hall who's in your department) so, even away from your desk, you could respond quickly. Else, just stay away from your inbox till 4:00pm or so...
Procmail or SIEVE could be extensively useful if the time spent programming them could be found
Post links to helpful resources in reply here.
To German and back...
Rick Zeman writes "the new York time, which has, magazine a fascinating article to dismember all innumerable ways the fact that people are diverted from their computers on the job and ', as HalloHi techvorrichtungen affects our behavior.' Of the article: ' information is not any more a scarce aid - attention is. Before David rose, a Cambridge, measure based expert on computer interfaces, may underline that 20 years, an office worker had only two kinds communicationses: a telephone, which required an immediate answer, and post office post office, which took days. "now we have dozens of possibilities between that posts," say rose. Are you are to email an announcement to answer as fast? Or an immediate announcement? Computer-assisted interruptions fall into a kind of the Heisenbergian uncertainty case: to know it is with difficulty, whether email is an announcement, to interrupt your work for it is you opens and read it - on, which point you have interrupted itself naturally.' Which could be done, in order to change a counting to the assistance, did you weaken this multitasking?" off
What we do need is an emailer with enough AI to make a quantitative and qualitative decision on whether we should reply to an email or instant message by ranking them in regards to their importance...
If computers have introduced this distraction, lets at least use computers to resolve an issue that we as humans don't handle too well and that is multitasking...
Well, one idea would be to use filters. I filter my email in separate mailboxes, depending on whether it is sent to my personal account, student account, one of my work accounts, or a mailing list. I could do something similar for instant messages, and my phone offers some filtering capabilities, too.
With the filters in place, I can decide on priorities. Work mail goes before personal mail, etc.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
And if I really need to concentrate I pull the power plug on the broadband modem or take a non-WiFi laptop out on the deck.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Virtual desktops! The FVWM paper (like its cousin the Afterstep pager I'm looking at right now) struck me as the single most impressive feature in X when I switched to Linux six years ago. I don't know how long pagers and virtual desktops have ben part of the Unix world -- surely since before the mid-nineties, at least. This article makes no mention of this even though it interviews a Microsoft scientist (with three computers on her desk) whose research shows that more computer "desk" space (i.e., a really big monitor) makes people dramatically more productive. That's interesting research, but it would have been good if the reporter had also talked to anybody other than Microsoft. Whoops -- he did -- Apple, Microsoft's "only competitor" according to the article. Unix/Linux gets cut out completely in this account despite its extreme relevance. I don't see a conspiracy -- I suspect the reporter is merely ignorant.
Due respect for Microsoft: I've visited the campus and seen some of this intelligent "presence" software, which is being used internally, and it truly is amazing. Business will eat this stuff up when it comes on the market, or gets included in the OS, which is not to say that workers will enjoy the potential capability of such software to log workers' activities in Big Brotherish detail.
*** "Freiheit ist immer die Freiheit des Andersdenkenden". -- Rosa Luxemburg ***
If you are working on something that requires your focused attention then turn off the distractions. When I'm coding at work I turn down the phone ringer and hit the send calls button so that everything goes to voice mail. I also close my email program so I'm not bothered by email notices or tempted to check email.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
for someone from a psychology background to run a study of MSN attention interruptions.. Sometimes I feel like MSN is (helping me) by keeping me happy sitting at my desk.
Other times I'm thinking, wow do I really need my mom's advice at the moment.
A straight up between subjects design with a control group working on a task for a week, and the other group having their MSN going for the task.
~jennifer.k~
What could be done to change computing to help mitigate this multitasking?
We should write some software to solve this problem.
In case you can't tell, I'm being sarcastic.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
20 years ago (and yes I am old enough to remember that) we had phones and snail mail. We also had a (closed, corporate) email system hosted on an IBM mainframe, Telex, Fax. And internal mail. And voice mail. And conference calls. We could even put a floppy disk in the post but that would be a bit wierd. Suppose we could also have used a bulleting board system on our shiny 2400 baud modems too.
Metabracketing is now old hat. I first came accross it in G. Bateson's book Steps to an Ecology of the Mind. I've taken the idea to be one of understanding the presuppositions of any proposition and to understand the context any proposition is set in.
In terms of 'Information is no longer a scarce resource - attention is." I don't see a problem. The article seems to impy that a surfiet of information is a deluge overwhelming workers, but, in any given work situation a worker can be defined as someone, hopefully, fully conversant with the task at hand. If a worker is fully conversant with the task then it's likely that, prior to the information age, a worker was equally deluged with information it terms of our capacity to hold and operate on any given body of information.
The value of a worker is h/er/is abililty to cull the immediatley pertainent information. Culling information implies a vertical, as well as a horizontal perspective and the ability to oversee the job in terms like a metabracketing process. Goes to one of my favourite quotes: "Concentration without elimination." T.S. Eliot one of the 4 Quartets.
Crying about information overload is just an excuse for inability.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
Back in the day companies had these incredibly useful devices called *secretaries*. These devices would open your mail and screen calls and visitors, there was even a voice recognition function! An incredible time saver they allowed even mid level professionals to concentrate on their jobs! Due to spiraling cost inflation even high level executives now must share the few remaining devices.
Seriously though, bring back the secretary. With high speed internet, VPNs, and so forth, the Remote (Outsourced) Secretary could be an intermediate solution to the attention defecit problem.
I check email once on arrival at work and once after lunch. I do NOT check it at the end of the day. If I don't think a given email is worth my time, I delete it without reading it. People know how to reach me by phone; if an email is urgent, they let me know to expect it and I adjust my protocol accordingly, but the onus is on the sender to put forth the effort to make his case. Most days, I spend at most 20 minutes dealing with new email "threads". I do not use IM at work. I was offered a company cell-phone and declined (I have a personal cell, the company does not have the number).
I am of "professional status" but NOT highly placed in my company hierarchy (no executive privledge for me!). I have been told that my approach to email glut is "suicidal", but I have been following this dicipline for over two years with no known negative repercussions.
There is damn little in this world that needs to be done "NOW", and the little that does need immediate attention generally makes itself obvious.
Although email has replaced the phone in a lot for a lot of our office communication, I think as long as you actually have a phone, it should be the instrument for anything that is crisis level or needs your immediate attention.
You need to train people that need to get in touch with you that they're NOT going to get immediate attention via email. Set your email to check once an hour and let people know that.
LoL!, speaking in slashdot about how people waste time with the computer in the job....this is ironic.
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Computer-based interruptions fall into a sort of Heisenbergian uncertainty trap: it is difficult to know whether an e-mail message is worth interrupting your work for unless you open and read it
What makes this even more frustrating is that, to follow the analogy, somebody has already peeked into the box but just decides to label it 'cat'.
Literalism isn't a form of humor, it's you being irritating.
I thought I told you to stop with this nonsense. I'm a Windows user (on my laptop anyways, which is my primary system). This is just annoying, and no one listens to someone who just posts the same shit over and over anyway. No one is forcing you to use linux, you can ignore it completely if you like.
I have my filter set at -1 (I'd like to read all the posts, sometimes a parent is modded lower than a child which makes it hard to read). Is there any way for me to filter this guy specifically so I don't have to read this again.
The right to protest the State is more sacred than the State.
In my line of work, if someone sent an e-mail, obviously it wasn't worth coming by the office to personaly tell me about, or even phone about. I'll then check e-mail as I get around to it, meaning maybe at the top of the hour if I'm not busy.
Same thing for checking phone messages, although they are slightly higher priority than e-mails.
Now, I'll answer the phone if I'm there, unless there is someone in my office. In that case, I never answer the phone unless I am expecting an important call back (in that case the visitor will be told ahead of time of a potential interruption). Nothing is more insulting to a visitor to your office than if a conversation is interrupted because the phone rings. It is as if someone just walks in to the office and cuts off the visitor and hijacks the person he's talking to.
I rarely use IM also. It can be a huge distraction. Fortunately for me I keep the circle of IM'ers on my list small and they tend to be non-business, so sometimes they are a welcome distraction.
my 2 cents
Remember those trays people used to have on their desks in the 70's? The ones marked "in" and "out"? You can see how they work in old movies... a clerk sits at his desk, working at a task, and when he finishes it he puts the completed task in the "out" box, and gets the next task from the "in" box.
One of the lessons I learned in dealing with many people and many emails at once, is that you have to treat e-mail a little like an old-fashioned "in"-box. You look at it only after you finish the task you are currently working on. Your inbox requires processing (not just reading): set aside time for this task. It can be twice a day, 5 times a day, or whenever you feel like it; the right moment depends a great deal on the nature of your work. Just as long as you remember that reading email is a task in its own right, and should not be done alongside anything else.
Another good rule to keep is that you have to process the entire inbox, once you get started on it. That's right, it should be empty after you have processed it. If you keep older read items alongside new messages, at some point you'll probably just give up and cry "I get way too much email". Simply process them one by one, each will require one of the following:
1) A short action, say, under 2 minutes. Take this action right away (quick and easy replies, noting appointments in your calendar, things like that).
2) A longer action... anything over 2 minutes or anything that requires a lot of thought. Stick these emails in an "action" folder and get to them later (when you are back into "action" mode).
3) No action. The email can be deleted or archived if it has info you'll need later.
A simple and nicely mindless process... 30 minutes will probably get you through 100 emails, and you will have a good idea about the priority of each of the ones in your action folder.
This is simply about being organised and not allowing interruptions. The hardest thing might be to not read your email while doing other things. Just shut down your email client so you cannot see incoming new mails. If there is something really important, people will call you if you don't respond within 30 minutes, believe me.
Speaking of interruptions... if the nature of your work is such that interruptions can really mess you up (coding springs to mind), turn off e-mail and IM. If you are blessed with a good office phone system, you may also be able to turn your phone off and redirect it to voicemail.
I got this way of dealing with communication tools from the book Getting Things Done; a great book on time management in general. The tips in this book have helped me getting from a state of feeling swamped in work, to feeling relaxed about taking a 2-hour lunch to let some material sink in, or just ignoring emails, things like that. (Yes I am still doing the same amount of work).
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
...or I'll miss my deadline...Oh look, a new article on the Slashdot RSS feed! I wonder what it's about... ...D'OH!
it is difficult to know whether an e-mail message is worth interrupting your work for unless you open and read it
No, it is not difficult at all: e-mail message is never worth interrupting your work. The reasoning is simple: mail transport is unreliable by protocol definition. Your "worthy" email message could gladly not come in at all. What level of up to moment importance can be assigned to it if it comes two hours later, or never?
There you are, staring at me again.
What do you call people that draw comics?
(10+2)*5
Work for 10 minutes. Break for 2. Do something else for 10. Repeat, killing items on your list. Supposedly you can do quite a bit of "next actions" in an hour this way. DON'T SKIP BREAKS!
Computer-based interruptions fall into a sort of Heisenbergian uncertainty trap: it is difficult to know whether an e-mail message is worth interrupting your work for unless you open and read it.
And if you find the sender has completely wasted your time, used unnecessary CPU cycles, and consumed your precious bandwidth -- call the FBI at (313) 965-2323 and have 'em raid the sender's home.
The spam in my yahoo account is atrocious. Something like 10 a day, all time wasters. (Though it was worse during spam heyday.....)
:-)
So I set up a different system and signed up a 2 new account elsewhere - a business name and a personal name.
Anything on the internet that I have to signup for goes in the name of my old yahoo account. This goes for forums, subscriptions, mailing lists, etcetera. Any online acquaintances get my old yahoo account until they earn my trust. Any new credit cards/banks/companies where I conduct personal transactions (say like ebay or on ebay), I do the same - 99% of their mail is junk.
On my business address, only my colleagues/boss/clients get this address. On my personal address, only my personal friends and my family will have it and services that have earned my trust.
In case of emergencies, my family has my cell phone number and work number. Same thing at work only with my boss.
I rarely get interrupted. I very rarely get useful emails in the old yahoo address which I check about every 2 weeks in under 10 minutes. I rarely have to mix personal with business or the other way around. Of coures, I don't use other services like IM during work, I don't have to (not that other people couldn't/shouldn't.)
With any communication medium, it's a cost/benefit analysis and not just talking dollars here, but on concentration, attention, whatever you value that the medium takes a little of before it gives you a return somehow. With this philosophy, I decide that many of the new communication tools aren't worth my personal hassle. (Yes, I also have discovered that I should somehow free myself of my slashdot addiction long ago
...but Outlook gets this right. When mail arrives, you get a transparent popup in the lower right corner where you can glimpse who the message is from, the subject, and maybe the first bit of body text (depends how long the subject is). If you don't click on it within a few seconds, it goes away again and you can open it on your own time when you feel the need. It is a distraction, yes, but not a huge one since it appears and disappears with no intervention from you. If you want to field it immediately, you can. If you don't, don't. It could stand to be slightly more intelligent -- if you're working in the lower right then it should pop up somewhere else -- but aside from that, they really did put together a good implementation.
This is not to say that Outlook as a whole is a solid product. It's feature-packed to be sure, but it looks like the work of a thousand hands that it is. It's surprisingly good at some things and surprisingly bad at others, and of course security has always been a SERIOUSLY low priority. I'm just pointing out one of the things it does well that could stand to be imitated.
Mal-2
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
I only check my email a few times a day but Instant Messages are checked immediately. It should be obvious that you shouldn't use the same IM for work as you do for play. Your coworkers should know to only use IM when they need your immediate attention - if an answer to something can wait a couple of hours they should send you an email and only IM you if you haven't responded within the needed timeframe. If you're coworkers can't use this responsibly, ask them to use email for all non-urgent communication and explain that you will check it every X hours and then block them from IM if they don't behave.
The 3 most common forms of disruptive work communication I've encountered are
1) The person can't correctly evaluate the urgency of their communication
2) The person failed to request communication before it became urgent
3) The person requires an inordinate amount of help with their work
I'm a software developer but I would imagine that for most other R&D work your team lead or project manager is ultimately responsible for managing those problems.
It was interesting to see no one mentioned a non-registration link. Well, here it is from NYT Link Generator.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I thought I told you to stop with this nonsense.
Ah, the sobering realization that no one gives a shit about what you say.
No one is forcing you to read his comments, you can ignore it completely if you like.
"What do you call people that draw comics?"
Pizza delivery boys.
There's an obvious feature that Thunderbird's been missing for a while that would mitigate some of this. You can reply and say that this feature is already available using mutt/Eudora/Outlook/some obscure hack, but please realise if you do so that that isn't my point.
Email filters, at time of writing, have no say over whether you get a notification for the email in question. A large proportion of my work email is minutes from other projects' meetings, people saying they'll be in late or are going home sick, and other irrelevant stuff of that ilk. People tend to put enough clues in the subject or header that it's easy to write filters for them, but it's still a context switch (that I've refined to be as thin and non-distracting an art as possible) to flip it open and see whether it's been filtered. It'd be massively useful if filters had an option to disable notification for matching messages.
I did submit this to... some... message board... somewhere... related to Mozilla... that I haven't checked on since. A while ago. I think.
= 9J =
easy. go get ratpoison. my work machine runs ratpoison exclusively when I'm doing development. at home when I'm kicked back surfing the web, KDE or OS X are great, but when I want to get some stuff done, ratpoison can't be beat.
From Answers.com:
cartoon (kär-tn')
n.
1. a.A drawing depicting a humorous situation, often accompanied by a caption.
b. A drawing representing current public figures or issues symbolically and often satirically: a political cartoon.
[...]
4. A comic strip.
Ewige Blumenkraft.
Precisely why I used quotes. The term is being used lightly and only used because I've seen it elsewhere - similarly misused. Most of us probably very much agree but the point is well taken. It is, however, all relative.
Expectations do vary locally and between people, within organizations or groups, etc. How does one's boss, or anybody, know how often another checks email? It's when they reply. If you communicate with someone via email often enough, you can develop a sense as to when you might hear back from them. Lunch time? Late afternoon? Within 3 hours, by the end of the week, etc.
Many people are at their desks all day and have reliable email they are expected to check quite often. It all comes down to expectation and it's easy to get burned when judging reliability/ping times.
The trick is to train your boss (or sender) to not expect a response in the middle of the day if you are often out of the office, at a job site, etc. Reply always at the end of the day to signal to them that delivery is not reliable in the middle of the afternoon but you can usually get back to them by 4:30p or so.... even if you see their email during the day, just hold off or respond and postpone (or schedule delivery) till later.
This can backfire and reduce efficiency within an organization but the technique can be put to good use for those that tend to be especially nagging or demanding of "immediate" responses.
Text/SMS can be a good alternative to calling somebody when you can't rely on email. The reception confirmation is of course again ambiguous (ask them to send a simple "OK" reply), but people carry their cell phones far more places then their email access. Delays are minimal and you don't need to get involved in a conversation for simple requests, informative notes, or reminders.
Any amount of exchange however will often take a shorter amount of time with a simple call than with lots of back and forth over SMS. It is however great for flirtations, sending your hubby/wife an "I'm thinking of you," for noisy environments where talking is difficult, or where talking on a cell is rude (this is many more places than most people believe!)
You can actually send text messages to email accounts and email/AIM to cell phones - check your provider or post tips in reply for others.
shit, this reminds me of an episode of "Dead Like Me" when this little dickfaced worm of a management consultant shows up at Happy Time....I remember getting soo irritated with the little puke that i hit the fast forward on my PVR...People like this guy need to chill out a little, work isn't all there is in life!!
At my old job, I had a coworker (more senior than I) who would interrupt constantly. This coworker was sure that whatever he said was of such great importance, that no matter what it was, it should take precidence above all else, and become my central focus.
This coworker would always ask me why I wasn't logged into AIM, and instruct me to log in. I would always leave AIM off, unless I was asked to turn it on. Many coworkers wondered why this was the case.
The answer was simple. This coworker would task me with meaningless, useless junk that would get in the way of my actual work. If it wasn't important enough to walk by my cubicle, call, or email about (especially since email left a paper trail, and people could hear him talking at my cube or phone), then it certainly wasn't important enough for me to do. With AIM turned off, I had a low pass filter on just how pointless the tasking I was willing to take on was.
Sometimes, I'd turn this policy. After all, having an instant message log certainly can be a useful thing... but that's a story for another day.
It's not the technology that's the problem, it's some peoples' inability to manage their time and to say "no" to unreasonable demands.
Over the course of your average work day, I use a land line, a cell phone, email, instant messaging, and a fax machine, not to mention actually physically talking to real people. I do not use these tools so that people can have indiscriminate access to me; rather, I use them to have immediate access to information.
All of the above devices have methods of separating the wheat from the chaff. Phones of any kind can have caller ID -- the only people I pick up for are those that I actually want to or have to speak to, like immediate clients or my boss. Everyone else can leave a message, and I go through my voice mail two or three times a day and get back only to the people that I want to speak to.
As for email and IM, well, if it's urgent, you shouldn't be emailing or IM-ing it. I don't care how easily most people are "accessible" these days, you can't assume that someone is a) in front of a computer at all times, and b) availble to answer your messages. And really, that's what subject lines, SPAM filters, and organizational folders are for -- so that you don't have to read everything in its entirety to filter out what you really need to pay attention to!
Communications tools have yet to replace face-to-face meetings entirely, and how would you feel if someone you were talking to was interrupted twenty times in a conversation due to these tools? (And yes, I do hate people that do this. If I am not important enough for you to ignore your cell phone and your blackberry for a few minutes, I should be talking to someone else.) If it's urgent, people will phone, and you will recognize the number -- it's not very often that someone will have an urgent request that you will actually respond to that is related to something you're not immediately working on.
Oh yes, and fax machines are really easy to ignore, I check them maybe once a day, and since 99% of the time it's spam with 1% of the time being invoices, this has never created a problem for me.
Basically, if it's really important, people will phone you or, God forbid, meet you in person. And if you can't tell someone over the phone that you have matters you have to attend to, or you can't tell the person in your office that you have to work on a project, it's not the fault of technology, it's your own wishy-washy-ness. Well, either that or they're actually (gasp!) the people you want/neet to talk to.
It works in reverse, too; I don't expect people to get back to me instantaneously. But I have no problem with that. If I have to talk to someone, I'll phone them, show up in person, or set up a meeting in advance. "Immediately" in the business world does not mean "right now," it really means "as soon as possible".
But this mess is partly created by Microsoft. During the 80's and 90's they put all those windows on our screens because they thought we wanted to be able to do 12 things at once, and I expect that next they'll want to sell us a GUI "tool" to help us tame the mess they introduced.
What I, as a professional programmer, really want from Microsoft is some way of just getting through my work, without opening all those stupid windows in the first place.
Oh, yeh..I remember a really *cool" unix tool which used to do that..
I'm a software visionary. I don't code.
Windows is *not* user friendly, and until it is windows will stay with >1% marketshare.
q uake_3/instalr.exe to your C: drive. Log out, log back in as administrator, then double click on it. Then you have to go to www.someotherrandomgamewebsite.cx/downloads/patche s/fps/quake/3/ and download all the files there. Then install them in order, or else the patch process will fail. You have to have the graphics drivers for your card installed, or the game will be slow. Then go to the installation folder for Quake and allow the user to run it. Configure your firewall to allow q3.exe, or you won't be able to play online. There won't be any sound, but there are some experimental patches at www.someotherrandomgamewebsite.cx/downloads/patche s/experimental/fps/quake/3/ that will work on Windows XP SP1 only.
Take installation. Windows zealots are now saying "oh installing is so easy, just double click on the setup icon": Yes, because typing in "apt-get" or "emerge" makes so much more sense to new users than double-clicking an icon that says "setup".
Windows zealots are far too forgiving when judging the difficultly of Windows configuration issues and far too harsh when judging the difficulty of Linux configuration issues. Example comments:
User: "How do I get Quake 3 to run in Windows?"
Zealot: "Oh that's easy! Try to download the installer from www.somerandomgamewebsite.com/downloads/id/quake/
User: "How do I get Quake 3 to run in Linux?"
Zealot: "Oh God, I had to install Quake 3 in Lunix for some lamer friend of mine! God, what a fucking mess! I opened the package manager, clicked "Quake 3", clicked "Install", and put in the CD! Jesus Christ! What a retarded operating system!"
So, I guess the point I'm trying to make is that what seems easy and natural to Windows geeks is definitely not what regular people consider easy and natural. Hence, the preference towards Linux.
UI software has ADD. Trying to collaborate using the mouse, users are confronted with a decreasing relevance of what can be shown on the screen at a given time. When the two or three solutions to collaboration are email and instant messaging, or rcs, it isn't really intuitive to see your computer as a mental image being processed by everyone on the project. Email allows some categorization, but it drowns out the recipient with this decision. You could use newsgroups, but they are static once posted, as is any instant message. Rcs on a document (or shemacs) allows more direct participation, but eliminates the hierarchy. Meetings offer a time to focus, but it becomes increasingly difficult to be productive when taken away from desk resources and planted in social discourse. You can change the subject, but to get people really thinking you have to offer examples. So much of a meeting disappears after you leave. It's probably a good thing for folks who have to worry about the demands that appear at meetings. But at the same time look: As a mere participant I'm not showing you now, and we're not meeting later. An xml hierarchy (hnb) program becomes person-specific in a hurry. Computers change the subject faster than your boss. For you to focus on the point, the computer should enable you to focus on the point by making it visible rather than holding your hand (mouse).
Beginning some concept work on a solution to network collaboration concept-sharing, there is this project (with bugs): freshmeat.net/projects/hmce
You will probably have a negative experience with this project because it only works with Linux (and maybe OSX) and right now it doesn't work deleting lines above others' cursors. Right now there is not another program offering both a hierarchy (hnb) and direct collaborative text editing (moonedit). Why has no free software developer done this? My guess is the popular focus on irc clients and wikis. Instant messaging is more popular than either of these but less developed. Another idea is to plug vnc in to the program and manipulate mouse signals so as to make it appear there are more cursors on the screen. I have some beginning code for this (dosvnc hack).
ciao,
- D. Jeffery (d DOT jeffery AT mailandnews DOT com)
Email is an unguaranteed delivery mechanism. It should never be used for truly urgent communication.
Therefore I do what I've always done: Check my email when I damn well feel like it. Turn off the message notifier, turn off the ability for an email to reach your phone or page you or anything of that sort. You'll check your email when you get around to it and not before then.
Really, if you don't want to be interrupted, make yourself less available.
This behavior trains those around you to not treat email as a good mechanism for urgent communications as well. After a few times of people coming to you because you haven't responded to the email they sent 10 minutes before, they'll stop sending you emails that require your immediate attention. They'll call you on the phone instead. In fact, they'll gradually stop attempting to email anybody for anything truly urgent. Eventually. It takes time for some people to get in the habit of this.
If you really want to get your attention span back, then stop using email notifier programs, but also stop using IM software. Of any kind. IM is about the most intrusive thing that can exist, since it jumps to the foreground and harshly interrupts your work at the whim of anybody else in the world, more or less. If somebody really wants your attention, they can pick up the phone and dial 10 digits instead. It's faster, and for anybody out of college, the slightly extra price (in some cases) shouldn't really be a factor. If they're not willing to spend their "minutes" or whatever to call me, well, then it's not urgent enough to interrupt me.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
People who can't even operate the most common infosystems at their most basic level are "Life Hackers"? That's like calling New York Times writers "reporters". That ain't even writing - that's typing! And pretty shoddy typing, that can't even get the right words in the right amount or order.
--
make install -not war
if using windows, at 12pm click on the little red 'x' in the upper right corner of your email client, then, right click on the smiley face in your task bar and select 'exit' at 1pm select 'start' -> 'thunderbird' and then 'start' -> ...
well hopefully you get the idea by now.
I read an interesting article on time management and one of the things it advised was NOT to read eMail for the first hour of your workday. That is the most productive time for many people so why kill it with reading eMail? Also, it sets a bad tone for your day. You start the day feeling rushed and that is a hard feeling to lose. I find this works pretty well. It's hard to avoid the temptation to read eMail first thing, but it does help.
blah blah blah
Sounds like a good idea, but, actually it didn't work. Almost everyone on the team found it impossible to live with this discipline. The few who did live with were the ones who would be disciplined in any other environment anyway.
The lesson? As others here have observed, it really is our own choice whether we prefer distractions and multi-tasking, or focusing on the job.
I'm a software visionary. I don't code.
I presume, by marking messages in your email inbox the way you do for spam filtering, you could weed out which messages are important enough to, e.g., pop up an alert on your desktop. A Bayesian filter (or whatever they're using these days) could then "learn" to give similar messages the same treatment, while the rest can sit around until you're ready to read them.
I'd be very surprised if someone hadn't done something similar already; or at least pointed out why it wouldn't work.
Game... blouses.
I would argue that the reason BlackBerry has been so successful is
that it lets you route all the different interruption channels into a
single device, which you have with you all the time and can view them
all at a glance and decide what you want to deal with. Plus you get
to configure which things you want to alert on (incoming calls, emails,
IM messages), and what not to bother you about until you dig into the
device and check for yourself.
It's paradoxical, but the effect of this is actually freeing. It puts
you in complete control of the time and manner in which you choose to
be interrupted.
That's the "killer app" aspect of the BlackBerry in a nutshell.
There aren't a myriad of new forms. There's:
You could add cell-phone and maybe pager into the list but that's still just a phone, albeit one that is more likely to reach you. The solutions are still the same:
E-mail. Just like snail-mail. Answer at regular times. I enjoy getting home and opening the mail... it helps that I've done the legwork to eliminate most junkmail. Most mail is meaningful and it happens once a day. Same with e-mail, except more often. Open and read every hour, two, or four depending on what works for you. Answer the ones you want, set aside others for later, and delete the rest. Again it's far less of a chore if you do the work to get rid of the spam.
IM. It's just like the phone. You realize you can either set your status as "away" or simply not answer, right? There's a reason all IMs start with something like "You there?" And personally I'd rather click on a little X than listen to the damn phone ring for 30 seconds.
Cell phone/pager. Again, just in case you didn't know, here's a little secret. Don't tell everyone ok... you don't have to answer these either. In fact, my cell-phone has a feature they just introduced where I can even turn the ringer off! I'll get the model number/provider if anyone's interested...
I would say that interruptions like phone calls/IM are less irritating nowadays because you can actually see who the hell it is before you answer. "Private Caller" is lowest on my list... as in perhaps if I'm lost in the desert and trying to distract myself from the wild dogs gnawing at my torso.
My problem is the amount of available information. I can lost looking at interesting but meaningless things (like talking about the amount of information available... ooo how post-modern...). It requires more willpower... but overall life is easier.
I guess the one true irritant is the wife who calls at least twice a day. It requires 5-10 minutes of sub-vocal grunting before it clicks that perhaps I might have actually been doing something when she called besides staring at the phone waiting for her to call (like reading Slashdot damnit). And yet still the calls come... and when you have kids you pretty much will always choose to answer. Or else you might be a bad parent. You wouldn't want to be a bad parent would you? No, I didn't think so. Good for you.
It seems like lately, there's a lot of backlash to instant messengers and email in the workplace. Lots of accusations of people spending "upwards of 16 to 20 hours a week" just reading or replying to their messages and the idea that all of this is ruining productivity.
I can see where that's one possibility, but I'd just like to point out the flip side. I've worked for companies with multiple locations around the country, and there's a very large, very real cost for all the long distance phone calls that go on just so people can remain in communications with their co-workers. By shunting as much off that off to email or IM as possible, the phone bills drop significantly. (In fact, one place I worked went so far as to issue everyone with "accounting codes" they had to dial in before making a long distance call, and that way - the accounting dept. could break down the cost of all the calls by department and charge them to the respective "cost centers" of the business. That means your accountants are losing a lot of productivity sorting all those phone calls every month too!)
Especially in cases where you're performing computer help-desk type functions for other employees, making the contact over the phone often means you're sitting on the line for long periods of time either "on hold" or effectively on-hold, while the person puts down the receiver and performs a few tasks and waits for the results, or while they make you wait while they handle some pressing thing that came up in the middle of your troubleshooting session. If you can do the support via a series of emails instead, you let both parties answer at their own pace and avoid running up LD charges for "dead air" over idle phone lines.
Am I the only person who thought of how a basic microprocessor handles interupts (single level interupts that is) as a possible solution to being swamped?
In order to prevent greedy devices from hogging all the CPU time, it will always return to the "main task" before servicing another interrupt. Not sure if this would apply to real life, but I think it could prevent you from queuing up a huge stack of work (pun intended).
You could always link to the source instead of a reference to the source: http://www.43folders.com/2005/10/11/procrastinatio n-hack-1025/
The problem with cell phones is that people expect you to be reachable all the time. So they get annoyed when you deliberately turn it off.
========
CINC, 4th Penguin Legion
why care...I'm not paying my wage!
You see, it's best to be 100% accurate when you are calling someone a dumbass, you dumbass.
Scheduling time like that is good and fine in theory, but:
1. Sometimes something pops up that's important, or at least project-related.
2. Sometimes management pops up.
3. I swear some people are such windbags, you could put whistles on them and call them a bagpipe. They tend to not be deterred by subtle hints like a briefcase on the chair (they can talk while standing anyway) or even a "Not now, please, I'm really really busy. We have an integration test today and I have to finish this." One particular co-worker just said he'll wait for me to finish that method I was typing, and then he started to hum loudly while waiting. Throwing a bit of a fit about it, still was a bit too subtle a hint for him.
And I don't even mean for project related stuff. It tends to be, to pick only on this one co-worker:
- about how we should change the whole structure and organization of our project (it's a framework) so it better fits his own vision. And I don't mean the way it works or the way it's split in modules, but such irrelevant crap as how it's tagged in CVS, because his vision is to rebuild it all himself at each compile instead of using the released distribution. (Was his program compiling too quickly, or what?) And while he can do it already, it doesn't fit his own view of the Right Way (TM) CVS tags should be used.
- about how I should do something, because it would take him 2 hours (including testing!) to do that in his own code. So he wastes 1 hour of my time, and 1 hour of my boss's time about it. (So still 2 hours of his own time too, and he still hasn't even started on it.)
- office politics to that end. Such as that he's already talked to some other team and convinced them too that they want us to change something, and look, they even have the funds to pay for that change. (Then said team is like "Huh? We never said that, and our funding isn't even approved yet.")
- about how he absolutely needs to understand some purely internal details of our framework, that frankly, is none of his business and not a part of the published API. So he comes with a bunch of class diagrams and absolutely has to know what each private member does, and if "uniqueID" in this one is perhaps a reference to "uniqueID" in that other class. (Nope.)
- about how he absolutely needs to understand exactly how much memory and CPU cycles are involved in initializing one facade class, and if he'd be better off using a pool of those instead. "So use a bloody profiler and call me if it actually shows as at least 1% time or memory used, because from where I stand it looks to me like an empty delegator class that just calls a singleton. So AFAIK it uses 8 bytes. But profile before you optimize anyway" doesn't seem to satisfy him, so he still spends the next hour waxing philosophical over the potential waste of resources in initializing 100 of those per hour. (Yeah, a whole hundred.)
- about how some weird bug _could_ be because of our framework, because it happened two weeks after our release, and it can't possibly be his own changes in his own code that produced that. And it's usually something that leaves me like "huh? So what does that have to do with my code? AFAIK none of us even has a method that does that, so how would a framework bug affect _that_?" But no, really, can't it at least theoretically be our internal changes to logging (e.g., that now we write some more stuff as "trace" that used to be "debug" level) that cause his application to send an email to the wrong person?
And so on and so forth. I suspect that for some of these people it's sorta like a social life. Except they can claim with a straight face that it's work-related.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Computer-based interruptions fall into a sort of Heisenbergian uncertainty trap: it is difficult to know whether an e-mail message is worth interrupting your work for unless you open and read it - at which point you have, of course, interrupted yourself.' What could be done to change computing to help mitigate this multitasking?"
This isn't a technical problem, this is a social problem. The problem is that too many people want to get in touch with you. And moreover, your boss has eliminated the secretarial pool about 15 years ago. Now, people can get in touch with the person they want to get in touch with. The developer of the program that they use. The systems administrator of the network they use. The guy at the cable company that can fix your reception.
You could employ technical solutions to this problem all day if you like, but it's not going to do any good. Lookout express already has a method for determining the priority of e-mail, but really, who uses that without abusing it? Who was the last person you know that actually marked their e-mail as "lowest priority"? No, everyone's message has the highest priority. It needs to be fixed *now*, and it's more important than anyone else in line.
I suppose one solution would be for your boss to hire more people like you, since you're clearly not getting any work done with the constant interruption. But the competition doesn't and won't do that, so you can't afford to do it either.
Oh, and the technology isn't the problem either. It's merely the facilitator, because now it's *easy* to get in touch.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
As the soon-to-be wife of a IT Director for a billion some dollar company (and being the entire IT dept.) I understand afew times during the night of 'Honey, I will be back soon I have to go check email'. For him, its work, just in case the cell phone does not ring right away. For non-IT work, I see alot of people waste massive ammounts of time playing online with IM and email. I have actually been bored with people that IM be just because they wanted to 'chat' during the work time. For a cell phone when I was a manager for a rest. I had numerous people ring me up just to 'chat' and that lovely txt msg, so I started to ignore all calls that were not urgent (from another store, manager above me, etc). I can understand people getting bored at work, but unless you work for a carnie, you really should work and not play around. For myself, sometimes I work around the house (freelance) or I am busy actually working on the house with repairs. For certain reasons I leave my IM open, but randomly I will get msg's of 'hey whats up' or 'you havnt talked to me in awhile'..........and I close all these windows because they are of no 'urgent' response. I check my email about twice a day, once after my /. morning readings, and once in the evening, there are no popups for me and there are no 'urgent' things that you can not either call me up or you can knock on my front door. I guess that makes me an asshole for wanting to actually get my work complete, o well.
Just a thought, use your computer for what its meant (your work), inturn you get (your paycheck) and maybe who knows, you can retire early and play on AIM for the rest of your life.
Let the *recipient* set the "Important" flag on incoming mail -- or rather, apply a Bayesian filter (or other appropriate method) to make the computer do it automatically. Then the user has a far better chance at guessing what email earn his/her attention.
OT: Does this public post mean the idea can't be patented? $DEITY, I hope so.
"Good news, everyone!"
That's d/\mn wrong! Information must be a.relevant, b.timely, and c.useful> . Data are just a carrier of information.
I'd wild guess that today, in the data spam web that waves around our daily lives, information is scarcer than ever. That's the whole point the grandfather article is trying to make.
<before>now</before>
Somebody help me, I can't breathe.... I just tore my diaphragm from laughing...
Tidbit, I'm not taking credit:
Henry Ford was always dropping into the offices of his company's executives. When asked why he didn't have them come to him, he replied, 'Well, I'll tell you. I've found that I can leave the other fellow's office a lot quicker than I can get him to leave mine.
"Good news, everyone!"
I read my email once per day, in the morning.
If you think that some issue is important enough that I should know about it now, then you should call me on the phone.
(The only exception to this policy is if you send me an email containing an attachment, then call me to let me know about it.
But even then, I will read only the one email from you, and let the others slide until the next morning.)
Oh, and don't bother trying to IM me, or IRC me, or whatever; I don't use any of that crap.
Personal visit, phone, email, and snail mail, prioritized in that order.
That's it.
Everytime I have a discussion about this with clients, co-workers or business partners, I hear tales of spam filtering, rules wizards, voicemail solutions, etc.
But what everyone seem to be ignoring, is that you can just reply to the communication and let the other party know how you feel about all this unneeded communication.
Get a phone call and think it could have been handled by a mail? Say so. Get private instant messages while you're at work? Tell the sender about your working hours and ask them to ask again later. E-mail that you don't appreciate? Reply and let the sender know you'd rather not be included in their list of 'fun' mailings.
I know it is probably blasphemy on /. to say so, but not every problem needs a technical solution. If you tell the few hundred people that actually send all that junk at you how you feel about it and how you would like to be contacted, the entire problem will soon be reduced to normal proportions.
Ofcourse, this does not take care of spam or commercial mail that you should actually read. Nor does it help when you get a lot of communication from parties you'll only have a single contact with. But I think for the majority of people, the majority of messages is from people they communicate with regularly.
I had a General Manager who never used computers before ask me what would be the best way to setup a computer for him to communicate with.
I honestly did tell him to give his personal receptionist / secretary everything she could possibly ask for or want, and let her do the filtering for him.
He did it, and it worked very well for both her and for the General Manager.
Later he got a fancy laptop to put on his desk to impress clients and play around with, but when it came to work, he let her do all the e-mail and scheduling and gatekeeping...
No PC made can out-do an intellegent, well trained, professional, personal assistant.
thats it
and life is oh so much sweeter.
Plus, I get way more sex.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --