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Meet The Life Hackers
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?"
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.
Just use Gaim http://gaim.sourceforge.net/. All of the "windows popping up" all go into one window. Also, it lets you conect to many diffrent servers (like AIM, Yahoo, MSN) at the same time in one client.
It saves a lot of time.
-ELiTe185
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.
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.
If you use Kopete (sorry, KDE only) for your IM client, you can configure it to make a little speech bubble pop up near the taskbar instead of a window that steals your focus. Someone actually IM'd me when I was typing this post, here's a screenshot. It shows you part of the message, and "View" and "Ignore" buttons.
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I'm actually just a script.
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Why is it that when you believe something it's an opinion, but when I believe something it's a manifesto?
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
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.
That was Schrodinger, dumbass, not Heisenberg.
Maybe try:
Tools -> Preferences,
In Plugins, Turn on "Message Notification".
In Plugins -> "Message Notification", turn off "Set Window Manager Urgent Hint".
I believe that should do it. (I don't have my windows machine handy to check it out, but I believe that's what that setting is for. Alternately, you can turn off the notifications completely from that screen too; turn on the plugin, then turn off all the notification options.
HTH. Cheers.
"Go to CNN [for a] spell-checked, fact-checked summary" -- CmdrTaco
Under Tools > Options > Advanced > General Settings, there's a checkbox and text box that might serve to work around this. Check "Mark message read after displaying for (5) seconds," then change the default (5) to 90000. Now you'll have to leave a message highlighted for more than a day before it gets automatically marked as "read."
.js file you can modify to change the behavior to match Outlook's, but that's my first reaction based on my knowledge of Thunderbird's dialog boxes.
I suspect there's some obscure
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