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?"

Comments

Factual errors?

[Burb]

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.

Don't check email so often

[kongjie]

A lot of people I work with have their email set to check every five minutes...some every minute!

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.

Have different email adresses....

[rolfwind]

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 :-)