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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?"
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
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.
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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.
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.
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
(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!
Very worthwhile. I know that anything flagged priority can be safely sent to the bottem of the queue.
The only people in my office that use priority flags are in Sales and Marketing. They don't use many critical systems, and I know their email is working fine, so whatever's left can wait 'til later. If it's a real crisis - they need new toner - they'll be in my office before I'll be able to reply anyway.
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
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!"
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.
It's happening. Heard it on some public radio show within the last six months, but I can't find it right now. The story was a direct report from a freelancer (writer, I think) who arranged for someone in India to screen phone calls and email. On the whole it seemed to work very well. The secretary was even able to compose replies to some of the email, and rather took offense at correspondents who seemed to be against her client's best interests. Fascinating story, I apologize for being unable to find it.