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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.
(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!