Slashdot Mirror
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?"
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