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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?"
is using Instant Messaging when I'm working. 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.
Hmmm. I suddenly have this mental image of me yelling, "Get off my lawn, you kids!" while waving my cane.
*Dilbert walks into his cubicle, presses button on his answering machine* Machine: You have 2,804 messages. 2,804 are marked "urgent". First urgent message: *beep* Todd: Hey Dilbert, this is Todd. I just called you to tell you that I sent you an email. Okay, bye. *Dilbert hits button* Machine: Messages deleted.
Etiquette is etiquette. He kills his mother but he can't wear grey trousers.
I wouldn't say e-mail interrupts much - I can read it when I want to. The most disruptive is someone walking into my office - you can't get away from that, although you can tell the person you're busy. A phone call is second to that, although you can just not pick up the phone. It also takes longer to punch in your access code and listen to a voice message then to quickly read an e-mail. Instant messenging would be next in line, although you can wait a few minutes (or hours) to respond to those. To me, e-mail is the least disruptive.
..sorry but i got distracted by an email. What was your question?
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.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
Well, for starters, we could stop reading slashdot at work.
Yeaahhhh, I just read slashdot, but it looks like I'm working. I do that for probably another hour after lunch too. I'd say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work.
One of the most valuable one-day seminars I attended talked about some of these things. Basically (and though I didn't always adhere), the gist is no matter what the potential interruptions, you map your day and set your own schedule. If something is important enough for immediate interruption you will discover that soon enough.
Some of the highlights included:
As for determining whether to immediately respond to e-mail or phone calls, these today pretty much provide the interface to allow you to at least filter at the "arrival" moment, e.g., an e-mail client that enunciates the "sender" and the subject, or caller-id on the phone indicates if it's someone you NEED to answer.
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?"
At work, I've taken the approach of turning off all notifications that I have new mail. That way I avoid the problem above - I don't know there's anything to interrupt me, so no interruption occurs. Higher priority is given to (work-related) IM and higher priority is given to a phone call. Note that 'higher' doesn't automatically guarantee I'll drop what I'm doing to answer, but you have the second-best chance of getting my attention. The very best method? Be at my desk and speak to me. That's not practical for all situations of course, working from home springs to mind as do remote offices etc., but for my normal work-day that's a fine approach.
My following the order above has resulted in me getting time to concentrate and think a lot more, and and I'm working better for it I feel.
Cheers,
Ian
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.
if a collegue is asking a question about the current project you're working on, prioritise it a little higher than a message asking if you're up for a game of pool later.
Don't wanna be nit-picky here, but I guess you messed up the order.
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.
If you are working on something that requires your focused attention then turn off the distractions. When I'm coding at work I turn down the phone ringer and hit the send calls button so that everything goes to voice mail. I also close my email program so I'm not bothered by email notices or tempted to check email.
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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.
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
Back in the day companies had these incredibly useful devices called *secretaries*. These devices would open your mail and screen calls and visitors, there was even a voice recognition function! An incredible time saver they allowed even mid level professionals to concentrate on their jobs! Due to spiraling cost inflation even high level executives now must share the few remaining devices.
Seriously though, bring back the secretary. With high speed internet, VPNs, and so forth, the Remote (Outsourced) Secretary could be an intermediate solution to the attention defecit problem.
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.
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
What makes this even more frustrating is that, to follow the analogy, somebody has already peeked into the box but just decides to label it 'cat'.
Literalism isn't a form of humor, it's you being irritating.
Remember those trays people used to have on their desks in the 70's? The ones marked "in" and "out"? You can see how they work in old movies... a clerk sits at his desk, working at a task, and when he finishes it he puts the completed task in the "out" box, and gets the next task from the "in" box.
One of the lessons I learned in dealing with many people and many emails at once, is that you have to treat e-mail a little like an old-fashioned "in"-box. You look at it only after you finish the task you are currently working on. Your inbox requires processing (not just reading): set aside time for this task. It can be twice a day, 5 times a day, or whenever you feel like it; the right moment depends a great deal on the nature of your work. Just as long as you remember that reading email is a task in its own right, and should not be done alongside anything else.
Another good rule to keep is that you have to process the entire inbox, once you get started on it. That's right, it should be empty after you have processed it. If you keep older read items alongside new messages, at some point you'll probably just give up and cry "I get way too much email". Simply process them one by one, each will require one of the following:
1) A short action, say, under 2 minutes. Take this action right away (quick and easy replies, noting appointments in your calendar, things like that).
2) A longer action... anything over 2 minutes or anything that requires a lot of thought. Stick these emails in an "action" folder and get to them later (when you are back into "action" mode).
3) No action. The email can be deleted or archived if it has info you'll need later.
A simple and nicely mindless process... 30 minutes will probably get you through 100 emails, and you will have a good idea about the priority of each of the ones in your action folder.
This is simply about being organised and not allowing interruptions. The hardest thing might be to not read your email while doing other things. Just shut down your email client so you cannot see incoming new mails. If there is something really important, people will call you if you don't respond within 30 minutes, believe me.
Speaking of interruptions... if the nature of your work is such that interruptions can really mess you up (coding springs to mind), turn off e-mail and IM. If you are blessed with a good office phone system, you may also be able to turn your phone off and redirect it to voicemail.
I got this way of dealing with communication tools from the book Getting Things Done; a great book on time management in general. The tips in this book have helped me getting from a state of feeling swamped in work, to feeling relaxed about taking a 2-hour lunch to let some material sink in, or just ignoring emails, things like that. (Yes I am still doing the same amount of work).
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
(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!
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
= 9J =
At my old job, I had a coworker (more senior than I) who would interrupt constantly. This coworker was sure that whatever he said was of such great importance, that no matter what it was, it should take precidence above all else, and become my central focus.
This coworker would always ask me why I wasn't logged into AIM, and instruct me to log in. I would always leave AIM off, unless I was asked to turn it on. Many coworkers wondered why this was the case.
The answer was simple. This coworker would task me with meaningless, useless junk that would get in the way of my actual work. If it wasn't important enough to walk by my cubicle, call, or email about (especially since email left a paper trail, and people could hear him talking at my cube or phone), then it certainly wasn't important enough for me to do. With AIM turned off, I had a low pass filter on just how pointless the tasking I was willing to take on was.
Sometimes, I'd turn this policy. After all, having an instant message log certainly can be a useful thing... but that's a story for another day.
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.
Unless the new recieptionist is named Steve. Then you may wish to just stop checking you e-mail for a while... or perhaps just change e-mail addresses... perhaps you should consider also changing the bit to the right of the at sign.
That is, unless you're a woman. Then, regardless of the sex of recieptionist, you just hit the judicial lottery, baby! Congrats!