Slashdot Mirror
Tech Makes Working Harder
Ant wrote to mention a C|Net article exploring U.S. workers' productivity. People say they actually accomplish less now than they did a decade ago. Research blames technology as the culprit. From the article: "Technology has sped everything up and, by speeding everything up, it's slowed everything down, paradoxically ... We never concentrate on one task anymore. You take a little chip out of it, and then you're on to the next thing ... It's harder to feel like you're accomplishing something.'"
I agree. Right now I have almost 190 things in my ticket system. If I were to concentrate on one for 4 hours, I would have about 30 people calling me asking for a solution and wondering why I haven't made any progress. 30 bad, 1 good doesn't look good to management.
I just try to find something that takes a long time to complete, start it, then multitask on as many others as I can at the same time. Prioritization to me means finding a way to kill 10 birds with one stone.
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one the bus load of girls just went down.
I remain skeptical. While this CNet article matches what researches have been studying for years, for example, this paper from MIT published originally in 1991, it's only measuring people's perceptions, rather than hard economic data. The economic indicators of the last 5 years have shown huge boosts in worker productivity in the US (ignoring last quarter's results). That directly contradicts the CNet article.
Yes, the paper from MIT makes the case that there are many factors which can increase a person's productivity, and our gains in productivity could have come from other sources than technology, but the question remains: is this true, or simply a matter of perception?
So the average soldier can carry about 100lbs on an ongoing basis. Once, many moons ago, the rifle, ammo, water, and a change of underwear added up to about that ammount. Then some egghead came up with plastics, nylon, and composite materials, and all of a sudden the same ammount of kit ended up weighing 80 lbs instead. So what happened? Well....someone somewhere said "wait a minute...the average soldier CAN carry 100lbs on an ongoing basis....". So on to his kit pile they threw a collapsable shovel, a high-speed whistle, two changes of underwear, and whatever else they could add to get up to the 100lb mark. Ofcourse, the proccess has been repeating itself over the centuries, with the result that today the average soldier has more items (and as a result, mpre pockets) than he knows what to do with, and ends up looking something like a gypsy caravan. Yet despite all the improvements in technology, the extra gizmos, the new training, etc, he's carrying the same weight, and still doing largely the same job. Moral of the story? Whatever sort of technology we come up with, we're going to keep pushing ourselves to OUR limit. The technology isn't there to make things easier, and in most cases it actually makes things more complex; it exists only to boost productivity and effectivness.
But U.S. workers have to some extent let them get away with it.
I think there is some truth to this. On This week in Tech ( http://www.thisweekintech.com/ ), the most recent Inside the Net podcast has a very interesting interview with the founder of a website by the name of 43Folders ( http://www.43folders.com/ ), where Merlin Mann discusses this very issue.
People often feel buried because they have to spend so much time tending to their "connectedness" - email, text messages, voice mail, etc - mostly because they simply don't know how to say "no". He mentions one associate who has to contend with 300 messages per day from inside the company, and suggests that allowing this to occur (as a matter of company policy) is highly counterproductive. It's an interesting podcast.