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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.'"
Or maybe it's the ear we live in. We're pushed so hard (must be ready 24 hours a day, while living three lives at once), that we're so tired/fed up with it we work less. Think of it like an army, if you march for a week without proper rest the last 3-4 days will be much slower than if you marched 6 days then took a rest on the 7th.
We push ourselvs untill our wills or body breaks. Theres no reason to care for typing in spread sheet numbers or carrying boxs, so we just do it and end up with half a job done.
Maybe if work was more rewarding (forget money, it's no real reward in this sense) and we weren't expected to be on call 24 hours a day, we would get a good rest and work three times as well (hence productive).
I like muppets.
Its regulations.
Seems that anytime something high profile goes down all sorts of new regulations come piling on and those filter down very quickly.
the amount of paperwork I have to go through to move even simple projects through work is ridiculous. We estimate that the average developer spends almost 15% of their time on paperwork that was never needed or required before.
About the only way technology slows me down if it does is that there are more ways for colleagues to interrupt me.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
When you think back a few years, finding out something that took horribly long to compute was a task. Lots and lots of people with calculators and/or even "old" computers, who punched cards and fed it to huge machines, then they got a result and after lots of sweat, breakdowns and tears, they finally got a result. They then went ahead, recalculated it, formatted it, a team of statistics professionals were put to the task and finally, you had some revelation and you were proud. Mystified how you could even make it possible.
Today, you pick your sample, toss it into some kinda machine and go for lunch. You come back, your results are neatly printed and statistically perfectionized on your desk.
The result is probably the same. But which would make you feel more satisfied?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Prioritization implies de-prioritization, by definition. You must be allowed to ignore less important issues for a little while in order to concentrate on more important ones. Whether or not that's the case depends on your organization's culture.
org.slashdot.post.SignatureNotFoundException: ewg
I don't think it's fair to dismiss the decline in worker productivity as being solely attributal to a lack of prioritization. Even if you *know* which task is the most important you still have to context switch to process and prioritize incoming information.
.. no.. sorry.. yes.. i understand.. no i can't help you with that right now... ok.. i promise i'll look at it in a second."
Phone rings -- "yes, hello?
[back to task]
Instant message -- "Dude!!! HRPROD22-NA01 is down, WTF?"
"I know, I know, but I'm working on something else right now, it's next in the queue, i promise you."
and so on and so on, ad nauseum. Context switching causes a performance hit for computers and humans. Gone are the days when shutting your office door gave you a semblance of privacy.
In a grander sense, many conjecture that we're no longer producing works of genius with the same frequency as was the case pre-Internet / telephone for the very reason that the finite capacity of our brains is now being pulled in ever more directions. From a simple neurological perspective, the melody processing part of your cranium will not become as prominent if you're constantly engaging other aspects of your mind -- buying coffee from starbucks instead of having it brought to your room, talking on the phone with your agent instead of being left alone to compose, conducting interviews instead of simply focusing on getting the next piece perfected. Bad examples perhaps but I think the idea is right on.
Too much fuzz.
CommentBot 0.7a running with args "-module irritate,disagree -target random"
Think back to the 50's and 60's, then look at today. Compare the advances in technology, one would expect that with the advances in technology, we'd be working less and have more free time. Kinda gone the opposite way hasn't it.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
"...the finite capacity of our brains is now being pulled in ever more directions... Too much fuzz".
Very true. And it's not a new problem, either:
"Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
Phone rings -- "yes, hello? .. no.. sorry.. yes.. i understand.. no i can't help you with that right now... ok.. i promise i'll look at it in a second."
[back to task]
Instant message -- "Dude!!! HRPROD22-NA01 is down, WTF?"
"I know, I know, but I'm working on something else right now, it's next in the queue, i promise you."
Look. I don't mean to be harsh, but either the person in charge of the servers has to be more competant (as in making sure they stay up) or they need to hire more staff.
If the IT desks phone is ringing off the hook and people are emailing you that stuff is going down, then either you need a better IT Admins or you need more of them.
That or better vendors...
If those IM, email, and phone technologies weren't available, it is safe to say those people would get up from their desk and come to your door and tell you those things are down or they need help with something. If they can't do their job, I'm pretty sure they are going to find some way of contacting you to try to find out why you aren't doing yours.
The fact, they could spend 60 or less seconds to do this instead of the 5 minutes required to go down to IT and back to their desk means more productivity for the company (which means the less chance they'll go out of business and you get to keep you server admin job).
Distraction is part of the 21st century corporate job.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
When I was charged with taking multiple tech support people at different offices around the country and assembling them into a single help desk, I tried to get management to realize that there would need to be a huge change in how workflow was organized.
There should be a first tier that receives calls, logs them, prioritizes them, deals with the simplest ones and passes the more difficult ones to tier two/three/etc. That would relieve tiers two/three/etc from having to stop every five minutes to "route incoming traffic," and allow them to focus on resolving problems.
Nobody seemed to understand that, so they kept it in an "everyone does everything" arrangement. Totally inefficient, and ultimately unsatisfying for customers and employees alike.
Yes, there is a lot of information coming in to people as they work. Yes, that information must be parsed and prioritized. Parsing and prioritizing information in an ad hoc fashion doesn't scale at all.
Web 2.0 == Giant Blogspam Circle Jerk
A study some years later showed that the people who used the financial planner the most had the worst financial performance! We figured it was because it was taking up the time they should be spending on all the other kinds of planning, not to mention the rest of their work.
--dave
davecb@spamcop.net