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How IT Increases Productivity
Several readers wrote to tell us about a groundbreaking study reported in Computerworld. Researchers at Boston University and MIT analyzed how IT makes people more productive at an individual level. They gathered more than 125,000 email messages, 5 years of project data, and survey responses to see what factors predicted revenue generation and completed projects. Abstracts for the original articles are available. Among the surprises: IT didn't necessarily make projects faster but it did dramatically increase productivity by facilitating multitasking; and IT-supported social networks predicted productivity better than experience did.
Some of us that are 40 and under (and I imagine 45 and under) grew up building this tech and are very effective multitaskers to level of competence that this 25 and under (Generation nexters) aren't able to comprehend.
./ers can too. I understood how the telephone worked at around 10 years old and was hacking calls with just a speaker and 2 wires ripped from a taple player to call my friends when I had no phone in my room, only a jack. There was a time when I memorized all the Bell codes (in my area) for redial, dictate phone number, delay dial, etc... all before this caller ID crap.
I can rewire a home for phone service. I imagine that most
My nephew is 17. I had him accompany me to rewire my mother's condo for 2 lines of phone service. The telco only wired one jack and put a splitter on it.
I was rather shocked when he stood in amazement watching me remove the plate from the wall and rewire the wires. Up to that point, the phone is simplay just a magic box that communicates to another magic box (phone) to him.
Something so simple that you can pulse dial with a speaker and 2 wires and get a connection for simple communication was such a mystery to him that I had to rethink what todays youth is into. He can turn on a cell phone, IM, use all the features but if you ask him how many volts his cell phone battery supplies, he's quite lost.
These Generation Nexters will be able to multitask with the tech presented to them but how many will know how to fix the tech?
if you steal from one source, that is plagiarism, if you steal from many, well, that's just research.
I have to echo one of my fellow responders...you don't multi-task better because you grew up around computers, you multi-task better because you are young. I graduated high school in 91, and so my early computer/tv/phone/gf sessions were occurring right at that magic age around 25, when we tend to loose that elasticity of brain that allows us to hold more complex logic structures in our heads - a task which happens to require lots of task switching. It is a very strange sensation to feel yourself...get dumber.
I don't see myself as less capable now than I was then, larger because experience more than makes up for the lost skill. However, I'm not nearly as capable of switching between disparate tasks as I was back then. Perhaps it is not worth studying yet - the first internet generation is in their 20's. In ten years, we may know a whole lot more.
Excellent! Maybe you can get transferred away and your boss can actually get some work done.
You do know you can't really multitask, right? Any multitasking requires context switching. Any additional task makes you 20% slower and dumber than you'd be if you concentrated at just one task. So I'd rather live in a future that took this into account and at least tried to serialize tasks for individuals somewhat. That's where the next productivity boost will come from.
These Generation Nexters will be able to multitask with the tech presented to them but how many will know how to fix the tech?.
I was born in 1982.
My grandfather knew how build a house (he built his own, my family's summer house, etc). I don't. Will that be a problem for me? No.
Society is moving forward the same way software development is. Thirty years ago I would probably need a decent understanding of the way a microprocessor works internally in order to complete the most mundane computing task. Today I've got languages and frameworks which abstracts the basic (boring?) stuff so I can focus on business logic.
In society today, constructing a house involves so much (building laws, energy saving, technology) that would make difficult and unneccessary (if not impossible) for me to learn just to have a house built.
Leave it to the experts.