Slashdot Mirror
Technology and Ever-Falling Attention Spans
An anonymous reader writes: The BBC has an article about technology's effect on concentration in the workplace. They note research finding that the average information worker's attention span has dropped significantly in only a few years. "Back in 2004 we followed American information workers around with stopwatches and timed every action. They switched their attention every three minutes on average. In 2012, we found that the time spent on one computer screen before switching to another computer screen was one minute 15 seconds. By the summer of 2014 it was an average of 59.5 seconds." Many groups are now researching ways to keep people in states of focus and concentration. An app ecosystem is popping up to support that as well, from activity timing techniques to background noise that minimizes distractions. Recent studies are even showing that walking slowly on a treadmill while you work can have positive effects on focus and productivity. What tricks do you use to keep yourself on task?
I can't bring myself to close tabs. I find myself with my hand shaking over the 'x' in the browser like a junkie trying to flush his last hit down the toilet. What if there's a comment that's really interesting? Or, worse, what if someone is wrong on the internet? What if I want to re-read that article? How will I find it again? I opened up that Stack Overflow page for a reason. I better leave it open until I remember what it was. Of course I can't close the gmail tab, what if there's an important email. Better leave twitter up because, reasons. Any new articles on Reddit? Oh, yeah, that was that Medium article I meant to read. Let me finish up writing this comment on Slashdot.
Waltz, nymph, for quick jigs vex Bud.
Once people realized you were timing them, they started to do everything quicker because they thought it would make themselves look good.
I am loving reading all these responses explaining how people avoid distractions, even while succumbing to the distraction of posting on reading and posting on Slashdot.
(Yeah yeah, I know, maybe they're in a different time zone... I would bet money the majority are still in their working hours. Including myself.)
I use one window to log into slashdot and keep it always in focus and on-top, and maximized so that it gets 100% of my attention. The other window is for distracting things like hacking out code, building, running test cases, updating rally etc etc. My attention span to slashdot has increased to nearly 30 minutes now.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
You're doing it wrong. You are abusing the concept of multiple tabs as a history and/or bookmarks bar and/or todo-list.
If you're really interested in keeping some pages around for a longer time than a couple of hours, just bookmark the fuckers. Or copy-paste the link onto your todo-list. Keeping a shitload of tabs open is a terrible way of maintaining a 'to read' or 'to process' list. I used to do exactly that, but stopped doing it when I lost my set of opened tabs one time too many due to some crash (and spending ten minutes finding and reopening the tabs from the history - yes, that is retarded). Remember, the only information you need is the URL. One line. Yet you spend 80MB, valuable screen estate and tab switching space, just to be reminded of that one simple string.
For things you visit daily or regularly: Speed dial extension
For branching information searches: Use one source Google tab, middle mouse click the stuff you need for the task at hand. Look at all the opened tabs and close the useless ones. If the query needs to be tweaked, repeat process. If the task is finished: clean up after yourself.
Things you want to look at in the coming days: URL on your todo-list. They're clickable in pretty much everything around nowadays anyway. Also: ALT+D, CTRL+C, ALT+Tab, CTRL+V, ALT+Tab. The advantage of using this approach versus bookmarking is that you have to actually plan to look at whatever it is and learn really fast to just get it over with or decide that it isn't interesting enough to spend time on anyway. This instead of creating yet another pile of shit (bookmarks) you're gonna plow through at some point in time (which is: never).
Things you need first thing tomorrow or actually go back to regularly during the day: Fine, leave those open.