Slashdot Mirror
Why Your Devices Are Probably Eroding Your Productivity (kqed.org)
University of California, San Francisco neuroscientist Adam Gazzaley and California State University, Dominguez Hills professor emeritus Larry Rosen explain in their book "The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High Tech World" why people have trouble multitasking, and specifically why one's productivity output is lowered when keeping up with emails, for example. Lesley McClurg writes via KQED Science: When you engage in one task at a time, the prefrontal cortex works in harmony with other parts of the brain, but when you toss in another task it forces the left and right sides of the brain to work independently. The process of splitting our attention usually leads to mistakes. In other words, each time our eyes glance away from our computer monitor to sneak a peak at a text message, the brain takes in new information, which reduces our primary focus. We think the mind can juggle two or three activities successfully at once, but Gazzaley says we woefully overestimate our ability to multitask. In regard to answering emails, McClurg writes: Gazzaley stresses that our tendency to respond immediately to emails and texts hinders high-level thinking. If you're working on a project and you stop to answer an email, the research shows, it will take you nearly a half-hour to get back on task. "When a focused stream of thought is interrupted it needs to be reset," explains Gazzaley. "You can't just press a button and switch back to it. You have to re-engage those thought processes, and recreate all the elements of what you were engaged in. That takes time, and frequently one interruption leads to another." In other words, repetitively switching tasks lowers performance and productivity because your brain can only fully and efficiently focus on one thing at a time. Plus, mounting evidence shows that multitasking could impair the brain's cognitive abilities. Stanford researchers studied the minds of people who regularly engage in several digital communication streams at once. They found that high-tech jugglers struggle to pay attention, recall information, or complete one task at a time. And the habit of multitasking could lower your score on an IQ test, according to researchers at the University of London. The saving grace is that we don't need to ditch technology as "there's a time and place for multitasking," according to Gazzaley. "If you're in the midst of a mundane task that just has to get done, it's probably not detrimental to have your phone nearby or a bunch of tabs open. The distractions may reduce boredom and help you stay engaged. But if you're finishing a business plan, or a high-level writing project, then it's a good idea to set yourself up to stay focused."
What is this left right Aristotle crap?
"People can't multitask" because reasons.
I find that after a couple of hours at a task I welcome a break whether it be to grab a cup of hot chocolate, I don't drink coffee, chat with a colleague, answer the phone or check the email's, or glance at Amazon, or https://soylentnews.org/ , or even this place.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
I get the flow. I like being in the flow, I get stuff done. When I'm in the flow human contact throws me out, but I can deal with email or text messages.
I don't have a facebook account, nor a linked in account, nor any other social media. When I'm in the flow I don't use WWW, unless it's to look up the interface to SomeAPII'veNeverUsedBefore(). When I'm in the flow I'm typically taken out of it by some dumass manager who couldn't manage their way to the coffee machine without help, or my CD (on a USB stick) ends and I realize I need to stretch, pee, and get more coffee, in that order. If you don't realize social media fucks up your productivity, you're an idiot. Pure and simple, you're a fucking idiot.
CSB
Had a manager some 15 years ago. She was a micro-manager. She couldn't keep track of what anyone was working on at any given time. She would drop into my office to ask the stupidest questions. Finally got her to send email instead of bugging me. She would send me email, then show up in my office as I was replying to it to ask "did you get my email?".
She was a hella nice woman, bad engineer (we "co-wrote" some Linux device drivers, she sucked at it), and a horrendous manager.
It's when you are in the "midst of a mundane task that just has to get done" that distractions have the worst effect. Distractions "help you stay engaged"? I'm surprised this fucker hasn't founded a startup based around this idiocy. San Francisco is awash with stupid money.
I find that it is good to take mini breaks to freshen the mind, especially if you are stuck in a "thinking rut". YMMV...
This is my sig, there are many like it but this one is mine
The article's links seem to have better real experimental data backing them up, but I still think I prefer reading http://www.joelonsoftware.com/'s 15 year old article "Human Task Switches Considered Harmful". The second half of "Where do These People Get Their (Unoriginal) Ideas?" is also relevant.
In the last few years he has posted much less often, and when he posts, it is usually only announcing the latest product his company has made, but most of his older "reading list" articles (from the front page) are still excellent.
n/t
So many apps (many main stream) first thing they do when they fire up is phone home, making you wait on them. A few minutes later, your waiting on something else again, and again, hard to stay in the flow when your device keeps pausing.
Remember getting in the zone when coding and then that moron would come up to you then talk about their car, lawn or how their daughter was attending a private school and other mundane information I don't want to know.
They're the people that think multitasking is something more than a bullshit buzzword to be thrown around as a criticism of people who are able to concentrate on the task at hand. I doubt they would feel the same way if they were told to cross a busy road and only look at their phone while they did.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Did they just confirm that my brain is a multi-core processor!? SWEET!
Trump, really, go get some sleep. You've got to stop posting whatever happens to cross your mind in the middle of the night.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
...one's productivity output is lowered when keeping up with emails,
I've known this for years. That's why I rarely check email, and just let it sit in the inbox until the person calls me the following week asking if I got their message.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
Relevant: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/sneak_peek
Time-efficiency in the 1930s meant businesses structured around batching similar tasks. Then in the 1990s, downsizing happened and the buzzword was 'multi-tasking', which meant doing everything yourself. That may have allowed humans to ignore task batching. Then multi-tasking was somehow turned into time-slicing, similar to what computers do to prevent CPU time being wasted. Maybe at the start, businesses issued a directive to keep busy and not waste time in the new, batching-unfriendly workplace. But there's always the fanatic excited by how precise he can be. The problem being, computers suffer from thrashing, where the attempt to not waste time, results in time being wasted. Humans suffer the same problem, with the added problem that they can't detect the difference between busy work and useful output. So a human will happily increase his busy work and not see the drop in useful output.
This has been a proven fact for 60 years, so why does multi-tasking continue to have supporters and fanatics? I think it's more about 'see what I did' ego-stroking, than making provably fewer mistakes.
"repetitively switching tasks lowers performance and productivity"
And it's easy to convince yourself (and hopefully, signal to your boss) that you're more "effective" - certainly more busy. After all, the only things that count are appearances and perception, right?
What is funny about this is that I heard the same kind of research when I worked in software development for a vendor in the 1970's. We had a policy that the folks taking support calls were relieved of regular development tasks for their week in the barrel, so to speak -- for this very reason. Taking random fire was so disruptive to creative thought that it was decided to just stop kidding ourselves about getting anything else done.
Doesn't take devices. It's the fact that internet access is so seductively available on the same system where I'm trying to get work done. Just a little break . . . . oh, is that the time? (instead of XKCD see http://www.dorktower.com/tag/t... )
The natural world has a TON of information to process. Things like predators, weather, food... all of those things require being able to process a vast quantity of constantly changing external outputs simultaneously. We are probably attention deficit for a reason. Can you imagine if in the wilds we were able to focus on something at the exclusion of everything else going on around us. We would be dead in a day. I think that the modern world is expecting things from us that we were never designed to do, and also probably why we crave distraction.
What works best for me is to scan my emails once in the morning, and reply/handle non-emergencies once per day, typically in the afternoon. I'm not constantly distracted, and people don't wait a week for a reply.
I certainly don't always stick to that schedule, but it works well when I do.
Adam Gazzaley has been doing lectures on this topic for over 3 years now. His gadgets much have really been distracting him to only just now finally publish a book on the topic. I'm curious how well his book is gonna sell given that the concept at least is pretty old news at this point...
Shut up, faggot!
My favourite touch is the two giant call-outs in the linked article.
Few of the sites I read regularly have these any more (meaning since I got good at "inspect element" and custom User CSS overrides; appears I've accumulated 150 of these over the past three years, also used to defeat anything that hovers or slides annoyingly).
Depends on task weight. If you're on a dedicated process then you're best off hammering it and keeping your momentum. This is where people want to put on the headphones and drone away. The longer you have the process in forefocus, the better chance to adopt optimizations, which just won't emerge without sustained sessions.
That said, there's also tasks that involve a lot of "click and wait" (incl literal clicking and waiting), that don't engage you much, that are usually unimportant anyway. Depending on the details and arrangement, you might see gains from multijuggling. If what you're doing is indulging (facetweet reddiblrgram socnets) on the side, probably not, but you probably don't care about any inflicted losses anyway.
"Oh, so you're a fag."
No I don't smoke cigarettes either.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
To me this seems to be blatantly obvious. I'm pretty sure corporations know about it, but it is too expensive to fix so no one at a level high enough to do so, will do so. Where I work, there are so many inefficiencies that could be fixed-- many hours a week, but no one seems to care about them.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Doesn't take devices. It's the fact that internet access is so seductively available on the same system where I'm trying to get work done.
Devices are relevant because they are vectors for unintentional distraction. The desktop analog is not the browser window that you intentionally use to distract yourself, but the email and chat clients that allow other people to distract you at random. Also the telephone.
I think that people letting their own mind wander is a separate issue, and not necessarily a problem to be solved. There are many occupations where constant focus is not useful (though there are fewer managers/owners who understand this concept).
Sorry but I can't help but ask, did you get your own stapler Wilton ?
http://rs692.pbsrc.com/albums/...
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?