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November 18, 2005
On distractions
This morning we arrived at the new Bleeding Edge cave with every intention of completing a column, Nine hours later, it's clear that the column will have to wait. We've been far too busy to write anything as substantial as a column.
We've been engaged, you see, in distractions. We have always been prone to the peripheral, but we are only just beginning to realise that computers and the Internet have succeeded in making these distractions a central part of life. It isn't just E-mail, SMS messages, and instant messaging that pull us away from our productive orbit. The simple act of scrolling a document provides a tiny hole in our focus that invites a diversion.
According to a recent article in the New York Times Magazine, the modern necessity to "multitask" has transformed the average desktop environment into a complex hub requiring rapid switches of attention.
The phenomenon has been analysed by human-computer interaction experts, and something called "interruption science". Their studies indicate that the average office worker spends only 11 minutes on any given project before being interrupted. Worse, each 11-minute span was fragmented into three-minute tasks, like answering e-mail, or reading a Web page. And it took an average of 25 minutes to recover from each distraction.
It's become so endemic, that there's now an entire discipline devoted to its study, called "interruption science".
Obviously New York Times journalists are among the prime victims of these trends, because they seem to be fascinated by the topic. Another article suggested that many of us are suffering from something called "pseudo-A.D.D" (Attention Deficit Disorder), apparently caused by the attractions of the Inbox.
"It's in human nature to wonder whether you've got new mail," said Alon Halevy, a professor of computer science at the University of Washington who specializes in data management systems and artificial intelligence. "I don't think anything else is as compelling to divert attention."
Dr. Halevy and others are working on something callled "semantic e-mail", which would be able to analyse your email and interrupt you only when it's important.
While he's at it, it would be very handy indeed to have some semantic blog tools. We're convinced that running a blog magnifies the problem. There's all those comments to read and approve, and sometimes respond to, to say nothing of one's own posts. We probably check each blog site (Razor has two) for comments at least half a dozen times a day.
At Microsoft, some anal-retentive researchers are apparently seriously vexed with all this inefficiency. They're working on interfaces that will help us keep our minds on the job. And then there's the Getting Things Done crowd, on whose time-taming activities we sometimes report.
Their focus, clearly, is to keep us churning out stuff. We can't help wondering, however, if this increasing tendency to succumb to distractions isn't really a disorder. Perhaps they're small reminders that we need to divert our attention, occasionally, from what's happening on the desktop, and devote a little time to doing things such as what we did today: ring a couple of old friends, and catch up with each other's lives. We can always write that column on Monday.
Posted by cw at November 18, 2005 06:21 PM
Comments
Couldn't agree more with the stats given in the study above. I attend at a school where every student has their own laptop. These were introduced this year (Yr.10), and we have not had them in previous years. Throughout this year, every single student has fallen victim to distraction - and some every three or four minutes. Whether it be games, email, browsing the web or hacking other people's systems, computers provide major interruption to work and productivity.
Posted by: SJM_1519 at November 18, 2005 08:36 PM