http://www.discover.com/issues/nov-05/departments/emerging-technology/
Emerging Technology
E-mail Making You Crazy?
How to cut through the info blitz and actually get some work done
By Steve Berlin Johnson
DISCOVER Vol. 26 No. 11 | November 2005 | Technology
The Institute of Psychiatry at King’s college London sent the world
of info junkies into a mild panic earlier this year by declaring that
e-mail might do more damage to your brain than smoking pot. Of
course, a closer examination of the study is less startling but still
fascinating. Researchers asked two sets of subjects to take IQ tests.
One group had to check e-mail and respond to instant messages while
taking the test. The second group just sat down and did the test
without distractions.
Surprise, surprise, the distracted group didn’t do as well on the test
—10 points worse than the control group. In similar testing
conditions, people intoxicated by marijuana had scores 8 points
lower. So researchers drew attention to their study by noting that
multitasking is worse for your ability to concentrate than getting
stoned.
The IQ loss also turns out to be temporary. Remove the multitasking
requirement, and test scores jump back to normal. Nonetheless,
because the study generated such a buzz, it does tell us something
useful—many of us suspect we’re not doing our best thinking in front
of a computer screen. We’re worried about what cultural critic David
Shenk calls “data smog” as we wade through e-mail, voice mail, and
instant messages, as well as the near-infinite distraction of surfing
the World Wide Web. This is the dark side of the connected age: We
have vastly more information at our fingertips than ever before but
less time to make sense of it.
Strategies for dealing with infomania—a term coined by those
researchers at the Institute of Psychiatry—involve variations of
pulling the plug. Some people detox by retreating to a cabin with old-
fashioned print on paper for a week once a year (Bill Gates does
that). Others restrict their time on the computer to no more than an
hour a day (Discover associate editor Kathy Svitil, who works from
home, says her kids’ constant cry is, “Mommy, when are you going to
get off the computer?”). Limited-time tactics are creeping into the
corporate workplace too: The marketing department at Veritas Software
recently instituted a policy of e-mail-free Fridays.
A better solution may lie in the design of interfaces. Data smog is
prevalent because modern software has become increasingly adept at
displaying multiple streams of information on a screen. Perhaps,
instead of time away from the screen, what we really need are better
screens: interfaces built for focus and contemplation and not a
barrage of distractions.
Still, a little perspective might be necessary here. I don’t need
maximum brainpower to type up an invoice, schedule a lunch meeting,
or pay my electric bill online. So if software helps me execute those
tasks simultaneously, I’ll happily make the temporary sacrifice of 10
IQ points to get through the busywork faster. And I suspect the same
holds for most of us, no matter how intellectually demanding our work
might be. Even rocket scientists don’t do rocket science all day.
The trick is separating periods when you need to focus diligently
from periods when you’re happy to be following multiple threads—the
difference between old-fashioned paying attention and what multimedia
pioneer Linda Stone calls “continuous partial attention.” How about
this idea: Your computer becomes capable of reorienting itself
depending on which of these two states you are in.
Many everyday applications already allow you to shift attention by
activating what is commonly called full-screen mode. You can, for
example, select full-screen mode while editing text documents in the
most recent version of Microsoft Word or when reading PDF files in
Adobe Acrobat. Full-screen mode (a pull-down option under “view” on
the menu bar) has a back-to-the-future quality. Suddenly your
advanced PC with its ability to run dozens of applications regresses
back to the one-document-at-a-time limits of early personal
computing. All the clutter—menus, background applications, e-mail,
and instant-message alerts—disappears, and only one document remains
for your perusal. Thanks to the crisp resolution of LCD screens and
improvements in typography, I find my computer preferable to reading
traditional printed books and articles. The typefaces are every bit
as legible, and I have the added ability to copy interesting chunks
of text or annotate with my own notes—all of which become searchable
data on my hard drive.
But full-screen mode is limited. You may not want to eliminate the
outside world entirely. If there’s an urgent staff meeting called,
you don’t want to miss the e-mail. On the other hand, you don’t want
to be distracted by 15 other e-mail messages that could be read
later. People already prioritize by thresholds of concentration.
That’s why you may say to an assistant: “Please, don’t bother me with
calls—unless it’s my spouse.”
Computers should be better at this kind of filtering, but they’re not
programmed to anticipate how your attention shifts from one minute to
the next. Your e-mail client doesn’t know that you’re trying to focus
on another, more pressing problem. But it would be easy enough to
create protocols that define different modes of concentration. Many
laptops have location settings that allow you to switch from office
mode to home mode and thus change a whole host of settings. Why not
offer a comparable option for defining different mental states?
In “focus” mode, a computer could automatically switch to a full-
screen view of the current document and notify all other applications
that you’re to be bothered only in an emergency. You could define the
criteria for breaking the cone of silence by creating a list of
important people authorized to interrupt. Or your computer could
compile the list in the background, by watching how quickly and
reliably you respond to different people over time. That vice
president from accounting always gets a rapid response, so the
software automatically puts him on the white list. But all those
unanswered e-mails from your mother-in-law? She doesn’t make the cut
when you’re focused.
Computers can learn to detect different levels of concentration on
their own. That’s the premise behind BusyBody, a new software package
under development at Microsoft. The software is designed to sense the
“cost of interruption” at any given point in a user’s interaction
with the machine. When you’re surfing idly through the blogosphere,
the cost of interruption is low. When you’re cramming to finish a
report, fielding 10 different instant messages from friends might be
too costly.
BusyBody learns these states by watching multiple levels of activity:
everything from the number of mouse clicks per minute to the number
of windows open and the time of day. Microphones allow the software
to sense when you are engaged in conversation. At the outset, as
BusyBody monitors shifting behavior, it occasionally queries you
about the interruption cost at that particular moment. Then it looks
for telltale patterns in all the data and determines your focus mode
on its own.
In tests at Microsoft, BusyBody predicted interruption costs
accurately about four out of every five times. You might scoff at a
program that interrupts your work flow
The Institute for the future in Palo Alto, California, recently
conducted a survey of Fortune 500 companies and found that
individual employees send and receive, on average, 178 messages each
day via email, phone, voice mail, fax, and pager. The typical
employee has to stop work to answer messages three times every hour.
to ask whether you’d like to be interrupted, but the end result is
precisely the kind of nuanced learning that humans do all the time.
Think of the personal assistant who can hear in the boss’s tone of
voice that he doesn’t want to be interrupted. Why shouldn’t your
computer be able to detect patterns in the way you work with
information? We shouldn’t have to do all the heavy lifting when it
comes to battling data smog. Machines should help out too. After all,
they’re the ones that got us into this mess in the first place.
---
You are currently subscribed to telecom-cities as: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To
unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Manage your mail settings at
http://forums.nyu.edu/cgi-bin/nyu.pl?enter=telecom-cities
RSS feed of list traffic:
http://www.mail-archive.com/telecom-cities@forums.nyu.edu/maillist.xml