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Meet The Life Hackers 194

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the too-many-voice-like-the-ones-inside-my-head dept.
Rick Zeman writes "The New York Times Magazine has a fascinating article dissecting all of the myriad ways that people are distracted from their computers in the workplace, and 'how hi-tech devices affect our behavior.' From the article: 'Information is no longer a scarce resource - attention is. David Rose, a Cambridge, Mass.-based expert on computer interfaces, likes to point out that 20 years ago, an office worker had only two types of communication technology: a phone, which required an instant answer, and postal mail, which took days. "Now we have dozens of possibilities between those poles," Rose says. How fast are you supposed to reply to an e-mail message? Or an instant message? Computer-based interruptions fall into a sort of Heisenbergian uncertainty trap: it is difficult to know whether an e-mail message is worth interrupting your work for unless you open and read it - at which point you have, of course, interrupted yourself.' What could be done to change computing to help mitigate this multitasking?"
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Meet The Life Hackers

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  • One thing I haven't succumbed to ... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by John Jorsett ( 171560 ) on Sunday October 16, 2005 @05:33PM (#13805491)
    is using Instant Messaging when I'm working. All the other distractions are bad enough without a bunch of little windows popping up all the time. I don't know how people who use it stand it.

    Hmmm. I suddenly have this mental image of me yelling, "Get off my lawn, you kids!" while waving my cane.
    • All the other distractions are bad enough without a bunch of little windows popping up all the time. I don't know how people who use it stand it.

      Just use Gaim http://gaim.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]. All of the "windows popping up" all go into one window. Also, it lets you conect to many diffrent servers (like AIM, Yahoo, MSN) at the same time in one client.
      It saves a lot of time.
      • I love Gaim for this very reason (not to mentiont the switching between the tabbed windows with ALT+1,2,3). One thing I do wish it allowed you to do is turn the "blinking window" off, when someone sends you a new message. I mean, I can easily ignore it, if I'm too busy to answer, but to be able to turn it off altogether, or just have it flash a couple of times would be extra nice.
        • Maybe try:

          Tools -> Preferences,
          In Plugins, Turn on "Message Notification".
          In Plugins -> "Message Notification", turn off "Set Window Manager Urgent Hint".

          I believe that should do it. (I don't have my windows machine handy to check it out, but I believe that's what that setting is for. Alternately, you can turn off the notifications completely from that screen too; turn on the plugin, then turn off all the notification options.

          HTH. Cheers.
    • is using Instant Messaging when I'm working. All the other distractions are bad enough without a bunch of little windows popping up all the time. I don't know how people who use it stand it.
      It may be disruptive, but it is far less disruptive than a phone call.
    • If you use Kopete [kde.org] (sorry, KDE only) for your IM client, you can configure it to make a little speech bubble pop up near the taskbar instead of a window that steals your focus. Someone actually IM'd me when I was typing this post, here's a screenshot [wakkah.net]. It shows you part of the message, and "View" and "Ignore" buttons.
      ---
      I'm actually just a script.
      Generated by SlashdotRndSig [snop.com] via GreaseMonkey [mozdev.org]

    • Re:One thing I haven't succumbed to ... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Bitseeker ( 762895 ) on Sunday October 16, 2005 @10:48PM (#13806764)
      Where I work, we use IM quite a lot. Both locally and overseas.

      In the overseas case, it's often easier to understand folks via typed English so it's better than using the phone while still being more immediate than email.

      In the local case, IM works well because

      1. It's not as disruptive as a phone call. You don't have to answer a newly initiated conversation immediately if you're really busy (or just set your client to give a busy message).
      2. It's faster than email when the person is there, but if you see that they're away, then you can fall back to sending email (the IM version of the answering machine message).
      3. Unlike email, IM doesn't clutter your Inbox and Sent folders with myriad little messages resulting in a long thread to get rid of. IM's transient nature is an important feature so it's best used for communication of transient information, ideas, requests, etc. Of course you can always save the conversation if you need to keep it.

      IM falls nicely between the telephone and email.


    • Hmmm. I suddenly have this mental image of me yelling, "Get off my lawn, you kids!" while waving my cane.

      My uneducated guess is that you are about 27 years old and already annoyed.

      Welcome to the youth communication age, where lame, incomprehensible typed language spreads uncontrollably to pre-teens and teens via the internets.

      My 14 year-old son knows what "pnwd" appears to mean but he doesn't know the history of the "word".

      We cannot control the proper usage of the language, so it's going to deteri
      • Then again, maybe language is evolving the way it should.

        Read the Declaration of Independence sometime. Could you imagine what it would be like if people in the modern age were still writing like that?

        I mean, the British already think we're savages for dropping the "u" out of words like "colour."

        Old fuddy-duddies everywhere are pissed that nobody uses the word "whose" correctly anymore.

        So, traditions of grammar and spelling are getting stomped on at a faster pace then ever. the forces which speed our comm

        • English-speakers already have enough trouble understanding each other due to dialect differences. I hope that in 40 years when I am 84 my age-influenced babble and drooling will still be understood by the youth.

          Pah! Who am I fooling, by that time, us old farts will be telling impossible tales of when we had music.
          Do you speak American? [pbs.org]
        • You miss the point. It's not "traditions" that we care it about, it's "the ability to communicate." When my students no longer have any adjectives left in their vocabularies beyond "cool" and "sucky", they are unable to say what they really think, or even to imagine that they are thinking something more complex beyond "cool" or "sucky." When they cannot parse complex sentences because words like "whom" are too ... "ooh, like that's so last decade, dood!" ... intimidating for them, they are unable to unde

          • Well-said, my emphasis below.

            You miss the point. It's not "traditions" that we care it about, it's "the ability to communicate." When my students no longer have any adjectives left in their vocabularies beyond "cool" and "sucky", they are unable to say what they really think, or even to imagine that they are thinking something more complex beyond "cool" or "sucky." When they cannot parse complex sentences because words like "whom" are too ... "ooh, like that's so last decade, dood!" ... intimidating for t
      • I was watching a program on Space (Canada) where the location was written onscreen as an "observitory". It appears that checking for accuracy is way down on the list of priorities these days.

        That's the Canadian spelling of observatory. Geez, get a little multi-cultural you neanderthal!
  • *Dilbert walks into his cubicle, presses button on his answering machine* Machine: You have 2,804 messages. 2,804 are marked "urgent". First urgent message: *beep* Todd: Hey Dilbert, this is Todd. I just called you to tell you that I sent you an email. Okay, bye. *Dilbert hits button* Machine: Messages deleted.

  • which interrupts the most? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by br00tus ( 528477 ) on Sunday October 16, 2005 @05:35PM (#13805509)
    I wouldn't say e-mail interrupts much - I can read it when I want to. The most disruptive is someone walking into my office - you can't get away from that, although you can tell the person you're busy. A phone call is second to that, although you can just not pick up the phone. It also takes longer to punch in your access code and listen to a voice message then to quickly read an e-mail. Instant messenging would be next in line, although you can wait a few minutes (or hours) to respond to those. To me, e-mail is the least disruptive.

    • Re:which interrupts the most? (Score:5, Funny)

      by John Jorsett ( 171560 ) on Sunday October 16, 2005 @05:40PM (#13805532)
      The most disruptive is someone walking into my office - you can't get away from that, although you can tell the person you're busy.

      There's also an ex-colleague's tactic of not bathing. Visitors really fall off when you reek. Unfortunately he took it too far and let the miasma stray outside the boundaries of his cubicle. We had a mini-revolt and got our manager to transfer him elsewhere.

      • You got modded 'funny', which would suggest slash thought you were kidding. In my work place, we actually had a coworker deliberately not bathe as part of some bohemian schtick she was doing. Management /ordered/ her to bathe.

        Yes, Dorothy, they /can/ do that.

        She came back to work the next day... appropriately washed.

        C//
      • What do you do when the person that chooses not to obey is the SAME person that walks into YOUR cubicle to chat your ear off?

    • Words to live by (Score:3, Interesting)

      by KlaymenDK ( 713149 )
      Tidbit, I'm not taking credit:

      Henry Ford was always dropping into the offices of his company's executives. When asked why he didn't have them come to him, he replied, 'Well, I'll tell you. I've found that I can leave the other fellow's office a lot quicker than I can get him to leave mine.

  • what?... (Score:5, Funny)

    by kreativemind ( 872620 ) on Sunday October 16, 2005 @05:36PM (#13805511)
    ..sorry but i got distracted by an email. What was your question?

  • How To Find Middle Ground? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by fragmentate ( 908035 ) * <jdspilled AT gmail DOT com> on Sunday October 16, 2005 @05:37PM (#13805519) Journal
    This was a clear problem for one company.

    What was done is that the normal distractions, which for this company was e-mail and instant messaging, were either banned outright, or controlled. In the case of e-mail, it was queued up and held, then released on the half-hour. So that was 2 interruptions from e-mail per hour, at most. The net result was actually a good thing, people actually got up and interacted with each other and kept it on-topic since everyone could hear the conversation. The caveat, of course, was if there was an immediate need. This was handled through the normal ticketing system, which was heavily monitored anyway. Obviously, executives were immune to these measures. They were permitted to be as distracted and distractive as they always have been.

    Instant messaging was disallowed, except for IRC, which their IT department monitored. Each group had a channel, and since it's open source, private messaging was disabled. At first, there was much noise about all of this. But people adapted, and, according to the HR team, productivity clearly went up.

    The problem is, this doesn't work for everyone. It doesn't work for all groups either.

    A little creativity is still necessary.

    This company claimed 16 hours a week was spent rifling through e-mail, and 8 hours a week using instant messaging. That left roughly 16 hours a week for these "worst offenders" of actual work. Not nearly an "Office Space" situation, but pretty bad nonetheless.
    • . In the case of e-mail, it was queued up and held, then released on the half-hour. So that was 2 interruptions from e-mail per hour, at most.

      I think the solution can be simpler than that -- just configure the email software not to automatically check for new messages. Instead, it should only check for new messages when the user manually clicks the 'check for new email' button.

      That way it's the employee who decides when he is ready to take a break and look at his new email. Voila, no interruptions!

    • Obviously, executives were immune to these measures. They were permitted to be as distracted and distractive as they always have been.

      You misspelled destructive.
  • As much as I hate to admit it, the great monstrosity that is Microsoft finally got a few things right with Outlook 2003 - Outlook being, of course, the one piece of software that actually manages to get a few new useful functions on every cycle.

    The little semi-opaque window that appears in the corner with a mini-blurb as to who just sent you an email and why you should care is quite useful, as are the search folders (from whom did MS rip off those ideas?)

    Personally, I don't interrupt my day to deal with e

    • In Thunderbird, turn on the "read" column, which displays a green dot for messages that are unread and a tiny black dot for messages that are read. Click the dot to toggle the unread/read state.

      As for flagging messages for follow-up, I prefer to use the "flagged" property of a message which every IMAP client seems to honor. Mail.app, Thunderbird, etc., let me set up my own virtual folder which can show me all the messages I've flagged (ever, today, in the last week). Opera M2 and Gmail let you set up mul
      • Yeah, I can toggle the read on/off, but what I'm really after is the ability to not flag a message as read just by reading it... I'd rather it remain marked unread until I manually say "yes, I have read this"

        • Re:Filtering emails (Score:3, Informative)

          by generic-man ( 33649 ) *
          Under Tools > Options > Advanced > General Settings, there's a checkbox and text box that might serve to work around this. Check "Mark message read after displaying for (5) seconds," then change the default (5) to 90000. Now you'll have to leave a message highlighted for more than a day before it gets automatically marked as "read."

          I suspect there's some obscure .js file you can modify to change the behavior to match Outlook's, but that's my first reaction based on my knowledge of Thunderbird's di

  • My fear (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Lord_Dweomer ( 648696 ) on Sunday October 16, 2005 @05:39PM (#13805528) Homepage
    My fear is that one day we will have faster and faster input methods up to the point of direct brain interfaces. Why? I mean, don't get me wrong, I'd love that for gaming.

    The reason I fear it is because as it is I already get too many communications a day. Technology isn't helping us lead less stressful worklives, its just increasing the pace of business and increasing efficiency....which means you end up doing more work and much more gets done...all to stay ahead of the competition of course. If anything I yearn for old times before all this when everything was sent via post. At least you had a chance to breath rather than being reamed out because you did not check your email 2 minutes ago and JUST found out about the extremely urget request to email something somewhere.

    • I remember thinking about this many years ago. Office technology is bullshit. We do the same damn things we used to only now it is actually more stressful as we have to do everything at a much faster pace. What happened to the promise that we would have more free time, more time to spend exploring other interests and spending time with family? The all mighty dollar, that's what happened.

      Everyone wants to maximize profits and nothing else. Oh, how foolish and optimistic we were in the 50s. It's almost comic

      • "What happened to the promise that we would have more free time, more time to spend exploring other interests and spending time with family?"

        When 'we' is the entire world, perhaps we have. I'm not sure of the numbers either way, but I'd venture a guess that as a whole, there are more person-hours spent exploring other interests, spent in 'free time', spent 'with the family' than ever before. The catch? The people in totalitarian regiemes are getting some, and the western white collars have to work har
        • And even if office work is more stressful now it is more likely related to misuse of technology ("print letter, send letter by snail mail, open letter, type content of letter into computer" instead of "direct internet communication in a format suitable for automatic parsing" or "calculating values by hand and putting it into a database form on your screen" instead of "letting the computer calculate everything"). To make office work more effective we would need people with a knowledge about computers compara

  • well here's one way to start... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Aeron65432 ( 805385 ) <agiamba@nOSPAM.gmail.com> on Sunday October 16, 2005 @05:41PM (#13805534) Homepage
    What could be done to change computing to help mitigate this multitasking?"

    Well, for starters, we could stop reading slashdot at work.

    Yeaahhhh, I just read slashdot, but it looks like I'm working. I do that for probably another hour after lunch too. I'd say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work.

  • Wow, what a unique phenomenon. Er, yeah ok, my browser has integrated RSS feeds and an e-mail client. I found that after adding newsforge & digg, + my spam e-mail address, I found myself being interrupted w/ tens of messages every 10 minutes (just got one as I clicked reply: anyone getting 'The Truth from Kavkaz Center'?). It began to annoy me and distract me. So I changed my message checking settings to once every 24/hours/week whatever. Problem solved.

    People at work are so ready to be interrupted beca

  • you still have to manage your own time (Score:5, Insightful)

    by yagu ( 721525 ) * <{yayagu} {at} {gmail.com}> on Sunday October 16, 2005 @05:44PM (#13805545) Journal

    One of the most valuable one-day seminars I attended talked about some of these things. Basically (and though I didn't always adhere), the gist is no matter what the potential interruptions, you map your day and set your own schedule. If something is important enough for immediate interruption you will discover that soon enough.

    Some of the highlights included:

    • when you set your schedule for the day, block out an hour for yourself... that will show as "unavailable" to anyone trying for your time. (It doesn't have to be an hour, and it doesn't have to be every day, but it gives you a block of time to handle things you want to do without interruption.)
    • put your briefcase or purse (or SOMETHING) on the "guest" chair in your cubicle (or office). This proved one of the biggest improvements in my control of my day. People have a tendency to see an empty chair as an invitation. In a ten year span, I'll bet I only had ONE person who actually walked in, moved my briefcase without asking, and sat down.

    As for determining whether to immediately respond to e-mail or phone calls, these today pretty much provide the interface to allow you to at least filter at the "arrival" moment, e.g., an e-mail client that enunciates the "sender" and the subject, or caller-id on the phone indicates if it's someone you NEED to answer.

    • Scheduling time like that is good and fine in theory, but:

      1. Sometimes something pops up that's important, or at least project-related.

      2. Sometimes management pops up.

      3. I swear some people are such windbags, you could put whistles on them and call them a bagpipe. They tend to not be deterred by subtle hints like a briefcase on the chair (they can talk while standing anyway) or even a "Not now, please, I'm really really busy. We have an integration test today and I have to finish this." One particular co-wo

  • Treat email as low priority (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mccalli ( 323026 ) on Sunday October 16, 2005 @05:49PM (#13805571) Homepage
    From the summary:
    it is difficult to know whether an e-mail message is worth interrupting your work for unless you open and read it - at which point you have, of course, interrupted yourself.' What could be done to change computing to help mitigate this multitasking?"

    At work, I've taken the approach of turning off all notifications that I have new mail. That way I avoid the problem above - I don't know there's anything to interrupt me, so no interruption occurs. Higher priority is given to (work-related) IM and higher priority is given to a phone call. Note that 'higher' doesn't automatically guarantee I'll drop what I'm doing to answer, but you have the second-best chance of getting my attention. The very best method? Be at my desk and speak to me. That's not practical for all situations of course, working from home springs to mind as do remote offices etc., but for my normal work-day that's a fine approach.

    My following the order above has resulted in me getting time to concentrate and think a lot more, and and I'm working better for it I feel.

    Cheers,
    Ian

    • Franky, I tend to take the opposite appraoch. I make a point not to check voicemail often, unless I know somebody was planning on calling me.

      If somebody has a problem, they can write me an email. I still won't read it right away, but it will get a response. In their email they will have had an opportunity to spell out their problem clearly, so in my response they'll get an actual answer. Typically when people leave a voicemail they just ask you to get back to them so they can explain their problem. I w

  • Bayes filter, Procmail tools (Score:5, Interesting)

    by QuietRiot ( 16908 ) <cyrus@80[ ]rg ['d.o' in gap]> on Sunday October 16, 2005 @06:00PM (#13805618) Homepage Journal
    Perhaps a Bayesian filter could be trained to alert you to "urgent" emails and none other just the same as they can be trained to flag/delete UCE messages?

    Procmail could be used to send a text message to your phone when someone from your whitelist sends you a message (people from your department, the president of your company, your broker, your brother/dad, but not Jim the annoying guy down the hall who's in your department) so, even away from your desk, you could respond quickly. Else, just stay away from your inbox till 4:00pm or so...

    Procmail or SIEVE could be extensively useful if the time spent programming them could be found :(

    Post links to helpful resources in reply here.
    • Thing is, I'm puzzled by this use of the words "urgent" and "e-mail" in the same sentance. I can't be the only person that doesn't send urgent stuff through a medium they've seen eat messages outright, lose them in filters, or delay for 4 hours because it's a bad day. Or is e-mail at other companies much more reliable (I'd just like to point out, I'm not responsible for the e-mail servers here!)?

      If it's urgent, call me. I don't see the problem here?
      • Precisely why I used quotes. The term is being used lightly and only used because I've seen it elsewhere - similarly misused. Most of us probably very much agree but the point is well taken. It is, however, all relative.

        Expectations do vary locally and between people, within organizations or groups, etc. How does one's boss, or anybody, know how often another checks email? It's when they reply. If you communicate with someone via email often enough, you can develop a sense as to when you might hear ba
  • Well, one idea would be to use filters. I filter my email in separate mailboxes, depending on whether it is sent to my personal account, student account, one of my work accounts, or a mailing list. I could do something similar for instant messages, and my phone offers some filtering capabilities, too.

    With the filters in place, I can decide on priorities. Work mail goes before personal mail, etc.

  • Miracles of tabbed browsing (Score:4, Interesting)

    by G4from128k ( 686170 ) on Sunday October 16, 2005 @06:11PM (#13805666)
    Tabbed browsing is a miracle for the time-starved. I love to throw up a bunch of pages in tabs loading in the background and then visit each one AFTER it loads -- no waiting while someone's painful graphics loads from some battered server. I often quickly scan a site for likely follow-on links and start those loading before I fully read the page I'm on. I hate hate hate hate sites that use javascript or Flash navigation that interferes with Cmd-clicking a link to open it in another background tab.

    And if I really need to concentrate I pull the power plug on the broadband modem or take a non-WiFi laptop out on the deck.

  • Manage your environment (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Matt Perry ( 793115 ) <perry DOT matt54 AT yahoo DOT com> on Sunday October 16, 2005 @06:12PM (#13805671)
    No sooner had she started one task than a colleague would e-mail her with an urgent request; when she went to work on that, the phone would ring.
    This sounds like she doesn't know how to manage her environment. I'm reminded of the people that say they hate cell phones because they can be reached anywhere as if there's nothing they can do about it (hint: don't answer it or turn it off).

    If you are working on something that requires your focused attention then turn off the distractions. When I'm coding at work I turn down the phone ringer and hit the send calls button so that everything goes to voice mail. I also close my email program so I'm not bothered by email notices or tempted to check email.

    • I wish it was that easy.

      The problem with a cell phone or e-mail or a regular phone is that when people expect you to answer/respond, they give you grief if you don't.

      I've got the Sunday comics (from a week or two ago) sitting on my desk because it has a funny strip called "Pearls Before Swine"

      Pig:Gee Rat, you've got 424 unplayed messages on your cellphone.
      Rat:Yes. I know.
      Pig: How come?
      Rat: Because people are stupid and i hate them. You see, my rotund friend, I have discovered that the key to happiness is to


    • I'm reminded of the people that say they hate cell phones because they can be reached anywhere as if there's nothing they can do about it (hint: don't answer it or turn it off).

      Many people like to complain that they are "so busy" (probably helps with their image to keep their jobs), but people that complain about it are low-level employees trying to look "important". It's all a political and show game for posers wanting to get ahead in marketingworld.

      People whose work *is* important don't give a shit
    • The problem with cell phones is that people expect you to be reachable all the time. So they get annoyed when you deliberately turn it off.
      • Then one should set the other person's expectations just like you have to do with everyone and everything else in life. I've never expected get an answer anytime I call a cell phone. I've also never had someone who has called me complain because I didn't answer.

  • What could be done to change computing to help mitigate this multitasking?

    We should write some software to solve this problem.

    In case you can't tell, I'm being sarcastic.

  • Factual errors? (Score:5, Informative)

    by Burb ( 620144 ) on Sunday October 16, 2005 @06:13PM (#13805679)
    20 years ago (and yes I am old enough to remember that) we had phones and snail mail. We also had a (closed, corporate) email system hosted on an IBM mainframe, Telex, Fax. And internal mail. And voice mail. And conference calls. We could even put a floppy disk in the post but that would be a bit wierd. Suppose we could also have used a bulleting board system on our shiny 2400 baud modems too.

  • Rise Above It (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Quirk ( 36086 ) on Sunday October 16, 2005 @06:18PM (#13805696) Homepage Journal
    No, this isn't an ispirational post. The story seems to focus on the horizontal and imply we, jointly and severally, are incapable of hierarchical priorization.

    Metabracketing is now old hat. I first came accross it in G. Bateson's book Steps to an Ecology of the Mind [amazon.com]. I've taken the idea to be one of understanding the presuppositions of any proposition and to understand the context any proposition is set in.

    In terms of 'Information is no longer a scarce resource - attention is." I don't see a problem. The article seems to impy that a surfiet of information is a deluge overwhelming workers, but, in any given work situation a worker can be defined as someone, hopefully, fully conversant with the task at hand. If a worker is fully conversant with the task then it's likely that, prior to the information age, a worker was equally deluged with information it terms of our capacity to hold and operate on any given body of information.

    The value of a worker is h/er/is abililty to cull the immediatley pertainent information. Culling information implies a vertical, as well as a horizontal perspective and the ability to oversee the job in terms like a metabracketing process. Goes to one of my favourite quotes: "Concentration without elimination." T.S. Eliot one of the 4 Quartets.

    Crying about information overload is just an excuse for inability.

  • Perfect Outsourcing Opportunity... (Score:5, Funny)

    by manonthemoon ( 537690 ) on Sunday October 16, 2005 @06:20PM (#13805705) Homepage
    Back in the day companies had these incredibly useful devices called *secretaries*. These devices would open your mail and screen calls and visitors, there was even a voice recognition function! An incredible time saver they allowed even mid level professionals to concentrate on their jobs! Due to spiraling cost inflation even high level executives now must share the few remaining devices.

    Seriously though, bring back the secretary. With high speed internet, VPNs, and so forth, the Remote (Outsourced) Secretary could be an intermediate solution to the attention defecit problem.

    • With high speed internet, VPNs, and so forth, the Remote (Outsourced) Secretary could be an intermediate solution to the attention defecit problem.

      It's happening. Heard it on some public radio show within the last six months, but I can't find it right now. The story was a direct report from a freelancer (writer, I think) who arranged for someone in India to screen phone calls and email. On the whole it seemed to work very well. The secretary was even able to compose replies to some of the email, and ra

  • Don't check email so often (Score:5, Informative)

    by kongjie ( 639414 ) <kongjie@ma c . com> on Sunday October 16, 2005 @06:24PM (#13805720)
    A lot of people I work with have their email set to check every five minutes...some every minute!

    Although email has replaced the phone in a lot for a lot of our office communication, I think as long as you actually have a phone, it should be the instrument for anything that is crisis level or needs your immediate attention.

    You need to train people that need to get in touch with you that they're NOT going to get immediate attention via email. Set your email to check once an hour and let people know that.

    • A lot of people I work with have their email set to check every five minutes...some every minute!
      And those of us who work in a MS environment have Outlook, which continually checks email. Although, yes, you can turn off the pop-up when you get mail.

  • Heisenkitty (Score:5, Funny)

    by tsm_sf ( 545316 ) * on Sunday October 16, 2005 @06:33PM (#13805772) Journal
    Computer-based interruptions fall into a sort of Heisenbergian uncertainty trap: it is difficult to know whether an e-mail message is worth interrupting your work for unless you open and read it

    What makes this even more frustrating is that, to follow the analogy, somebody has already peeked into the box but just decides to label it 'cat'.

  • Treat e-mail as an inbox for tasks (Score:5, Insightful)

    by JaredOfEuropa ( 526365 ) on Sunday October 16, 2005 @06:36PM (#13805786) Journal
    Remember those trays people used to have on their desks in the 70's? The ones marked "in" and "out"? You can see how they work in old movies... a clerk sits at his desk, working at a task, and when he finishes it he puts the completed task in the "out" box, and gets the next task from the "in" box.

    One of the lessons I learned in dealing with many people and many emails at once, is that you have to treat e-mail a little like an old-fashioned "in"-box. You look at it only after you finish the task you are currently working on. Your inbox requires processing (not just reading): set aside time for this task. It can be twice a day, 5 times a day, or whenever you feel like it; the right moment depends a great deal on the nature of your work. Just as long as you remember that reading email is a task in its own right, and should not be done alongside anything else.

    Another good rule to keep is that you have to process the entire inbox, once you get started on it. That's right, it should be empty after you have processed it. If you keep older read items alongside new messages, at some point you'll probably just give up and cry "I get way too much email". Simply process them one by one, each will require one of the following:
    1) A short action, say, under 2 minutes. Take this action right away (quick and easy replies, noting appointments in your calendar, things like that).
    2) A longer action... anything over 2 minutes or anything that requires a lot of thought. Stick these emails in an "action" folder and get to them later (when you are back into "action" mode).
    3) No action. The email can be deleted or archived if it has info you'll need later.

    A simple and nicely mindless process... 30 minutes will probably get you through 100 emails, and you will have a good idea about the priority of each of the ones in your action folder.

    This is simply about being organised and not allowing interruptions. The hardest thing might be to not read your email while doing other things. Just shut down your email client so you cannot see incoming new mails. If there is something really important, people will call you if you don't respond within 30 minutes, believe me.

    Speaking of interruptions... if the nature of your work is such that interruptions can really mess you up (coding springs to mind), turn off e-mail and IM. If you are blessed with a good office phone system, you may also be able to turn your phone off and redirect it to voicemail.

    I got this way of dealing with communication tools from the book Getting Things Done [amazon.com]; a great book on time management in general. The tips in this book have helped me getting from a state of feeling swamped in work, to feeling relaxed about taking a 2-hour lunch to let some material sink in, or just ignoring emails, things like that. (Yes I am still doing the same amount of work).
    • Personally, I use the "unread" flag for this. I have my inbox sorted first by whether I've read or not, and second by date. When I go into my email-read cycle, I start at the bottom unread message that I haven't seen (I generally have at most a dozen outstanding "this needs to be taken care of" or "these are notes to myself" emails at a time) and go up, marking them as unread again after I've glanced at them.

      So my inbox always has less than a dozen unread important messages after I've finished reading. Work
  • it is difficult to know whether an e-mail message is worth interrupting your work for unless you open and read it

    No, it is not difficult at all: e-mail message is never worth interrupting your work. The reasoning is simple: mail transport is unreliable by protocol definition. Your "worthy" email message could gladly not come in at all. What level of up to moment importance can be assigned to it if it comes two hours later, or never?
    • mail transport is unreliable by protocol definition

      This "formal logic" probably does not do much to convince bosses or your mother for whom there has never been a day on the Internet when email failed to arrive instantaneously, "like it should".

  • Work Through It! (10+2)*5 (Score:5, Interesting)

    by QuietRiot ( 16908 ) <cyrus@80[ ]rg ['d.o' in gap]> on Sunday October 16, 2005 @06:38PM (#13805796) Homepage Journal
    (10+2)*5 [lifehacker.com]

    Work for 10 minutes. Break for 2. Do something else for 10. Repeat, killing items on your list. Supposedly you can do quite a bit of "next actions" in an hour this way. DON'T SKIP BREAKS!

  • Have different email adresses.... (Score:5, Informative)

    by rolfwind ( 528248 ) on Sunday October 16, 2005 @06:53PM (#13805859)
    The spam in my yahoo account is atrocious. Something like 10 a day, all time wasters. (Though it was worse during spam heyday.....)

    So I set up a different system and signed up a 2 new account elsewhere - a business name and a personal name.

    Anything on the internet that I have to signup for goes in the name of my old yahoo account. This goes for forums, subscriptions, mailing lists, etcetera. Any online acquaintances get my old yahoo account until they earn my trust. Any new credit cards/banks/companies where I conduct personal transactions (say like ebay or on ebay), I do the same - 99% of their mail is junk.

    On my business address, only my colleagues/boss/clients get this address. On my personal address, only my personal friends and my family will have it and services that have earned my trust.

    In case of emergencies, my family has my cell phone number and work number. Same thing at work only with my boss.

    I rarely get interrupted. I very rarely get useful emails in the old yahoo address which I check about every 2 weeks in under 10 minutes. I rarely have to mix personal with business or the other way around. Of coures, I don't use other services like IM during work, I don't have to (not that other people couldn't/shouldn't.)

    With any communication medium, it's a cost/benefit analysis and not just talking dollars here, but on concentration, attention, whatever you value that the medium takes a little of before it gives you a return somehow. With this philosophy, I decide that many of the new communication tools aren't worth my personal hassle. (Yes, I also have discovered that I should somehow free myself of my slashdot addiction long ago :-)
  • ...but Outlook gets this right. When mail arrives, you get a transparent popup in the lower right corner where you can glimpse who the message is from, the subject, and maybe the first bit of body text (depends how long the subject is). If you don't click on it within a few seconds, it goes away again and you can open it on your own time when you feel the need. It is a distraction, yes, but not a huge one since it appears and disappears with no intervention from you. If you want to field it immediately, you
  • It was interesting to see no one mentioned a non-registration link. Well, here it is [nytimes.com] from NYT Link Generator [blogspace.com].
  • There's an obvious feature that Thunderbird's been missing for a while that would mitigate some of this. You can reply and say that this feature is already available using mutt/Eudora/Outlook/some obscure hack, but please realise if you do so that that isn't my point.

    Email filters, at time of writing, have no say over whether you get a notification for the email in question. A large proportion of my work email is minutes from other projects' meetings, people saying they'll be in late or are going home sick,

  • Multitasking may lower your IQ, according to study (Score:4, Informative)

    by ninejaguar ( 517729 ) on Sunday October 16, 2005 @07:23PM (#13805983)
    Excessive multitasking [woodtv.com] can make you stupid [careerjournal.com].

    = 9J =

  • ratpoison (Score:3, Informative)

    by zojas ( 530814 ) <kevin@astrophoenix.com> on Sunday October 16, 2005 @07:29PM (#13806005) Homepage
    easy. go get [freshmeat.net] ratpoison [nongnu.org]. my work machine runs ratpoison exclusively when I'm doing development. at home when I'm kicked back surfing the web, KDE or OS X are great, but when I want to get some stuff done, ratpoison can't be beat.

  • My solution (Score:5, Funny)

    by NitsujTPU ( 19263 ) on Sunday October 16, 2005 @07:54PM (#13806111)
    At my old job, I had a coworker (more senior than I) who would interrupt constantly. This coworker was sure that whatever he said was of such great importance, that no matter what it was, it should take precidence above all else, and become my central focus.

    This coworker would always ask me why I wasn't logged into AIM, and instruct me to log in. I would always leave AIM off, unless I was asked to turn it on. Many coworkers wondered why this was the case.

    The answer was simple. This coworker would task me with meaningless, useless junk that would get in the way of my actual work. If it wasn't important enough to walk by my cubicle, call, or email about (especially since email left a paper trail, and people could hear him talking at my cube or phone), then it certainly wasn't important enough for me to do. With AIM turned off, I had a low pass filter on just how pointless the tasking I was willing to take on was.

    Sometimes, I'd turn this policy. After all, having an instant message log certainly can be a useful thing... but that's a story for another day.

  • Email is never urgent (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Otto ( 17870 ) on Sunday October 16, 2005 @08:55PM (#13806358) Homepage Journal
    Email is an unguaranteed delivery mechanism. It should never be used for truly urgent communication.

    Therefore I do what I've always done: Check my email when I damn well feel like it. Turn off the message notifier, turn off the ability for an email to reach your phone or page you or anything of that sort. You'll check your email when you get around to it and not before then.

    Really, if you don't want to be interrupted, make yourself less available.

    This behavior trains those around you to not treat email as a good mechanism for urgent communications as well. After a few times of people coming to you because you haven't responded to the email they sent 10 minutes before, they'll stop sending you emails that require your immediate attention. They'll call you on the phone instead. In fact, they'll gradually stop attempting to email anybody for anything truly urgent. Eventually. It takes time for some people to get in the habit of this.

    If you really want to get your attention span back, then stop using email notifier programs, but also stop using IM software. Of any kind. IM is about the most intrusive thing that can exist, since it jumps to the foreground and harshly interrupts your work at the whim of anybody else in the world, more or less. If somebody really wants your attention, they can pick up the phone and dial 10 digits instead. It's faster, and for anybody out of college, the slightly extra price (in some cases) shouldn't really be a factor. If they're not willing to spend their "minutes" or whatever to call me, well, then it's not urgent enough to interrupt me.
    • Instant messaging doesn't have to pop up. You can ask it to stay in the background, and similarly train people not to consider instant messaging to be 'instant'. This has worked for me, although new people that I talk to don't always catch on very quickly. (by the way, I do this with 'gaim' - keep one conversation window for all conversations (tabbed), and don't let it steal focus.)

      [soapbox]
      I'm developing an interesting application that will help mitigate the interruption affect by changing the way your int
  • I read an interesting article on time management and one of the things it advised was NOT to read eMail for the first hour of your workday. That is the most productive time for many people so why kill it with reading eMail? Also, it sets a bad tone for your day. You start the day feeling rushed and that is a hard feeling to lose. I find this works pretty well. It's hard to avoid the temptation to read eMail first thing, but it does help.
  • I presume, by marking messages in your email inbox the way you do for spam filtering, you could weed out which messages are important enough to, e.g., pop up an alert on your desktop. A Bayesian filter (or whatever they're using these days) could then "learn" to give similar messages the same treatment, while the rest can sit around until you're ready to read them.

    I'd be very surprised if someone hadn't done something similar already; or at least pointed out why it wouldn't work.
  • I would argue that the reason BlackBerry has been so successful is
    that it lets you route all the different interruption channels into a
    single device, which you have with you all the time and can view them
    all at a glance and decide what you want to deal with. Plus you get
    to configure which things you want to alert on (incoming calls, emails,
    IM messages), and what not to bother you about until you dig into the
    device and check for yourself.

    It's paradoxical, but the effect of this is actually freeing. It puts

  • It's very simple.... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by feepness ( 543479 ) on Sunday October 16, 2005 @10:28PM (#13806688)
    Computer-based interruptions fall into a sort of Heisenbergian uncertainty trap: it is difficult to know whether an e-mail message is worth interrupting your work for unless you open and read it - at which point you have, of course, interrupted yourself.' What could be done to change computing to help mitigate this multitasking?"

    There aren't a myriad of new forms. There's:

    • E-mail
    • Instant messaging

    You could add cell-phone and maybe pager into the list but that's still just a phone, albeit one that is more likely to reach you. The solutions are still the same:

    E-mail. Just like snail-mail. Answer at regular times. I enjoy getting home and opening the mail... it helps that I've done the legwork to eliminate most junkmail. Most mail is meaningful and it happens once a day. Same with e-mail, except more often. Open and read every hour, two, or four depending on what works for you. Answer the ones you want, set aside others for later, and delete the rest. Again it's far less of a chore if you do the work to get rid of the spam.

    IM. It's just like the phone. You realize you can either set your status as "away" or simply not answer, right? There's a reason all IMs start with something like "You there?" And personally I'd rather click on a little X than listen to the damn phone ring for 30 seconds.

    Cell phone/pager. Again, just in case you didn't know, here's a little secret. Don't tell everyone ok... you don't have to answer these either. In fact, my cell-phone has a feature they just introduced where I can even turn the ringer off! I'll get the model number/provider if anyone's interested...

    I would say that interruptions like phone calls/IM are less irritating nowadays because you can actually see who the hell it is before you answer. "Private Caller" is lowest on my list... as in perhaps if I'm lost in the desert and trying to distract myself from the wild dogs gnawing at my torso.

    My problem is the amount of available information. I can lost looking at interesting but meaningless things (like talking about the amount of information available... ooo how post-modern...). It requires more willpower... but overall life is easier.

    I guess the one true irritant is the wife who calls at least twice a day. It requires 5-10 minutes of sub-vocal grunting before it clicks that perhaps I might have actually been doing something when she called besides staring at the phone waiting for her to call (like reading Slashdot damnit). And yet still the calls come... and when you have kids you pretty much will always choose to answer. Or else you might be a bad parent. You wouldn't want to be a bad parent would you? No, I didn't think so. Good for you.
  • It seems like lately, there's a lot of backlash to instant messengers and email in the workplace. Lots of accusations of people spending "upwards of 16 to 20 hours a week" just reading or replying to their messages and the idea that all of this is ruining productivity.

    I can see where that's one possibility, but I'd just like to point out the flip side. I've worked for companies with multiple locations around the country, and there's a very large, very real cost for all the long distance phone calls that g
  • Am I the only person who thought of how a basic microprocessor handles interupts (single level interupts that is) as a possible solution to being swamped?

    In order to prevent greedy devices from hogging all the CPU time, it will always return to the "main task" before servicing another interrupt. Not sure if this would apply to real life, but I think it could prevent you from queuing up a huge stack of work (pun intended).
  • why care...I'm not paying my wage!
  • Computer-based interruptions fall into a sort of Heisenbergian uncertainty trap: it is difficult to know whether an e-mail message is worth interrupting your work for unless you open and read it - at which point you have, of course, interrupted yourself.' What could be done to change computing to help mitigate this multitasking?"

    This isn't a technical problem, this is a social problem. The problem is that too many people want to get in touch with you. And moreover, your boss has eliminated the secretarial p
  • Let the *recipient* set the "Important" flag on incoming mail -- or rather, apply a Bayesian filter (or other appropriate method) to make the computer do it automatically. Then the user has a far better chance at guessing what email earn his/her attention.

    OT: Does this public post mean the idea can't be patented? $DEITY, I hope so.

  • Everytime I have a discussion about this with clients, co-workers or business partners, I hear tales of spam filtering, rules wizards, voicemail solutions, etc.

    But what everyone seem to be ignoring, is that you can just reply to the communication and let the other party know how you feel about all this unneeded communication.

    Get a phone call and think it could have been handled by a mail? Say so. Get private instant messages while you're at work? Tell the sender about your working hours and ask them to

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