We were struck, during our usual Sunday morning stupor, by The New York Times Magazine article by Clive Thompson that explores how workers deal with interruptions. Titled “Meet the Life Hackers,”
Thompson introduced readers to researcher Gloria Mack. As you read the
following, put yourself into Chaser mindset: If this is happening
while we work, what happens when we try to consume news and
information? Okay, here are the nut graphs:
When [University of California professor Gloria] Mark crunched the
data, a picture of 21st-century office work emerged that was, she says,
“far worse than I could ever have imagined.” Each employee spent only
11 minutes on any given project before being interrupted and whisked
off to do something else. What’s more, each 11-minute project was
itself fragmented into even shorter three-minute tasks, like answering
e-mail messages, reading a Web page or working on a spreadsheet. And
each time a worker was distracted from a task, it would take, on
average, 25 minutes to return to that task. To perform an office job
today, it seems, your attention must skip like a stone across water all
day long, touching down only periodically.Yet while interruptions are annoying, Mark’s study also revealed
their flip side: they are often crucial to office work. Sure, the
high-tech workers grumbled and moaned about disruptions, and they all
claimed that they preferred to work in long, luxurious stretches. But
they grudgingly admitted that many of their daily distractions were
essential to their jobs. When someone forwards you an urgent e-mail
message, it’s often something you really do need to see; if a cell
phone call breaks through while you’re desperately trying to solve a
problem, it might be the call that saves your hide. In the language of
computer sociology, our jobs today are “interrupt driven.” Distractions
are not just a plague on our work – sometimes they are our work. To be
cut off from other workers is to be cut off from everything.
In a presentation this Chaser uses to promote the value of
e-learning at Poynter’s NewsU site, there’s a moment where the narrator
says, “Life is interruptions.” The challenge, for media companies, is
to get the attention of consumers.
Down at the bottom of the Times story is one of those important ideas:
Now that multitasking is driving us crazy, we treasure
technologies that protect us. We love Google not because it brings us
the entire Web but because it filters it out, bringing us the one page
we really need. In our new age of overload, the winner is the
technology that can hold the world at bay.
So, what will media companies do to help the consumer in the Age of Overload?
Footnotes:
The Times article mentioned personal-productivity guru
David Allen. Poynter’s Chip Scanlan is a disciple of Allen’s, and
has written about the topic. Here’s the link for an article
called “Writer Hacks.”
Want some other solutions for all of these life distractions? Here’s some info from the Times piece:
“In fairness, I think we bring some of this on ourselves,” says Merlin Mann, the founder of the popular life-hacking site 43folders.com.
“We’d rather die than be bored for a few minutes, so we just surround
ourselves with distractions. We’ve got 20,000 digital photos instead of
10 we treasure. We have more TV Tivo’d than we’ll ever see.” In the
last year, Mann has embarked on a 12-step-like triage: he canceled his
Netflix account, trimmed his instant-messaging “buddy list” so only
close friends can contact him and set his e-mail program to bother him
only once an hour. (“Unless you’re working in a Korean missile silo,
you don’t need to check e-mail every two minutes,” he argues.)Mann’s most famous hack emerged when he decided to ditch his Palm
Pilot and embrace a much simpler organizing style. He bought a deck of
3-by-5-inch index cards, clipped them together with a binder clip and
dubbed it “The Hipster PDA” — an ultra-low-fi organizer, running on
the oldest memory technology around: paper.
Back to paper? That’s cool!
