All this made me feel much better. I've obviously been watching too many zombie movies lately, and reading too many novels about Dracula because the title spooked me at first!
I realized as I read it, that it wasn't psychotic or strange that I missed the job I held before I started this doctoral program, even though it drove me nuts sometimes because there was just so much to do! The article explains what multitasking does to us:
The upshot is something that Linda Stone, a software executive who has worked for both Apple and Microsoft, calls "continuous partial attention": we are so busy keeping tabs on everything that we never focus on anything. This can actually be a positive feeling, inasmuch as the constant pinging [from incoming email messages] makes us feel needed and desired. The reason many interruptions seem impossible to ignore is that they are about relationships - someone, or something, is calling out to us. It is why we have such complex emotions about the chaos of the modern office, feeling alternately drained by its demands and exhilarated when we successfully surf the flood.
"It makes us feel alive," Stone says. "It's what makes us feel important. We just want to connect, connect, connect. But what happens when you take that to the extreme? You get overconnected." Sanity lies on the path down the center - if only there was some way to find it.
The article focuses on Microsoft, because it is some of their programmers who they interviewed for the article, but it notes later that many of the 'life hackers', people trying to reduce the chaos in their working lives, actually prefer Apple because of its simpler, more user-friendly designs. Microsoft has focused on performance, but from the standpoint of the program, not the user.
Microsoft had sold tens of millions of copies of its software but had never closely studied its users' rhythms of work and interruption. How long did they linger on a single document? What interrupted them while they were working, and why?
To figure this out, [Mary Czerwinski] took a handful of volunteers and installed software on their computers that would virtually shadow them all day long, recording every mouse click. She discovered that computer users were as restless as hummingbirds. On average, they juggled eight different windows at the same time - a few e-mail messages, maybe a Web page or two and a PowerPoint document. More astonishing, they would spend barely 20 seconds looking at one window before flipping to another.
Why the constant shifting? In part it was because of the basic way that today's computers are laid out. A computer screen offers very little visual real estate. It is like working at a desk so small that you can look at only a single sheet of paper at a time. A Microsoft Word document can cover almost an entire screen. Once you begin multitasking, a computer desktop very quickly becomes buried in detritus.
This is part of the reason that, when someone is interrupted, it takes 25 minutes to cycle back to the original task. Once their work becomes buried beneath a screenful of interruptions, office workers appear to literally forget what task they were originally pursuing. We do not like to think we are this flighty: we might expect that if we are, say, busily filling out some forms and are suddenly distracted by a phone call, we would quickly return to finish the job. But we don't. Researchers find that 40 percent of the time, workers wander off in a new direction when an interruption ends, distracted by the technological equivalent of shiny objects. The central danger of interruptions, Czerwinski realized, is not really the interruption at all. It is the havoc they wreak with our short-term memory: What the heck was I just doing?
How many times have you asked yourself that question? I know I have more times than I can count. So, interruptions are okay, they make us feel vitalized and in charge, but they're also inefficient, causing us to forget what it was that we were doing before we were interrupted. Part of that disruption arises because of how and when we are disrupted.
In the 1920's, the Russian scientist Bluma Zeigarnik performed an experiment that illustrated an intriguing aspect of interruptions. She had several test subjects work on jigsaw puzzles, then interrupted them at various points. She found that the ones least likely to complete the task were those who had been disrupted at the beginning. Because they hadn't had time to become mentally invested in the task, they had trouble recovering from the distraction. In contrast, those who were interrupted toward the end of the task were more likely to stay on track.
Gloria Mark compares this to the way that people work when they are "co-located" - sitting next to each other in cubicles - versus how they work when they are "distributed," each working from different locations and interacting online. She discovered that people in open-cubicle offices suffer more interruptions than those who work remotely. But they have better interruptions, because their co-workers have a social sense of what they are doing. When you work next to other people, they can sense whether you're deeply immersed, panicking or relatively free and ready to talk - and they interrupt you accordingly.
So why don't computers work this way? Instead of pinging us with e-mail and instant messages the second they arrive, our machines could store them up - to be delivered only at an optimum moment, when our brains are mostly relaxed.
One afternoon I drove across the Microsoft campus to visit a man who is trying to achieve precisely that: a computer that can read your mind. His name is Eric Horvitz, and he is one of Czerwinski's closest colleagues in the lab. For the last eight years, he has been building networks equipped with artificial intelligence (A.I.) that carefully observes a computer user's behavior and then tries to predict that sweet spot - the moment when the user will be mentally free and ready to be interrupted.
Some of the programs they're working on are really interesting, and seem to promise to maximize a worker's productivity at his or her individually attuned screen, though it appears that much of the testing has involved employees in technologically-heavy workplaces, who are very savvy about computers and probably use them quite efficiently in the first place. I'd be curious to see how that might change in a less technologically savvy workplace (such as the last one I was at - many employees did not turn their computers on till half way through the day, and there was only one machine isolated from the internal network that connected to the internet - yeah, they were paranoid and not willing to spend money on protecting the whole system).
But I still actually miss the busy office life, where I interacted with dozens of other people every day, either electronically, or in person. These days, I'm lucky if I talk to three people all day who aren't family or students (not quite the same kind of interaction). Being a grad student is such a solitary activity, I'd actually relish some interruptions once in a while!
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