Back in 2005, in one of our IMA eNews articles, “Finding Your Way Back,” we commented on a New York Times Sunday Magazine article which talked about how our computers are distracting us from focusing on our work. We quoted the article as follows:
…a picture of 21st-century office work emerged that was, [Gloria Mark, a scientist of "human-computer interactions" who studies how high-tech devices affect our behavior] 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.
In the past five years, the problem has only gotten worse. A more recent article, “Stay on Target,” appeared in The Economist, featuring computer software that “disables bits of your computer to make you more productive.” The article says:
The problem with working on a computer, after all, is that computers provide so many appealing alternatives to doing anything useful: you can procrastinate for hours, checking e-mail, browsing social-networking sites or keeping up with Twitter.
Keeping such diversions at bay involves some technological jiu-jitsu, using the power of one piece of software as a defense against distraction from others. Some programs fill the whole screen to keep disturbing alerts hidden; others disable specific websites, such as Facebook, or even cut off internet access altogether. The idea is similar to parental-control programs that prevent children from accessing inappropriate content: but these are controls that grown-up users deliberately impose upon themselves.
The program goes on to discuss several of these software packages, then focused on one in particular, called Freedom, which, they say “may be the ultimate tool to ward off distractions.”
How I discovered the article is disturbingly ironic. I was in the midst of working on a client’s business requirements document when I received an IM from a friend, who suggested I check out her Facebook status. The lure of the message was too much for me, so I did so, then followed her link to her blog post, and navigated from there to this article.
The whole reason my friend IM’ed me about this was because we’ve often talked about how distracting it can be to focus at work or at home because, as the Economist piece describes, we’re afflicted by “continuous partial attention” – constantly time slicing and doing bits of tasks at a time.
We’re curious – how do you deal with the everyday distractions online? Have we come to such a state that we actually need digital babysitters to stay on track?
