NYTimes: Meet the Life Hackers

[Bud]

Does this resonate with anyone?

****

A study by University of California at Irvine researcher Gloria Mark finds that modern, high-tech office workers are frustrated by the many interruptions they regularly encounter in their daily grind; yet these interruptions, ironically enough, are critical to their jobs. In the emerging field of interruption science, researchers are trying to determine the best times and ways to interrupt the office worker so that the drawbacks of such distractions are minimized and the benefits maximized. The average worker does not return to the task he or she was doing prior to an interruption for 25 minutes after the distraction, a behavior partly attributed to the worker's constant shifting between multiple windows on the computer screen. Research shows that 40 percent of the time, workers ramble along a different tangent when an interruption ends because their short-term memory has been disrupted. An experiment conducted by Microsoft Research Labs' Mary Czerwinski demonstrated that workers perform more efficiently and recall things better when working with large-screen computers, and her team subsequently created tools that group documents and programs together to maximize screen space; another experiment yielded a tiny circular window that floats on one side of the screen, with moving dots representing important information to keep track of. Research by technology writer Danny O'Brien has shown that some of the most productive workers use single documents or emails as repositories for the most pressing tasks they have to do and data they need to remember. Meanwhile, Microsoft Research Lab researcher Eric Horvitz has spent the last eight years devising networks with artificial intelligence that monitor a computer user's behavior and attempt to predict future actions so that a optimal time for interruption can be determined.

To view the full article: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/16/magazine/16guru.html
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[TheViolinSkirt]

high-tech office workers are frustrated by the many interruptions they regularly encounter in their daily grind

Yes, but the computer isn't my problem.

[Coda]

"Research by technology writer Danny O'Brien has shown that some of the most productive workers use single documents or emails as repositories for the most pressing tasks they have to do and data they need to remember."

"Repositories" sounds a lot like the humble "To Do List." Sound advice, no matter if you chisel it into stone, ink it unto papyrus, use pencil on scrap paper, or send yourself e-mails. And I think it doesn't matter where you work...I work at home, and there I times I give up trying to remember what I was doing while trying to get from Point A to Point B. I often work at night just to avoid too many interruptions. I think an interesting tangent to this is: How many interruptions are too many in one day? What's the magical level that finally breaks the back of your productivity? If your job is to answer phone calls, then a phone call isn't an interruption, but being forced to write a report about your phone calls might be. But if your job is to write, and you're forced to deal with phone calls and door bells, that is definitely an interruption.

[verena]

Wanna know what resonates with me now (and never did before) ? It rings a bell, and not an unpleasant one at all.

Microsoft !

From this article, I understand there is a whole lot of functionalities to my laptop that I didn't care to explore. I can hardly deal with more than one window open. Imo, there's nothing like a fountain pen or a pencil for your personal to-do-list, errand thoughts and cover notes. But I should definitely learn more.