science of interruptions
Screenshot: nytimes.com, Scalable Fabric, a program developed by Microsoft Research Labs, allows users of the Windows platform to minimize documents so they are out of the way but still in sight.
Matt Linderman from 37signals published his thoughts about interruptions at work and the consequences:
"Now researchers are looking for new ways to maximize screen space, including a radar screen approach with blips that represent things like emails and appointments.
The clearer your screen, she found, the calmer your mind. So her group began devising tools that maximized screen space by grouping documents and programs together - making it possible to easily spy them out of the corner of your eye, ensuring that you would never forget them in the fog of your interruptions. Another experiment created a tiny round window that floats on one side of the screen; moving dots represent information you need to monitor, like the size of your in-box or an approaching meeting. It looks precisely like the radar screen in a military cockpit.
After the jump: bits on high-tech distractions in the workplace, the secrets of “sickeningly overprolific” software engineers, and (sing it all together now) the importance of simplicity.
Information is no longer a scarce resource - attention is. A scientist of human-computer interactions recently studied how high-tech devices affect office work behavior.
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."