Just a little glance, nobody will notice, and really, it could be important:
…rapid-fire switching of attention among tasks. In that state of mind, says computer scientist Mary Czerwinski of Microsoft Research, you don’t process information as fully and are not using your frontal lobe effectively.
When Teresa Amabile of Harvard Business School studied 238 people working on projects that required creative solutions, she found that fragmentation of attention also impeded creativity…
Given the damage caused by interruption overload and continuous partial attention, we can infer either of two things about people who use their BlackBerry while holding a conversation, weighing decisions, trying to solve a problem or attempting to do creative work with, they claim, no ill effects. Possibility one: they are lying. Possibility two: their work just isn’t that hard.
Tags: blackberry
That’s similar to a recent article I read about multi-tasking that said, essentially, no one really multi-tasks. No one processes more than one thing at one time. Multi-tasking is really switching back and forth from thinking about one thing to the other. But like your article says, it always detracts from the effectiveness on any one task.
I’m sorry… can you repeat that? Wait… sorry, hold on.. I just got to… $*%% buttons so small… alright. Okay, now, you were talking about some article?…
Well here is another article from a little different direction. But the correlation between attention disorders and what people assume you have to do for work is frightening really.
http://adultaddstrengths.com/2006/02/09/top-10-advantages-of-add-in-a-high-tech-career/
In the article there’s the frequently emphasized caveat “IF they find it interesting”. Unfortunately, not all of work, much less life, is interesting. What’s a bored ADDer to do?
OK, the adult ADD article is sad. I have also read something similar to Matt C. about how multi-tasking is a myth. There was an article in the Harvard Business Review a couple years ago that came to similar conclusions as the article that John links to.
And I must say that since getting my handheld there have been times when I’ve been distracted by it. This blog post has motivated me to turn off my email notifications on my cell phone, something I did long ago in my Outlook.
But this does not apply only to BlackBerries, as easy as they are to pillory. I would encourage folks to:
1. Turn off your email notifications in your Outlook or Entourage. In Outlook it’s here:
a. Go to Tools…Options…
b. Under the Preferences tab, click the E-mail Options… button
c. Click the Advanced Email Options… button
d. Untick all of the checkboxes in the “When new items arrive in my Inbox” group.
When you do this, though, do please make sure to check your email every 1 or 2 hours. When you really need to concentrate, get out of Outlook altogether (but again, login once in awhile to check).
2. Keep yourself logged out of Google Talk, etc. unless necessary.
If this article is correct–and there is no reason to believe that it isn’t–it is quite problematic to be interrupted by different widgets screaming for your attention.
And if you find me using my handheld when I should be paying attention to you, give me a good kick… =)
Here is another interesting article along these lines called “Keep Focus By Tuning Out Your Computer”
http://www.infoq.com/news/2009/02/stop-micro-multi-tasking
‘Course the fact that I found it in the middle of the day means I’m not following it.