Sunday, December 10, 2006

How Do You Keep Up?

Over the years, I've often complained about how fast stuff (mainly information and tasks) pours into my life. I regularly said things such as "It's like trying to take a sip from a firehouse -- it's a good way to lose a lip." I'm certainly not unique in feeling this way. Moreover, as is now obvious to anyone with an internet connection, this problem has not gotten any better with the march of time. Knowing that I am at home on extended medical leave, you would perhaps think that I would have more time to stay caught up, and fewer required tasks to deal with, but alas, it is not so.

Periodically I go through cycles of blissful obliviousness, shocked recognition, stolid denial, bleak despair, sullen resignation, and philosophical acceptance about this issue. Once in a while, I learn something interesting that just possibly might improve matters. A couple of days ago I ran across an essay by Kathy Sierra entitled "The Asymptotic Twitter Curve" which makes clearer for me what the real problems are. It will come as no surprise to anyone that the issue is not so much the volume and speed of incoming stuff, but rather my ability to focus my attention on that tiny fraction of the torrent which genuinely warrants attention. However, Sierra's analysis of the mechanism of the offending behaviors was really insightful. Again, it is not the facts that surprised me, but the degree to which those facts impacted my ability to work.

Sierra's essay starts off talking about interruptions, and how each succeeding technological development seems to shorten the mean time between interruptions. She has a wonderful graph that illustrates this perfectly:



(Image used without permission, but Hey! I want you to go read her post! This is just an appetizer.) Twitter, it turns out, is like the hellish union of inane blogging and inane IMing. It's sole purpose is to allow a group of people to provide for each other the answer to that cosmic question "What are you doing now?", in real time of course. Far, far worse than useless.

Twitter is of no interest to me. What does interest me greatly, however, are Sierra's comments on focus, flow and interruption. 'Flow' is a notion from human performance psychology. It refers to that wonderful state one enters when completely engrossed in a single activity. In such a state, one is able to function at a very high and effective level. If memory serves, the notion of flow was first applied to describe how very talented athletes 'got into' their performance. They learned to concentrate so completely that they become aware only of the game, the competition, their performance. They forget about themselves, their anxieties, the crowd, the arena, the officials, and so on. Sometimes this condition was also called 'getting into a zone'.

Somewhat later performance researchers recognized that the notion of flow also applies to many other disciplines ranging from the arts to brain surgery. I have certainly experienced this state many times in my software work over the years, but far less frequently in recent years. The fact of the matter is that the best way to be happy when one is working is to be in a flow state. This is probably one of the reasons why I have been unhappy in my work this past decade or so. I almost never had a chance to get into a flow state with my work.

I was particularly struck by Sierra's analysis of the truly insidious nature of interruptions, and why they are so deadly for flow experiences. She has two graphs near the end of her article that show this. One depicts how a person would typically perceive interruptions over the course of an hour. The other depicts what really happened over that hour. The killers are the little interruptions that we cause ourselves. As she says "WE cause interruptions because we are addicted to 'staying in the loop'." That is so, so true of me. I love being connected. It is amazingly addictive. In my last job, the company made heavy use of IM. The excuse was that some of our co-workers were located elsewhere, and that it was more efficient to pop quick questions to them through IM. Really, though, I think that the real reason was that most of my co-workers , who were much younger than I (roughly 25-35), were used to and even dependent on IM. They used IM to talk to each other, even from neighboring desks, particularly if the subject was not one that a manager should overhear. Likewise, they spent a lot of time talking with people outside our work.

It didn't take long to suck me in. I have to admit, there is a certain warm, wicked glow that non-manager-type personnel feel when making sardonic anti-management IM comments to each other during meetings. (Yes, we even took our wirelessly connected laptops into meetings.) I kept exploring other IM possibilities, even setting up a Jabber server on my home machine for a group of friends. At one point I was using three different IM clients to talk to people on a bunch of different IM networks. (One is sobered by the realization that taking medical leave to deal with a life-threatening condition might have been the only way to disconnnect thoroughly from this compulsive real-time communication.)

When you add in blogs and feeds and feed readers, not to mention email and discussion groups, it is exactly like a drug addiction. No matter how much you get, it's not enough. One of my particular weaknesses is news, both of the Google News kind, and the more specialized kinds typified by Digg, Slashdot and now Google Reader. One could spend all day spelunking through this maze of twisty little passages all alike, and never, ever come up for air. I act as if it is dreadfully important to assimilate all inputs, and miss no possible bit of incoming information.

So, what is one to do? Sierra semi-jokingly refers to a 12-step program for 'in the loop' addicts. That may be what it takes. In the meantime, simply turning off those distractions is a start. I know this is blindingly obvious, but I could simply choose not run any email client all the time, nor any IM client, or any feed reader. If they are not running, they will not interrupt me. Instead, I should limit their use to specific, limited periods of my work day.

Another culprit is trying to do several things at the same time. Like a brightly-colored, highly attractive leech, the seductive idea of multi-tasking actually drains one's ability to focus. If I'm honest with myself, I have to admit that trying to flip back and forth between two or more tasks gives all of them short shrift. A task that is truly worth doing should have my attention, all of it.

I remember reading an article several years ago about how little of a typical work week goes toward completing useful tasks. I was struck by the article's claim that in reality we spend only a small fraction of our work hours, say 5-10 per week, on tasks we should be working on. Another way to look at it is like this: If I could completely focus my attention, I could get the equivalent of a typical week's work done in a single day, and then take the rest of the week off. This claim very much resonates with me. I'm certain that there have been many, many weeks in the past few years in which I got less than 5 hours of honest-to-God useful work done.

So, here's my plan, starting now:
  • Avoid having any email client (Gmail, Yahoo mail, etc.), any IM client (Google Chat, AIM, etc.) or any source of news (Google News, Google Reader, etc.) open except when I am deliberately using them.
  • Avoid multi-tasking. If this means I have to wait for some painfully slow process to complete, then I will wait for it, rather than flipping over to some other task in order to 'make better use of my time'.
Nothing startling here. What would be startling, I suppose, would be if I manage to hold to this discipline for any substantial length of time. Check back with me in a while.

It is interesting to look at the behavior of my kids and their friends. They claim that multi-tasking works for them. For example, they insist that they can listen to loud, driving music while studying Spanish. I don't know, but it's hard to see how that can work. I know that I can't write at all if there is any music playing that has lyrics in a language I have even the faintest understanding of. (Admittedly, I can sometimes write fairly dense prose while listening, say, to Russian choral music, or Dwarvish chants from the Lord of the Rings soundtrack. But then, I don't speak Russian or Dwarvish.) Likewise, I cannot do math or programming if there is any music going on at all. Still, my kids claim that I'm just old-fashioned (not to mention just old), and that they can handle it even if I can't. I once caught my son Dave talking on the phone, while playing music on the computer, carrying on several IM conversations, and watching TV. (He probably was supposed to be doing homework as well.) I would probably have had a nervous breakdown trying to do that. I rather tend to agree with Sierra on this point:
We're evolving much, much, much too slowly... Brain 2.0 isn't coming anytime soon.

1 comment:

mcav said...

I couldn't agree more with your post on "How Do You Keep Up?". For the months of December and January, I am "on vacation" from med school to interview for residency. For someone who spent the last more than three years working insane hours this seem like a dream come true. Examples of these hours include getting up at 3:15 am to make morning rounds at 4:30 am, or considering a 14 hour work day at the hospital a short one with plenty of time to workout and do reading in the evening). Although last week was busy with 5 interviews, this week has been light (such that I've been setting the alarm to wake up by 10 am so as not to waste the entire day sleeping). However, each day it seems I still manage to find a way to sit in front of my computer for more than 5 hours getting nothing done whatsoever. Today will clearly be no different. I've brainstormed a few reasons why this happens:

1.) MySpace: It took my wife months to pursuade me to join but I finally agreed. Now, I have 55 friends (miniscule in the scope of "regular" users) but its seems to have accelerated with people "finding" me all the time. Its kind of like toenail fungus, once you have it, it just kind of grows. I can't even manage to stay on top of MySpace--a couple of days ago my 16 year-old cousin posted a comment on my account saying "you need to soup up your MySpace page". Thank God I don't belong to FaceBook (despite numerous invitations from friends) and I ignore my Friendster account.

2.) Email: I just checked and I sent over 800 emails this year. School business, running a club I'm involving in, thank-you letters for interviews, corresponding with family, friends, etc etc.

3.) Cellphone (+palm pilot in one): Hundreds of contacts, none of whom I talk with nearly enough if at all. At least when I'm at my computer, I don't have to compulsively check my email on my phone like I do when I've everywhere else. Instead, a subtle computer beep reminds me frequently when a new non-junk email comes in (which are now outnumbered by junk by a factor of 5:1). I also can update my lists of things I wish I had time for, update my schedule with things I won't have time to do, and send text messages to avoid talking for too long with any of those contacts I've been bad about calling.

4.) Blogs: My dad and wife now have blogs, in addition to all of the MySpace blogs of my friends that I can't manage to find time to read. Each of these blogs seems to lead me down an endless spiral of clicking links... before I know it I can't even remember where I started. But at least I've learned what a "Gordian knot" is.

5.) IM: I can't even turn this on, it drives me insane. I haven't logged on it in months, but within seconds of turning it on, I get 5 messages from people dying to distract themselves from whatever they should be doing.

6.) Web: Compulsively checking my online residency application for new messages from programs, reading CNN.com and New York Times, Weather, ordering groceries online, googling to my hearts content (or discontent). Fortunately my wife handles all things financial, but if I so desire I can look at the bank account, credit card, ING account, Macy's account, life insurance, student loans (times approximately 8 lenders), electric bill, cable bill, the list goes on and on.

Furtunately, my iPod battery just died and I don't have the appropriate cable to connect my computer to the speakers, otherwise I might have music on too.

Soon, school will claim me back from this insanity.