This is a new design challenge in this age of information anxiety and abundance of meaning. More and more people, myself included, are doing many things at the same time. However, decades of research (and common sense) have indicated that the quality of one’s output and depth of thought deteriorate as one attends to ever more tasks. For example:

• “We are under the impression that we have this brain that can do more than it often can,” says René Marois, neuroscientist and director of the Human Information Processing Laboratory at Vanderbilt University, quoted in a recent NYTimes piece about how multi-taskers max out their brains, creating neural network bottlenecks and causing confusion and mistakes (thanks, Susan Mernit).
• When people try to perform two or more related tasks either at the same time or alternating rapidly between them, errors go way up, and it takes far longer–often double the time or more–to get the jobs done than if they were done sequentially, says David E. Meyer, director of the Brain, Cognition and Action Laboratory at the University of Michigan: “The toll in terms of slowdown is extremely large–amazingly so.” (thanks, DeedsDoing 2006)
• “Kids that are instant messaging while doing homework, playing games online and watching TV, I predict, aren’t going to do well in the long run,” says Jordan Grafman, chief of the cognitive neuroscience section at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, quoted in a CNN report last year.

IN MY EXPERIENCE FOR EXAMPLE: During Nexus 2007 last Saturday, I found myself switching among three screens on my laptop most of the time. We were using Twitter.com for message sending, Campfirenow for chatting, and Nexus Live/Interactive to view Twitter messages from everyone. I could barely pay attention to the speakers/panel on the stage. Probably listened to only half the words. One possible way to reduce distraction could be better to replace Campfirenow with a shoutbox hooked onto Twitter via its API, the way Uzyn managed to hook Ping.sg shouts into pingsg_shouts on Twitter. Open Tweetbar on the sidebar and everyone would have two less screens to distract their attention — in other words, Let everyone look at just ONE screen.

Recently, Bjorn Lee twittered: “i have ADD, maybe i shld enrol in that china camp where they reform internet addicts.. oops, thats called NS in spore.” (ADD stands for Attention Deficit Disorder here, I think.)

What other solutions are there? Listen to former Microsoft VP Linda Stone perhaps (thanks, Mike Rohde):

“Continous Partial Attention (CPA) is different than multi-tasking, where the motivation is productivity: giving equal attention to many activities. CPA’s motivation is being a live node on the network, gaining meaning from the network, being ready for new opportunities at any moment…”

“But this always on, anytime, anywhere, anyplace era has has created an artificial sense of constant crisis. The adrenalized fight or flight mechanism kicks in. It’s great when we’re being chased by tigers. How many of those 500 emails a day is a tiger? Or are they mostly mice? Is everything really such an emergency? Our way of using the current set of technologies would have us believe it is.”

And learn from Jakob Nielsen (thanks, Beth):

1. Don’t check your email all the time. Set aside special breaks between bigger projects to handle email. Don’t let email interrupt your projects, and don’t let the computer dictate your priorities.
2. Don’t use “reply to all” when responding to email. Abide by the good old “need to know” principle… send follow-up messages only to those people who will actually benefit from the reply.
3. Write informative subject lines for your email messages. Assume that the recipient is too busy to open messages with lame titles like “hi.”
4. Create a special email address for personal messages and newsletters. Only check this account once per day.
5. Write short.
6. Avoid IM (instant messaging) unless real-time interaction will truly add value to the communication. A one-minute interruption of your colleagues will cost them ten minutes of productivity as they reestablish their mental context and get back into “flow.” Only the most important messages are worth 1,000 percent in overhead costs.
7. Answer common customer questions on your website using clear and concise language. This will save your customers a lot of time — thus making you popular — and will keep them from pestering you with time-consuming phone calls and emails.
8. User test your intranet. Clean it up so that employees can find stuff faster, and make the intranet homepage their entry point for keeping up on company news and events.
9. Don’t circulate internal email to all employees; instead put the information on the intranet where people can find it when they need it. (This obviously assumes that you’ve fixed the intranet’s usability.)
10. Establish a company culture in which it’s okay not to respond to email immediately. This frees employees from the pressure of incessantly checking email and lets them get more work done.

Finally, run 5 miles or do a spin class like Beth does. She explained:

“For some reason, vigorous cardio exercise helps clear out the information anxiety Maybe it is the just the stepping away from the reflected light dancing across my eyes coming from the monitor.”

Related Posts:

• Web of Mass Distraction I

SECOND, the Podcast Awards for 2006 are out. Among the winners are three Catholic podcasts:

• People’s Choice: MuggleCast
• Best Produced: The Signal
• Best Podcast Directory: iTunes
• Best Mobile Podcast: Catholic Insider (Catholic obviously)
• Business: Manager Tools
• Comedy: Distored View
• Cultural/Arts: Anime Pulse
• Education: Tips from the Top Floor
• Entertainment: Pottercast
• Gaming: Podtacular
• General: Rosary Army (Catholic)
• Movies/Films: The Signal (again!)
• PodSafe Music: AccidentHash
• Political: Free Talk Live
• Religion Inspiration: Daily Breakfast (Catholic)
• Technology/ Science: DiggNation
• Travel: Mouse Tunes

According to the designers, this instrument is intended to be:

• collaborative: several performers (locally or remotely)
• intuitive: zero manual, zero instructions
• sonically challenging and interesting
• learnable and masterable, even by children
• suitable for novice and advanced electronic music (i.e. installations and concerts)

Curious about who’s listening to podcasts in general, or do you need to know who your particular audience is so that you can attract the right sponsors? The panel fields questions such as: Who are the listeners in categories of age, education, gender, and location? How much are podcasts being used for learning? How much for corporate purposes? These panelists discuss the latest metrics on who’s listening and who’s producing podcasts, plus offer creative ways of getting to the numbers behind your podcast.

20 Oct 2005: Students in University of Washington get class lectures on demand, thanks to podcasts. (uweek.org)

3 Nov 2005: The “Stanford on iTunes” debut in late October marked the first time a university made audio content from lectures, interviews, commencement speeches and the like publicly available through a system like the iTunes Music Store. (CNet News.com)

24 Feb 2006: Students in the School of Psychology at University of Wales, Bangor, are now able to gain access to Podcast lectures . (iPod in Education)

5 May 2006: IT Sligo has become one of the first third-level institutions in Ireland to deploy video podcasts of lectures to online engineering students, allowing them to view their lecturers using their iPod, mobile phone or any MP3 player with a video display. (siliconrepublic.com)

26 May 2006: A microbiology lecturer at a West Yorkshire university, has abolished traditional lectures in favour of podcasts. Students will access the podcasts via MP3 players, phones or computers, and ask questions via text messages, to be answered in the lecturer’s blog. (BBC News)

“Ludwig van Beethoven (1770 – 1827) was a famous composer. He started going deaf in 1800. He had to use his ‘inner ear’ – his memory of sounds – to compose his great music. His Ninth Symphony is the longest symphony ever written. It closes with a choir singing the Ode to Joy. He took 10 years to compose it. Here was Beethovan, deaf, but demanding that the choir sing about joy! When the Symphony was first played on 7 May 1824, in Vienna, the audience loved it. However, he could not hear them. A singer had to turn him around so he could see them cheering.

“BUT MANY music critics made bad remarks about the Symphony. It was music completely new at that time. To include a choir was innovative. In fact it was shocking. It was the first time in history such a thing had ever been done – because it involved singing, it was only part symphony. It was a mixture the critics were not comfortable with. One conductor called the piece tasteless. A composer called the grand finale badly set.

“The critics were even more upset because Beethoven had not followed the normal form of a symphony. This means that the first movement should be fast, the second movement slow, the third movement dance and the fourth movement fast. Beethoven broke the rules with his Ninth Symphony.

“Today, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is accepted all over the world as one of the greatest pieces of music ever composed…. If your idea is good, you should not worry about all the bad remarks. With time, people will see how good your idea is. So keep thinking… keep trying… keep doing… keep making your own music!”

Today, the Internet provides different stories on why the CD has a normal playing lenth of 74 minutes. They all revolve around the effort to record all of the Ninth Symphony, one of the longest classical compositions, on a single audio CD.

According to one story, the world-famous conductor Herbert von Karajan, whose concert recording appeared at that time on the PolyGram label, demanded that Philips introduce a CD with a sufficient playing time for his favorite piece. Another version says that the wife of the then-Chairman and founder of Sony Akio Morita urged her husband to exercise his influence and pay homage to Beethoven with the extended playing time.

(Imported from a forum.)