Whispered Distractions - adding Fuel to the file filtering function

Today was a frustrating day, with many small things going wrong and some major issues with doing a big piece of work in the urgent, necessary and totally dull category - online. This of course required frequent bouts of coffee and other distractions, of which one such had me reading this article on Techmeme about distraction and attention. Sez Biz Week:

Roughly once every three minutes, typical cubicle dwellers set aside whatever they're doing and start something else—anything else. It could be answering the phone, checking e-mail, responding to an instant message, clicking over to YouTube (GOOG), or posting something amusing on Facebook. Constant interruptions are the Achilles' heel of the information economy in the U.S. These distractions consume as much as 28% of the average U.S. worker's day, including recovery time, and sap productivity to the tune of $650 billion a year, according to Basex, a business research company in New York City.

Many years ago, we did some work on White Collar Productivity (it was all the rage in the 90's) and found - no surprise - the same stuff as written above, as I'm sure did people 10 years before us when PC's first invaded the workplace. And so on...... However, I do know that with the always-on nature of broadband it is far worse, what with IM, email, various macro and micro blogs etc being added to the mix. Ambient Intimacy rapidly degrades to Ambient Distraction

However, help is at hand apparently:

Soon, however, the same kinds of social networking software and communications technologies that make it deliciously easy to lose concentration may start steering us back to the tasks at hand. Scientists at U.S. research labs are developing tools to help people prioritize the flood of information they face and fend off irrelevant info-bytes.

Not only that, but the Big Boys are learning how to filter their own Kool Aid:

Some of the biggest technology firms, including Microsoft, Intel, Google and I.B.M., are banding together to fight information overload. Last week they formed a nonprofit group to study the problem, publicize it and devise ways to help workers — theirs and others — cope with the digital deluge.

Not just them - 101 outfits are working on filtering - Dave Winer may love his River of News, but time starved people would rather have a thinner Stream of Relevance. I too have fulminated on the subject profoundly!

And so I thought, until today. Today I was doing something profoundly dull, the sort of Admin that everyone running a company needs to do, the sort you put off, the sort that mounts up after 2 days at a conference, the sort that is frustrating because you are the sap dealing with klutzy Web 1.0 style interfaces etc.

So today I was damn glad of my newstream....I was watching the comments come in on AlertThingy - which has a popup/fade display that I think of as "whispering" as there is no noise, no need to change screen to read them - plus my emails which have a similar popup/fadeout, and it was darn pleasant to have that momentary relief, that whisper of something interesting in an otherwise humdrum time. For example, I was able to keep up on the comments from Fuel 2008 and a few other bits and pieces as I worked, and it really wasn't intrusive given the tasks I was doing.

Ti be fair though, I have already set these things up to be quite filtered, having purged my various feeds of noisy or vexing people. However, from today whispering definitely interests me as an addendum to Filtering - as, it would seem it does to the BizWeek crew:

New modes of e-mail and phone messaging can wait patiently for an opportune time to interrupt. One program allows senders to "whisper" something urgent via a pop-up on a screen.

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Would I have got the work done faster without it - possibly, but I don't know - I suspect I would have taken more breaks, it would actually be interesting to study whether a person takes longer or the same to complete various types of tasks with such systems. My suspicion is that boring tasks would not be very heavily impacted.

By the way, there was quite a bit in the article about prioritising interruptions etc:

what about the dicier judgment calls? Picture the moment when the phone has fallen silent, your in-boxes are closed, and you're lost in a creative thought. Even the smartest digital assistant is likely to conclude it's safe to interrupt, but this is dangerous territory. "If you handle the exception cases wrong, your users will stop using your tool," says IBM team leader Jennifer Lai.

She found a solution in a time-honored social convention. If you pop into a co-worker's office when he's on the phone, he may try to wave you away but will listen if you whisper some important news.

When I am doing creative work, or knowledge intensive work like report writing, these whispers can be fatal, however. Then they are total ambient distractions and I need the power to turn them off.

Music, however, is another matter......... that is usable in any situation - maybe instead of whispering, messages should interject themselves as lyrics in the stuff you are listening to at the time