learning to live with the bits and bytes … and stay sane
tech distractions nyt magazine about “meet the life hackers” .. quotes from the article which i thoroughly enjoyed:
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…. Distractions are not just a plague on our work – sometimes they are our work. To be cut off from other workers is to be cut off from everything….The upshot is something that Linda Stone, a software executive who has worked for both Apple and Microsoft, calls “continuous partial attention”: we are so busy keeping tabs on everything that we never focus on anything….The clearer your screen, she found, the calmer your mind….O’Brien wrote for himself a program that, whenever he’s surfing the Web, pops up a message every 10 minutes demanding to know whether he’s procrastinating. It turns out that a certain amount of life-hacking is simply cultivating a monklike ability to say no.
yup.. sounds about right. carry on now.