Are our computers productivity killers?

By Jeremy Wagstaff   |  Mon, 07/21/2008 10:34 AM  |  Sci-Tech

Do computers boost our productivity or sap it? It's a fair question, and one I was pondering as I watched an old friend of mine, too polite for his own good, try to squirm out of an online chat session I'd initiated.

For him, chat's an all-or-nothing thing. Because he's a nice guy, and born before 1980, he tends to throw all his concentration at the person or thing in front of him. Turn a TV on and, whatever is showing, he'll not be able to avoid concentrating on it. Even if it's one of those politically incorrect little people-throwing contests they still have in faraway places like Cornwall and Isarn. (My wife says I'm the same way. We probably all are when it comes to tall people tossing those smaller than themselves like cabers across a field.)

So here's the thing: We are either multitaskers or we're not. We can either juggle lots of things or not. And computers are definitely tools for multitasking. All those windows open; all those little pop-up alerts. All those sounds telling us that something has happened. For people like my single-minded friend, the computer is a strange world, like trying to sharpen the focus on different depths of field in your camera.

Me? For the most part I'm on fuzzy. My work requires I do a lot of things at the same time. So while I was aimlessly chatting with my friend, I was chatting with two other people online, sipping an awful latt* (why do we think drinking warm milk is a good idea?), downloading a piece of software, installing another, and testing three other programs.

Oh, and editing a document. All this with hyperactive kids and over-caffeinated adults screaming all around me.

I admit there are some things I can't do multitasking. I can't write. At least I can't write well. Of course, some would argue I can't write at all, so this isn't a good example. But it's important to understand the opposite of multitasking is focus, and it's also flow.

Flow as in the term assigned by Mih*ly Cs*kszentmih*ly, who used it to describe that sense of being lost in the moment, being in the zone, or whatever you want to call it, when everything around you is magically ignored by your conscious. A friend told me that that is why some of us like working in noisy places -- it enables part of our brain to focus on this "zoning out" task, freeing the rest our brain to focus on the matter at hand.

But it's important to distinguish between these two states. Multitasking is when you assign a part of your attention to something, whereas "flow" is when you assign all of it. One shouldn't look down on multitasking; it's true that we'll never create anything great when we're in that state -- I can't imagine Van Gogh checking his BlackBerry while dabbing yellow onto his Daffodils -- but most of us, in our normal daily lives, are not called upon to do anything great.

We're just required to juggle. Work and play. Email and spreadsheets. Drawn-out meetings and deadlines. Monosyllabic bosses and loquacious cubicle hoppers.

In this sense the computer is both the product of and the best tool we've got for this multitasking world. But we need to make it our slave.

My friend, like a lot of people who use instant messaging, needs to understand that such communication mediums are not necessarily real-time. A message sent may lie unanswered for hours; a fast-running conversation may end abruptly. Facebook, in this sense, is a better tool because messages are sent and answered over days, like the Scrabble-like game Facebookers seem to love.

But there's no question connectivity can be a distraction. When I need to achieve flow I unplug it from the net, close down any programs I don't need, and, if I really need to just focus on writing, fire up a program like WestEdit (http://is.gd/UAJ), which turns your screen into a single pane, with nothing to distract you but the text you type.

My advice? Don't do more than you're comfortable with when you're multitasking, and, if you do find instant messaging intrusive, disable it or make yourself invisible to those you don't need to communicate with during the working day.

Oh, and don't feel the need to be too polite. The person you're reluctantly chatting with is probably chatting with a dozen other people at the same time.

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