Dawn Of The Distracted
With the evolution of the Internet we have been bombarded with email, blogging, micro-blogging, instant message, websites, podcasts and more. Jono Bacon and Stuart ‘Aq’ Langridge discuss this sensory overload, how to manage it and whether it is having an effect on our attention spans, all wrapped up in a shot that should keep the most concentration-challenged jaq fan interested.
49 Comments to “Dawn Of The Distracted”
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So that’s why SoJ is <10 minutes and released often?
Well, it’s not the only reason, but…it’s part of it
I can’t get this shot, not with my web browser (google chrome) and not with vlc which I have always used before. I’ll try with firefox.
-Yos
Yos: what happens when you try? Works for me in Chromium…
It appears to play but I have no sound.
Finally I got my fix; I was able to pay attention to it for about 2 minutes
-Yos
Can I assume that the problem was at your end rather than ours? (If it’s at ours, I’d like to fix it.)
happened to me too the other day. ok in firefox
Working fine and dandy here using ELinks which calls ogg123 to playback the .ogg file.
Oh, the irony. I started listening to this, and then went to read other things and realised I’d hardly heard any of it. Let me try turning up the volume.
Gerv
See? SEE?
I do that sort of thing all the time
This reminds me of that conversation we had on Twitter a few weeks back, where I talked about wanting to research while listening…
I do okay most of the time, but I don’t know how often it happens where I suddenly realize I haven’t really been listening to whatever is on my headphones for the last five minutes.
I’m pretty sure that if you started doing LugRadio again, people would happily sit down and listen for an hour and a half
I find that the key to dealing with the constant stream without getting distracted is self-discipline. For example, I use Twitter at work as a lot of people who work on the project I work with and related projects are on there too. However, I try to avoid posting or replying to anything that’s not to do with any of those projects. I also use Gwibber rather than the Twitter website so as to avoid the temptation to go to other sites while reading updates, and I never go on Facebook unless it’s lunchtime since I know the stuff on there will ONLY distract me from work.
I think I agree with Aq’s idea of the mail client with “Delete this” or “I’ll deal with it later,” it sounds similar to the Inbox Zero approach which I’ve started several times and failed to keep up. I also make heavy use of mail filters to sort mail as it arrives which helps me see what’s relevant to what I’m doing and what isn’t.
I’m not sure that having everything coming to one place/program would help. I tried using Gwibber to deliver my Twitter and Facebook feeds together and found that I couldn’t get anything useful from either, as there was too much in one place. Adding email to that would be a nightmare, unless it’s managed in a way I haven’t thought of (looking forward to seeing what Raindrop does).
Well, yeah, the solution to the barrage-of-distracting-information is self-discipline, in the same way that the solution to the problem of being fat is self-discipline, or the solution to the problem of giving up smoking is self-discipline, or the solution to the problem of crime is self-discipline. That is, it works for people who have self-discipline already. Those of us that haven’t basically lose, under that policy; what I’m interested in is how to help people who are distracted all the time precisely because they don’t have the mental fortitude to avoid the distractions…
Hahaha, OK, point taken
I never can read long comments, lol. Yes, let’s say it was a PEBKAC error.
-Yos
I can’t get the audio in my podcatcher. It seems the feedburner feed is missing the media element for this podcast, so it doesn’t know what to download. Can you please fix? Thanks in advance.
Check out http://www.illdoctrine.com/
The guy edits to pretty much eliminate the noise, what’s left is signa.
Quantum leap in addressing the issue, I love it.
Thanks, Kent
Is it possible to number the podcast titles so that they can be kept in order of download ?
I honestly believe that we are indeed being saturated by information overload. And the problem is that it is not only the internet, though this is by far the worst. We are barraged by advertisements on TV, flashing electronic billboards, and the like. Many times, information overload is accompanied by sensory overload.
Jono said that he is finding it more and more difficult to keep up. This is normal. You are getting older. Just as our parents said “I don’t understand computers” yet slowly adapted to it. (My parents are in their 70s and constantly on the computers). People of my generation “couldn’t read on screen” and had to print things out. Over the last 10 years, I have found that not only do I now read on screen better (pdfs on the computer and books on my N810), but it actually feels wierd reading on dead trees. We adapt, unfortunately far slower than the technology advances.
Personally, I use the old-school information methods, email, IRC, etc. I tried twitter, but didn’t like it, and haven’t used it in two years. What we as humans need to figure out is how to properly filter the information we are being barraged with.
From time to time, as I know that I might be interrupted by the internet-related distractions, and that I feel I need to work, I try to take an afternoon totally offline.
All I need is a laptop filled with the appropriate documentation, a text editor, a decentralized source code manager (pick your favorite) and I go downtown to a café where I’m sure that I can have decent coffee and no Internet access at all.
It’s very good for a lot of things: design, documentation writing, book reading,… and of course, coding (make sure you have all the packages you need beforehand).
Of course, you can’t hack on some network-related stuff (well… you can if you practise TDD with the appropriate Mock objects), but you can achieve quite a large amount of work without IRC, Twitter, Identica, Mail, Shot of Jaq updates…
You’d be surprised how comfortable you feel working like this: http://www.flickr.com/photos/brunobord/3903634491/
I agree, I often do this too. My world is filled with distractions, and as I need to work on IRC, that is a particular distraction. Sometimes I will log off IRC to focus on other elements. It really helps.
Yes, we are bombarded with information and it is getting harder to switch off. Some people simply don’t.
Also, the internet, like everything else, is going for quantity over quality. Ever expanding ways to transmit information but not enough new ideas/content.
I think the quality statement might be a tad unfair – in many ways all of these new channels to communicate in have opened up ideas and concepts.
There is nothing inherent in the Internet that pursues quantity over quality. All the Internet has done is reduce the cost of publication to the point where anyone can be heard.
Yes, there is a lot of crap, but there’s a lot of crap in more traditional media as well, it was just more expensively produced crap.
There are two things we need to manage the flow: 1. Better filtering. There are several people I follow on Twitter, but that I’m not interested in over 50% of what they have to say, the problem is that I’m really interested in the rest. I just need a better way to filter that content. 2. Intercommunication between apps like Stuart mentioned. If I could hit a button or keyboard shortcut to have Evolution fire an event over to Getting Things GNOME then I can follow up on non-immediate material more easily. The idea of mashing up data and applications really needs to find a stronger home on the desktop.
Android’s approach to that is interesting; an Android app calls an Activity, which might be, say, “open this webpage”, or for your above example would be “add an event to my calendar”, and then does nothing else. Any application can “provide” the activity. So apps can talk to one another, but it’s loosely-coupled; Evo would know how to say “add this event” and wouldn’t care who does the adding; GTG would know how to say “I am an event adder” and wouldn’t know who was going to send it events. This would be entirely doable on the desktop. (It’s already sort of doable; if you’re an app that wants to say “add this event to my calendar” and not care how, you write the event to a temporary .ics file and shell out to “xdg-open temporary.ics”.) More of this would be great.
Completely agree. I’ve been playing with Android since the original betas, and carrying an Android Phone for over a year now.
However, as interesting as it is, a lot of app developers don’t seem to really be providing a lot of Activities for use by external developers, or other people aren’t tapping into activities and the like that are available.
Part of this is, I suspect, due to the fact that there have been no efforts to standardize Intents, for instance, a standard intent for todo-tasks, so as an app developer, you need to develop against specific other applications, instead of classes of applications. The potential for a great ecosystem exists, but it’s going to take a bit more of an organized push to make it happen.
Some of the most popular Intents are picked up by other apps — “open in browser”, for example. Part of the problem is that there’s no central place where Android hackers can get together and know what’s going on to take advantage of things like common shared intents, but that’s because everyone-gets-together doesn’t scale…
Isn’t this related to what Google Wave is trying to address as well? Their solution however seems to be to bring all communications together into one big client that does everything. They don’t however try to separate the wheat from the chaff.
What the problem really amounts to integrating messaging into work flow and time management. I don’t think that necessarily required having one program that handles the messages themselves, so much as each of the message clients telling the work flow manager “I have a new message from Jono about communitising the community, what do you want to do with it?”. You could then look at it now, postpone looking at it for some predefined period of time, or pick a specific time to look at it. When the time to deal with it arrived, the work flow manager would remind you of it. When you dealt with it, the work flow manager would mark it down as done.
What all that needs is a work flow scheduler and integration with the different clients. Rather than one big client that does everything, you would have a number of different clients that each do one very simple thing. Your e-mail client wouldn’t have a calendar, but it could talk to your calendar. The same would apply to RSS feeds, microblogging clients, wikis, and anything else that could benefit from it.
I like the general idea, and I think it’s something that would be of greater and greater utility the larger the organisation using it is.
The problem with bringing Wave into the equation is that from what I’ve seen it’s designed to replace the existing communication channels with one protocol, not bring them together in one place.
Unless everyone switches to Wave (I honestly don’t think it’s ever going to happen, but perhaps that would be a good topic for a Shot?), then it’s just adding to the noise.
Mentioning Wave was to show the contrasts in approach. Personally, I think that Wave would be a good replacement for things like Outlook/Exchange or Notes/Domino in large organisations where you’re going to have a uniform solution anyway. In that situation, most of the messages are internal anyway.
For the world in general however, I think that any solution is going to have to work with existing protocols and add utility to them. It would look more like an infrastructure component that ties things together like Telepathy or D-Bus rather than being a user application in itself.
I find dashboards (like iGoogle) help me keep a handle on all the sources of information I like to keep track of. They don’t solve the problem of distractions, but they at least aggregrate the distractions into one place that I can go when I want to be distracted.
Sometimes when I’m stuck on a hard (programming) problem, it’s good for me to switch to my dashboard and get a dose of email/blog/microblog/social networking/news/weather etc. to purge my mind for 5 minutes before going back to the problem. Of course it still takes discipline to ration these bouts of distraction down to a minimum and prevent them from being distruptive, but that’s life, get over it!
There are techniques like Getting Things Done (which Aq mentioned) that can really help with this. I heavily use GMail’s archive & labelling functions and the Remember the Milk web site to implement GTD. I aim to have an empty inbox and a list of “next actions” ready at all times.
Great choice of topic!
Alastairo 1 January 2010 at 4:26 pm Wrote:
Is it possible to number the podcast titles so that they can be kept in order of download ?
I second that. I mentioned this in one of the other threads.
Jono, you’re getting old.
I am too. At 36, I’m already thinking “WTF is the point of Facebook and Twitter?”
I’ve worked the GTD method, and I’m getting cranky about people in my life trying to contact me through yet another new inbox. Inboxes full of spam, v1agra, advertising, Zombie vampires and ninja kittens. How am I supposed to get good at anything when the UI/OS/format/required skills/learning curve of the inbox-du-jour keep changing?
I’ve become quite content to browse the web with links & lynx. It’s not stylish, but it drives home how little substance there is on some sites. Laugh all you want, but it’s getting to the point that all I really want from my computer is fulfilled by Slackware and a few thoughfully constructed shell scripts like Mashpodder, a BASH script podcatcher, which fetches the podcasts I want for my screenless mp3/ogg player. Maybe I’m evolving into a neo-Luddite looney…
For those of you who like this topic, the CBC’s SPARK podcast and blog does a fine job at presenting perspectives about the impact of connected technologies.
Don’t use Facebook! The following link may help with any Facebook dilemmas, people here may have… http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jan/14/facebook
Don’t use Facebook. http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jan/14/facebook
At 46, I’m even older, GuyNamedRob.
Ironically enough, I bought GTD, and never finished reading the book.
For me, it was rather daunting going through every piece of paper and email and what not and categorizing it. It seems like a good method once you get the initial setup done, and as long as you keep to the program. However, the nature of workflows today is things popping up and doing its best to interfere with that flow.
Maybe I am getting old. If not old, at least cranky.
I am convinced there is a way to unify these different streams of consciousness and build in a project management approach. I was knocking together some sketches for solutions to this on a plane ride recently. I might try and knock something up. No idea whether it would work, of course.
Have any parts of this idea seen the light of day? There was a failed Chandler(?) (Outlook meets GTD) project a few years back that I believe was wished good riddance by the LUGradio crew.
Well im a different generation to you guys im part of the new wave of computer users who grew up with good cheep computers and ive never had too much attention. This may be something to do with my ADD but no matter. I think it helps me get more things done because rather than doing something for an hour or two I get bored and want to do something else. So there is always something to keep me occupied. Although the one problem with that is somethings dont get done and somethings simply get forgotten. I think its not too bad at the moment but it will get worse in the years to come. Think about it we have twitter, blogs, email etc now what will we have tomorrow to distract us??
i think i have one of the shortest atten … what was i talking about? google apps actually works well for a gtd approach, though – i’ve gound that 37 signal’s “base camp” (though it’s paid for) is a very good gtd app (for multiple people_
I am 22 , I must be rare because I find that I have an incredibly long attention span. Most of the blog/twitter/facebook stuff seems like it requires too much energy to maintain. So its not purely generational.
I think the way to solve the distraction problem is a global way to turn down the volume. Similar to status (away, busy, offline). It would be something like a focussed level, (high, medium, low, none), with a way to choose which messages from which people alert you before hand at a particular focus level. Messages that don’t pass the filter would que until the attention level is lowered. It should have the ability for granular filtering. (So I always get the alerts from my girlfriend no matter what communication medium is used) and categorical filtering (So I can block all twitter messages). Of coarse granular should override the categorical filtering.
I’ve been thinking along the same lines for a while.
I’m one of these mac using orange sunglass wearing twats; the reason is simple enough: mail.app. What a killer mail client. It’s totally integrated with iCal, so that I can read an email, click on the part that reads “so you want to meet for lunch tomorrow at noon?” and assign it to a meeting in iCal, which I will have a reminder of on my iPod.
It’s amazing how much simpler things are when your programs talk to each other. It’s easy to send a movie project from iMovie to iDVD to burn it, easy to have relevant programs talk to each other. It becomes much more powerful.
It’s a lot like the pipe. A simple way to have programs talk to each other, because the format they all use is standardised.
At that point, it’s not a distraction rich environment any more, it’s just integrated information that’s useful. A twitter feed is often about stuff that interests you: someone’s life, or a band you like, or specials from the local pizza shop. Having all this stuff integrated with my calendar means that I’m getting useful, rich information that’s being integrated in a relevant way.
As far as reddit and digg and those kind of news aggregation sites go, though, I fall squarely in the information overload group. The only way I was able to get any real control over that was ’sudo echo “127.0.0.1 reddit.com >> /etc/hosts”‘ .
(3:01am 5 Jan) James Wrote: “I’m one of these mac using orange sunglass wearing twats… Etc etc… It’s totally integrated with iCal… Etc etc… on my iPod… Etc etc… send a movie project from iMovie to iDVD… Etc etc etc…”
“Shot Of Jaq is an irreverent take on the goings on in the Open Source, Free Culture [...]” – About Page for Shot Of Jaq
Does not compute. : /
Hey Whym,
to make things worse, you can get shot of Jaq on iTunes as an .mp3 and you can download it from this very site in that very same format.
I was just using examples from my day to day workflow. Not intended as promotion, but as a comment on how having information manipulation programs start working together can make it simple to start doing things with that information. Which is why I also reached towards the pipe.
If it redeems me at all, I develop using a free software license.
I don’t have any problem with this personally, while I may look at twitter or youtube occasionally when I have nothing better to do. I am not addicted to social media and can easily ignore it if I have something more important/interesting to do such as graphics or coding. Additionally I do not own nor have any use for a phone.
I have to say I’m surprised you did not mention the stuff that was written in the G?OME Shell Design Document* regarding the planned new notification system/paradigm.
I think it solves many issues. The rest is self discipline and actually making use of the new notification system.
*: see the first link in http://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/Design
You’re right; frankly, I forgot. I meant to cover both when talking about notify-osd, whch has some similar goals but a slightly different approach, and I didn’t. Mea culpa. Still, this is what the discussion is for; now other people will also know about gnome-shell’s approach
Thanks!
I’m currently reading my emails. Then, looking at Jono invitation link. Then, bump into this post. Then I realize… I got distracted from what I’m doing in the first place.
I have tried the other combination. By keeping all those interesting links from friends in my bookmark and hope that I will go there later. However, I end up forgetting all those links when I have time and doing something else.
Hahaha… now, I’m gonna get back to work. Thanks Jono!