Thursday, February 27, 2014
More Adept, but More To do - Interruption Management
"Technology reduces the amount of time it takes to do any one task but also leads to the expansion of tasks that people are expected to do." -- Juliet SchorLabels: innovation, stress, technology, to-do, work
Sunday, February 23, 2014
Stay Informed, Avoid Overwhelm - Interruption Management
How can you stayed informed without being overwhelmed?
* Choose to acquire knowledge that supports or interests you, not what you simply happen to ingest, or think you have to ingest.
* Look for broad-based patterns and trends, as opposed to quickly disappearing fads and forgettable trivia.
* Learn to delegate some of your reading to your most junior staff. After only 15 minutes of instruction and armed with a list of key words, they will be able to rather easily identify articles of interest to you.
* Prune your files regularly and ruthlessly. Constantly throw out what does not support you. Labels: choice, delegation, information overload, organization, personal growth, proactivity, productivity, time managment
Tuesday, February 18, 2014
Tuesday, February 11, 2014
Deciding More Easily - Interruption Management
'Sleeping on it' is best for complex decisions: February 16, 2006 New Scientist (Vol 311, p 1005)
“ Complex decisions are best left to your unconscious mind to work out, according to a new study, and over-thinking a problem could lead to expensive mistakes. The research suggests the conscious mind should be trusted only with simple decisions, such as selecting a brand of oven glove. Sleeping on a big decision, such as buying a car or house, is more likely to produce a result with which people remain happy than consciously weighing up the pros and cons of the problem.”
“Thinking hard about a complex decision that rests on multiple factors appears to bamboozle the conscious mind so that people only consider a subset of information, which they weight inappropriately, resulting in an unsatisfactory choice. In contrast, the unconscious mind appears able to ponder over all the information and produce a decision that most people remain satisfied with.”
Ap Dijksterhuis at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands says “We found that when the choice was for something simple, such as purchasing oven gloves or shampoo, people made better decisions – ones that they remained happy with – if they consciously deliberated over the information.”
“But once the decision was more complex such as for a house, too much thinking about it led people to make the wrong choice. Whereas, if their conscious mind was fully occupied on solving puzzles, their unconscious could freely consider all the information and they reached better decisions.”
Expectation counts
The unconscious mind appears to need some instruction. “It was only when people were told before the puzzles that they would need to reach a decision that they were able to come up with the right one.” If they were told that none of what they had been shown was important before being given the puzzles, they failed to make satisfactory choices.
“At some point in our evolution, we started to make decisions consciously, and we’re not very good at it. We should learn to let our unconscious handle the complicated things,” Dijksterhuis says. Labels: choices, complexity, decide, decision-making, deliberation, focus, mind, sleep, study, think
Wednesday, February 05, 2014
Noise and its Hazards - Interruption Management
The noise of modern life may affect "speech and language development" in the very young, according to a study that found the auditory parts of the brains of young mice are slower to organize properly in the presence of continuous sounds. Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, reared a group of rats in an environment of continuous background noise and found that their brain circuits that receive and interpret sound did not develop at the same rate as animals that were raised in a quieter environment.
Edward F. Chang and Michael Merzenich, co-authors of the study appearing in the journal Science, said that the continuous noise delayed the organization of auditory neurons during a critical two- to three-week period after the rat pups were born. Although the rat is not a perfect model for what happens in humans, the authors note, the study does suggest that high levels of noise might possibly affect some language learning in infants.
"These findings suggest that environmental noise, which is commonly present in contemporary child-rearing environments, can potentially contribute to auditory and language-related development delays," the authors write in Science. The authors noted that although the brain development was delayed in rats exposed to the noise, “their brains did eventually mature normally.” Labels: brain, children, development, language development, neuroscience, noise, speech
Wednesday, January 29, 2014
Smart Phones Diminish Freedom - Interruption Management
Seven years ago, economist Robert Samuelson wrote in Newsweek: "Cell phones-and, indeed, all wireless devices-constitute another chapter in the ongoing breakdown between work and everything else. They pretend to increase your freedom while actually stealing it. People are supposed to be always capable of participating in the next meeting, responding to their e-mails or retrieving factoids from the Internet."
"People so devoted to staying interconnected are kept in a perpetual state of anxiety, because they may have missed some significant memo, rendezvous, bit of news or gossip. They may be more plugged in and less thoughtful."
--wow, could he have been more accurate! Labels: anxiety, cell phone, communication, freedom, information overload, stress, technology, work
Wednesday, January 22, 2014
Driven to Distraction - Interruption Management
An article in American Psychological Association rings an alarming bell:
"Cell phones may be convenient but there's one place
they seem to do more harm than good - and that's behind the steering
wheel. Psychological research is showing that when drivers use cell
phones, whether hand-held or hands-off, their attention to the road
drops and driving skills become even worse than if they had too much to
drink. Epidemiological research has found that cell-phone use is
associated with a four-fold increase in the odds of getting into an
accident - a risk comparable to that of driving with blood alcohol at
the legal limit."
"But cell phones aren't the only cause for concern. A host of
emerging, even more engaging and time-consuming in-car technologies,
such as navigational displays and Internet browsers, although developed
to make long commutes more productive, also present new challenges for
drivers. Cognitive psychologists and human-factors engineers are teaming
up to document how these new gadgets affect driving performance and
traffic safety." Labels: alarming, attention, cell phones, challenges, driving skills, harm, risk, safety, steering wheel
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