You may have noticed my prolonged absence over the last couple of weeks - I've come down with a bad case of election fever. The polls are like crack to me - I've checked them every day for the last two weeks, sometimes more than once. Elections I care about are even worse than my second favorite distraction of the moment, checking the mail room (on the chance that a letter about my funding will be there).
I won't attempt to count the hours, but let's just say while I've been arguing with uninformed or close-minded party-loyalists, documenting the changing whims of public opinion, reading candidate profiles and platforms, and looking up every Harper-bashing link my friends post on Facebook, there has been little time for blogging.
Friday 29 April 2011
Thursday 7 April 2011
The secret to email management
After listening to that podcast I tried to manage my email more effectively, and as it turns out, things just got worse. Mind you, I wasn't checking email every 5-10 minutes for 1 minute because I was trying not to, it had more to do with being the end of term and having a whole bunch of panicked students trying to submit their final reports electronically, but nevertheless, I was looking at my taskbar's Outlook icon almost every other minute, waiting for some new emergency to pop up so I wouldn't have to think about working...
Today, I had a lot of work to get done, and so I just decided to close Outlook completely, and focus on the task at hand. And you know, it's amazing how much more I've gotten done without that little bell and icon popping up every time I get a new message.
The moral here is, if you want to reduce email checking but don't have the discipline to avoid looking every time the icon thingy says you have one, just close the program down.
Today, I had a lot of work to get done, and so I just decided to close Outlook completely, and focus on the task at hand. And you know, it's amazing how much more I've gotten done without that little bell and icon popping up every time I get a new message.
The moral here is, if you want to reduce email checking but don't have the discipline to avoid looking every time the icon thingy says you have one, just close the program down.
Saturday 2 April 2011
Multitasking
I was listening to a recent episode of Nora Young's CBC program "Spark", on the topic of chronic multitasking behaviour. After a brief introductory spot discussing the dangers of distraction while cycling (of all potentially dangerous things to be distracted from, why she chose cycling I'll never know), she interviewed a behavioural researcher named Clifford Nass from Stanford University, who has been studying a phenomenon he called chronic media multitasking, defined as constantly checking text messages, emails, facebook, etc., while trying to accomplish other things. Now, the standard interpretation of this behaviour is that it leads to reduced productivity or efficiency because you're constantly losing little bits of time here and there as you progress through your daily tasks. What's interesting about Dr. Nass' findings is that these types of behaviour also apparently influence the way we think, not just the amount of time we have for thinking; people who chronically multitask have less ability to filter out irrelevant information. And, contrary to what you may think, frequent multitasking does not make you better at it - it only amplifies the behavioural problems.
It struck me that this may be a case of neuroplasticity - of people changing their brain physically or chemically by positively reinforcing specific thought patterns. If we spend a lot of our time thinking in a certain way, we end up training our neural circuitry to grow in ways that bypass other potential deviations in thought.
So the more we multitask, the less ability we have to derail that multitasking behaviour when we need to focus more intensely on something for a period of time.
Of course, this trend in behaviour is largely attributed to the widespread use of things like smart-phones and other portable devices. When we have these things right at our fingertips, we grab hold of them the moment we get bored with the task at hand, whether that is checking email intermittently while working on a paper, sending text messages while in class, or answering a phone call while in the middle of a movie. In fact, in a survey of other professional researchers, Dr. Nass found that the most common reason for checking email was not feeling that something important was waiting, but wanting to put off the thing they are doing for a little bit longer. In his own words, "Multi-tasking is an escape..."
He suggests that when we check email, we should devote at least 15 minutes to it, not the 1-2 minute frequent we seem to lean towards as a form of procrastination, and do it far less frequently. Both the duration and the timing of our distractions require consideration if we are to shed the cloak of self-destructive false-productivity that we think of as multitasking.
My own goal for the coming week is to try avoiding the 1-minute email checks during the day and force myself to sit down and read or write for longer periods of time. We'll see how that goes.
It struck me that this may be a case of neuroplasticity - of people changing their brain physically or chemically by positively reinforcing specific thought patterns. If we spend a lot of our time thinking in a certain way, we end up training our neural circuitry to grow in ways that bypass other potential deviations in thought.
So the more we multitask, the less ability we have to derail that multitasking behaviour when we need to focus more intensely on something for a period of time.
Of course, this trend in behaviour is largely attributed to the widespread use of things like smart-phones and other portable devices. When we have these things right at our fingertips, we grab hold of them the moment we get bored with the task at hand, whether that is checking email intermittently while working on a paper, sending text messages while in class, or answering a phone call while in the middle of a movie. In fact, in a survey of other professional researchers, Dr. Nass found that the most common reason for checking email was not feeling that something important was waiting, but wanting to put off the thing they are doing for a little bit longer. In his own words, "Multi-tasking is an escape..."
He suggests that when we check email, we should devote at least 15 minutes to it, not the 1-2 minute frequent we seem to lean towards as a form of procrastination, and do it far less frequently. Both the duration and the timing of our distractions require consideration if we are to shed the cloak of self-destructive false-productivity that we think of as multitasking.
My own goal for the coming week is to try avoiding the 1-minute email checks during the day and force myself to sit down and read or write for longer periods of time. We'll see how that goes.
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