Day 11

With two weeks at New Job now under my belt, it's clear (already? finally?) that Old Job was not exactly conducive to clear thinking. The frenetic pace, the unceasing interruptions, the "multiple competing priorities," the cubicle-based office plan, the incessant unpleasant noises, and especially the corporate ethos which made virtues of all those vices – it was hard to think at all there, much less to think straight. The most welcome consequence of the literal peace and quiet has been a return of my ability to hold something in my head for longer than a second, a lifting of the buzzing fog that seemed like, but happily was not, a permanent mental presence. This ability and freedom to focus comes in handy when dialing phone numbers, getting back on task after an interruption, quickly finishing a small task, efficiently starting a big one, leave for home on time, et cetera.

Matching this new psychological state is the striking, and nearly as welcome, decline in the number and intensity of received emails. I don’t think I’ve had a single email yet that demanded a response within an hour, much less within minutes. At Old Job, I got several of those a day – often, two or three in the hour after lunch. This morning, by way of comparison, I had four new emails. Two duplicated each other – delete one! – and then two of the remaining three were irrelevant – delete! delete!

Having “long, luxurious stretches” to work more or less continuously on a single task – or to choose when I interrupt myself – is a wonderful thing, and it nicely complements my newfound privacy. I hated feeling like I was constantly under observation, if not on exhibit, but in my new desk it’s the diametric and near-euphoric opposite: I cannot see anyone (unless they cross in front of my door) and no one can see me (ditto). And on top of this boon is the last I’ll mention now: my big LCD monitor. It seems almost as large as my south-facing window (itself a hard-to-underestimate feature of the job), but it’s also set up such that no one can it and it’s big and clear enough to allow me to arrange almost my work as I see fit. I started doing this by reflex, inspired by a half-remembered statement of Edward Tufte to the effect that one should use the biggest and best possible monitor so that the maximum amount of data was visible at once. My futzing was reinforced over the weekend by a fascinating article in the New York Times Magazine on “interruption science” – the study of how and why office work is disturbed and disrupted, and how to make office work better. One researcher – at Microsoft! – found that

Computer users were as restless as hummingbirds. On average, they juggled eight different windows at the same time - a few e-mail messages, maybe a Web page or two and a PowerPoint document. More astonishing, they would spend barely 20 seconds looking at one window before flipping to another.

Why the constant shifting? In part it was because of the basic way that today's computers are laid out. A computer screen offers very little visual real estate. It is like working at a desk so small that you can look at only a single sheet of paper at a time. A Microsoft Word document can cover almost an entire screen. Once you begin multitasking, a computer desktop very quickly becomes buried in detritus.

This is part of the reason that, when someone is interrupted, it takes 25 minutes to cycle back to the original task. Once their work becomes buried beneath a screenful of interruptions, office workers appear to literally forget what task they were originally pursuing. We do not like to think we are this flighty: we might expect that if we are, say, busily filling out some forms and are suddenly distracted by a phone call, we would quickly return to finish the job. But we don't. Researchers find that 40 percent of the time, workers wander off in a new direction when an interruption ends, distracted by the technological equivalent of shiny objects. The central danger of interruptions… is not really the interruption at all. It is the havoc they wreak with our short-term memory: What the heck was I just doing?

Almost all of the solutions, it turns out, are technical, not social: new software, better hardware, etc. Nobody's talking too much in this piece about creating office environments where human interaction takes place differently, except insofar as that interaction can be controlled by technologies. This emphasis on Stuff, not People, is, in itself, an interesting story, but a predictable one given that Microsoft is behind the research. At any rate, part of the solution was giant monitors.

Researchers took 15 volunteers, sat each one in front of a regular-size 15-inch monitor and had them complete a variety of tasks designed to challenge their powers of concentration - like a Web search, some cutting and pasting and memorizing a seven-digit phone number. Then the volunteers repeated these same tasks, this time using a computer with a massive 42-inch screen, as big as a plasma TV.

The results? On the bigger screen, people completed the tasks at least 10 percent more quickly - and some as much as 44 percent more quickly. They were also more likely to remember the seven-digit number, which showed that the multitasking was clearly less taxing on their brains... In two decades of research, [the researcher] had never seen a single tweak to a computer system so significantly improve a user's productivity. The clearer your screen, she found, the calmer your mind.

I’m not quite to the point of requesting a high-res movie screen for my office, but then again, my new setup is nice enough that I don’t think I need one to do my job and enjoy it. And that, by itself, is a good arrangement.