6 ms·

Notes on 'The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World'

97 points by luu 10y ago

tmail21 10y ago
Ever increasing distraction and "real-time" communication and collaboration are reaching a point of diminishing returns and actually decreasing our productivity. The book Deep Work, by Cal Newport is a start on identifying the problem and a possible solution (i.e. isolate yourself for stretches of time to accomplish Deep Work). Unfortunately, we live in a world where collaboration is necessary. So, what's the solution? One possibility is to come up with a collaboration solution that is built from the ground up to be asynchronous in nature. (Deep Collaboration as the enabler of Deep Work) Such a solution would complement our real-time collaboration solutions.
- Toenex 10y ago
  Which is one reason why email is still such a key collaboration tool.
- pdexter 10y ago
  What's the pitch for tmail21 in this context?
- kentt 10y ago
  Deep Work is great! I agree that after reading it the collaboration part is very difficult. Unfortunately the best solution that I've been able to come up with is to work on projects that can be accomplished by myself alone. It's obviously not ideal and dramatically limits the types of fun projects of otherwise take on.
- pravula 10y ago
  "Unfortunately, we live in a world where collaboration is necessary. So, what's the solution?" - There are specific examples of Deep Work collaboration in his book. Deep Work =/= No collaboration.
- nradov 10y ago
  E-mail, wikis, discussion forums, and issue trackers are all collaboration tools built from the ground up to be asynchronous in nature. Are you looking for something else?
  - L_Rahman 10y ago
    Each of these tools has two parts: - the constraints of the tool itself - the culture of the organization that uses the tool One organization could use emails and issue trackers completely asynchronously with scheduled twice daily checkins. Yet another could use them for near instantaneous communication. As always, the technology is usually something that simply exposes the underlying human behaviors.
  - tmail21 10y ago
    Agreed that all of these can be used asynchronously. However, I would refer to these as "incidentally-asynchronous", in the sense that their design goals were not primarily to be asynchronous (and hence support "Deep Work"). The major determinant of asynchronous deep collaboration efficiency is number of "cycles-to-outcome". (where a cycle is roughly a request/response loop). Email because of its lack of shared state collaboration generates lots of extra cycles because of confusion on shared state (i.e. attachment nightmare). Conversely, something like online document collaboration supports shared state collaboration, but is really poor at "what happened". For all but the smallest of documents this leads to compounding "implicit document rot" on every iteration. Alternatively, it leads to ever increasing time to "catchup" once again vastly expanding cycles-to-outcome. Neither is good with accountability (something that issue trackers are good with). Lack of accountability is another driver of increasing cycles-to-outcome. A deep collaboration solution that enables Deep Work could be designed from first principles based on minimizing cycles-to-outcome.
kjhughes 10y ago
I found the noted acceleration in time to 50 million users to be very interesting: radio 38y telephone 20y tv 13y cellphone 12y internet 4y ipod 3y myspace 2.5y facebook 2y youtube 1y angry birds 35d
- ashark 10y ago
  I wonder what they'd look like if you changed the target to a percentage of global population. Moving target, so it'd be harder to figure out, but say time to 5% or similar. It'd surely make the numbers less dramatic.
  - jerf 10y ago
    From 38 years to Angry Birds is 2.6 orders of magnitude. Population has increased by a lot less than that since radio. It's close to 400, so a radio population of one billion would have to be 400+ billion today to scale linearly. You are correct that it would be somewhat less dramatic, but it would still be impressively dramatic. I'm just doing some Fermi estimates here to give a sense of what sort of change we'd get in reaction to your idea in the spirit of fun, not anger, because I enjoy this sort of thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_problem
    - ashark 10y ago
      As pointed out in the notes the Angry Birds entry is a bit of a non sequitur since that's more like measuring how fast a given new TV show's viewership increased after TVs were already extremely common, and it's not exactly a world-changing technology like most of the other things on the list. It's not comparable to the other things, and was probably included for effect rather than its belonging on the list by shared criteria with the other items. I expect the others would look far less dramatic as a percentage—I'd guess the 12-year cell phone number and the 38-year radio number especially would move far closer together if percentages rather than an absolute count were used. TV/cell phone might well reverse, since they're already so close. The table sets off some serious "lying with numbers" warning bells.
ashark 10y ago
A cursory search for the briefly-mentioned Tools of the Mind program does not make it seem "promising". However, social science and education research is terrible and lots of organizations conducting research and pushing meta-study-backed recommendations have an agenda ($$$). Anyone in the field willing to offer some insight?
asciimo 10y ago
Many of these subjects are discussed in the popular Learning How To Learn online course [https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn]. I finally signed up for it and I'm grateful. Sure, we all know how to learn, otherwise we wouldn't be here. This course provides practical techniques for learning more information, better, and with greater durability. Plus science!
_pmf_ 10y ago
That's the kind of stuff that UX should focus on, not some hog wash handwavy fuzzy pop science.

97 points by luu 10y ago

Ever increasing distraction and "real-time" communication and collaboration are reaching a point of diminishing returns and actually decreasing our productivity. The book Deep Work, by Cal Newport is a start on identifying the problem and a possible solution (i.e. isolate yourself for stretches of time to accomplish Deep Work). Unfortunately, we live in a world where collaboration is necessary. So, what's the solution? One possibility is to come up with a collaboration solution that is built from the ground up to be asynchronous in nature. (Deep Collaboration as the enabler of Deep Work) Such a solution would complement our real-time collaboration solutions.

Toenex 10y ago
Which is one reason why email is still such a key collaboration tool.
pdexter 10y ago
What's the pitch for tmail21 in this context?
kentt 10y ago
Deep Work is great! I agree that after reading it the collaboration part is very difficult. Unfortunately the best solution that I've been able to come up with is to work on projects that can be accomplished by myself alone. It's obviously not ideal and dramatically limits the types of fun projects of otherwise take on.
pravula 10y ago
"Unfortunately, we live in a world where collaboration is necessary. So, what's the solution?" - There are specific examples of Deep Work collaboration in his book. Deep Work =/= No collaboration.
nradov 10y ago
E-mail, wikis, discussion forums, and issue trackers are all collaboration tools built from the ground up to be asynchronous in nature. Are you looking for something else?
- L_Rahman 10y ago
  Each of these tools has two parts: - the constraints of the tool itself - the culture of the organization that uses the tool One organization could use emails and issue trackers completely asynchronously with scheduled twice daily checkins. Yet another could use them for near instantaneous communication. As always, the technology is usually something that simply exposes the underlying human behaviors.
- tmail21 10y ago
  Agreed that all of these can be used asynchronously. However, I would refer to these as "incidentally-asynchronous", in the sense that their design goals were not primarily to be asynchronous (and hence support "Deep Work"). The major determinant of asynchronous deep collaboration efficiency is number of "cycles-to-outcome". (where a cycle is roughly a request/response loop). Email because of its lack of shared state collaboration generates lots of extra cycles because of confusion on shared state (i.e. attachment nightmare). Conversely, something like online document collaboration supports shared state collaboration, but is really poor at "what happened". For all but the smallest of documents this leads to compounding "implicit document rot" on every iteration. Alternatively, it leads to ever increasing time to "catchup" once again vastly expanding cycles-to-outcome. Neither is good with accountability (something that issue trackers are good with). Lack of accountability is another driver of increasing cycles-to-outcome. A deep collaboration solution that enables Deep Work could be designed from first principles based on minimizing cycles-to-outcome.

kjhughes 10y ago

I found the noted acceleration in time to 50 million users to be very interesting: radio 38y telephone 20y tv 13y cellphone 12y internet 4y ipod 3y myspace 2.5y facebook 2y youtube 1y angry birds 35d

ashark 10y ago
I wonder what they'd look like if you changed the target to a percentage of global population. Moving target, so it'd be harder to figure out, but say time to 5% or similar. It'd surely make the numbers less dramatic.
- jerf 10y ago
  From 38 years to Angry Birds is 2.6 orders of magnitude. Population has increased by a lot less than that since radio. It's close to 400, so a radio population of one billion would have to be 400+ billion today to scale linearly. You are correct that it would be somewhat less dramatic, but it would still be impressively dramatic. I'm just doing some Fermi estimates here to give a sense of what sort of change we'd get in reaction to your idea in the spirit of fun, not anger, because I enjoy this sort of thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_problem
  - ashark 10y ago
    As pointed out in the notes the Angry Birds entry is a bit of a non sequitur since that's more like measuring how fast a given new TV show's viewership increased after TVs were already extremely common, and it's not exactly a world-changing technology like most of the other things on the list. It's not comparable to the other things, and was probably included for effect rather than its belonging on the list by shared criteria with the other items. I expect the others would look far less dramatic as a percentage—I'd guess the 12-year cell phone number and the 38-year radio number especially would move far closer together if percentages rather than an absolute count were used. TV/cell phone might well reverse, since they're already so close. The table sets off some serious "lying with numbers" warning bells.

ashark 10y ago

A cursory search for the briefly-mentioned Tools of the Mind program does not make it seem "promising". However, social science and education research is terrible and lots of organizations conducting research and pushing meta-study-backed recommendations have an agenda ($$$). Anyone in the field willing to offer some insight?

asciimo 10y ago

Many of these subjects are discussed in the popular Learning How To Learn online course [https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn]. I finally signed up for it and I'm grateful. Sure, we all know how to learn, otherwise we wouldn't be here. This course provides practical techniques for learning more information, better, and with greater durability. Plus science!

_pmf_ 10y ago

That's the kind of stuff that UX should focus on, not some hog wash handwavy fuzzy pop science.