What's Missing Is a 'Home' for Groups

I just read a really interesting NY Times article by Clive Thompson.- ‘Meet The Life Hackers’ (yes, you have to register for the NYT, but this is worth it). Basically, he has cited several studies and observations by others of how technology has facilitated the volume and decibel level of interruptions in our worklife and the various means individuals and tech firms are coming up with to cope.

Some of it is very clever and common sense as described by Danny O’Brien. He conducted an informal survey with some very productive people in the hopes of discovering how they managed to be so productive. It seems many in his audience were technical software engineers. From Thompson’s article…

“He was hoping that the self-described geeks all shared some common tricks.

He was correct. But their suggestions were surprisingly low-tech. None of them used complex technology to manage their to-do lists: no Palm Pilots, no day-planner software. Instead, they all preferred to find one extremely simple application and shove their entire lives into it. Some of O'Brien's correspondents said they opened up a single document in a word-processing program and used it as an extra brain, dumping in everything they needed to remember - addresses, to-do lists, birthdays - and then just searched through that file when they needed a piece of information. Others used e-mail - mailing themselves a reminder of every task, reasoning that their in-boxes were the one thing they were certain to look at all day long.

In essence, the geeks were approaching their frazzled high-tech lives as engineering problems - and they were not waiting for solutions to emerge from on high, from Microsoft or computer firms. Instead they ginned up a multitude of small-bore fixes to reduce the complexities of life, one at a time, in a rather Martha Stewart-esque fashion.

and some of it is, well, scary..

“So why don't computers work this way? Instead of pinging us with e-mail and instant messages the second they arrive, our machines could store them up - to be delivered only at an optimum moment, when our brains are mostly relaxed.

One afternoon I drove across the Microsoft campus to visit a man who is trying to achieve precisely that: a computer that can read your mind. His name is Eric Horvitz, and he is one of Czerwinski's closest colleagues in the lab. For the last eight years, he has been building networks equipped with artificial intelligence (A.I.) that carefully observes a computer user's behavior and then tries to predict that sweet spot - the moment when the user will be mentally free and ready to be interrupted.

Horvitz booted the system up to show me how it works. He pointed to a series of bubbles on his screen, each representing one way the machine observes Horvitz's behavior. For example, it measures how long he's been typing or reading e-mail messages; it notices how long he spends in one program before shifting to another. Even more creepily, Horvitz told me, the A.I. program will - a little like HAL from "2001: A Space Odyssey" - eavesdrop on him with a microphone and spy on him using a Webcam, to try and determine how busy he is, and whether he has company in his office. Sure enough, at one point I peeked into the corner of Horvitz's computer screen and there was a little red indicator glowing.

"It's listening to us," Horvitz said with a grin. "The microphone's on."

It is no simple matter for a computer to recognize a user's "busy state," as it turns out, because everyone is busy in his own way. One programmer who works for Horvitz is busiest when he's silent and typing for extended periods, since that means he's furiously coding. But for a manager or executive, sitting quietly might actually be an indication of time being wasted; managers are more likely to be busy when they are talking or if PowerPoint is running. “

Does anyone see the irony here? – techies using lo-tech solutions to manage life for themselves and developing hi-tech, Big Brotheresque solutions for the rest of us. Sounds vaguely similar to the wiki scenario. Techies use them all the time, but maintain Lotus Notes and other ‘tech’ solutions for the rest of us.

All of this is also very focused on the individual. What’s MISSING in all of this is the nature of the interruptions – the CONTEXT.

Obviously, most of our interruptions come from others – people we collaborate with. And each collaboration usually includes some other folks because we tend to collaborate in groups. Groups give interruptions context. Yet, there is no infrastructure that supports the ‘group’ - just the one-to-one communications that individuals get interrupted by.

Eemails, RSS Feeds, cell phones. desk top documents – it’s all just bits of incomplete data that force us to connect with the other person to complete it, loop around with others so they get the new data, etc, etc., and as the Thompson’s article shows…

“Each employee spent only 11 minutes on any given project before being interrupted and whisked off to do something else. What's more, each 11-minute project was itself fragmented into even shorter three-minute tasks, like answering e-mail messages, reading a Web page or working on a spreadsheet. And each time a worker was distracted from a task, it would take, on average, 25 minutes to return to that task. To perform an office job today, it seems, your attention must skip like a stone across water all day long, touching down only periodically.”

The article speaks to finding a middle ground and I will contend that that middle ground already exists. I would bet that, at least in the workplace, 80% of the interruptions relate to projects and groups that all have very similar attributes and could each be facilitated with a company wiki. Each group could have its own restricted membership and all the non-critical updates, announcements, requests, etc could be managed there for anyone in the group to consider when the time is right for them.

What does this have to do with managing interruptions? In the absense of a simple means to manage the context of groups and activities, individuals have no choice but to constantly reach out and interrupt others with 'news'. And when we aren't reaching out and interrupting someone else, we anxciously wait to be interrupted lest we miss something important.

It's all about being out of the loop and a smart wiki deployment can keep people in the loop and allow them to actually focus on one thing at a time. Instead of being secure in our connected state and not having to think about it, we have adopted a work style that reflects our insecurity about being disconnected.