I read in the Wall Street Journal that a new "plague of inattention" is taking over. I was shocked, shocked to learn that people are actually doing more than one thing at once, like talking on the phone and scanning email, or watching TV while IMing.
I am amazed by articles like this one, that report on what I know is a well-established shift in everyday business reality. The ax grinding that goes on is annoying since I don't believe that adopting modern communication media and accepting their impacts on the conduct of business should trigger anxiety and concern. But apparently that is exactly what is happening, at least among those suffering from "infostress."
The article does however point out an interesting factoid: a University of California - Irvine study shows that the typical office worker (14 in the sample from a California financial services company) switches task once every three minutes. This is either by choice or by interruption. Gloria Mark, the researcher running the study calls this frequency "nuts."
Why is it nuts, I wonder? The article suggests that desktop applications -- email, web, spreadsheets, and so on -- are not time-ergonomically designed. Others that are interviewed suggest that we should just say no to task switching -- more moral fiber, just disconnecting for longer stretches of time -- and we can turn back the clock to a better, slower pace.
I think this is a generational issue, and that the WSJ readership is dominated by an aging, grudgingly connected population of boomers. I bet that the study would show higher rate of task switching by younger workers (although the sample size is too small for any useful segmentation).
My experience has been that older people are less likely to adopt novel communication media, and are reluctant to shift their patterns of communication interaction. My 75 year old mother has never used an ATM. My 45 year old wife resists logging into IM. A 50ish colleague (eight years ago) would have his secretary print out his email and place it in his physical inbox, so that he could respond in longhand: she would collect the sheets of legal paper from his outbox, and type the email responses.
Younger people are more likely to IM, to exploit cellular connectivity, to accept the interrupts of modern communication and to exploit them. Those who have grown up with IM, for example, will think it commonplace to IM while sitting in a meeting, or responding to email while talking on the phone.
The directive that closes the WSJ article -- "The next time a phone conversation turns into a one-way monologue, demand the surfer shut off the computer monitor and listen" -- is simply outmoded business etiquette. People will mulitask because it allows them to better manage their time, and to track a variety of critical activities at one time.
My grandmother once forced me to learn how to peel a banana with a knife and fork, so that I would be capable of meeting the standards of table manners that she thought appropriate. My children would think I was crazy if I were to make them do the same. The tone of the WSJ article -- that we have lost some important element of a better era through shifting to multitasking -- is simply wrongheaded.
Every generation wrings its hands about the perils of adopting increasingly sped-up communications and the loss of quieter, more sedate, and human (meaning already socialized) communications. Pundits condemned radio, television, the Internet, cell phones, email, and now IM as being unnecessarily disruptive, intrusive, and redundant. But this is all a tempest in a teapot. The adoption of each of these media was accompanied by the whining of aging media bigots, and in every case, the younger generation simply adopted the new media and moved on.
This article will appear laughable in a few years, like jokes about the demand for an ROI for corporate email in the late 80s. And in a generation, this sort of handwringing about multitasking will seem as foreign and incomprehensible as Emily Post's On Etiquette seems to today's teenagers.
