| Home > Community thoughts > New York Times on Life Hackers to improve productivity: "By a sizable margin, life hackers are devotees not of Microsoft but of Apple" |
| New York Times on Life Hackers to improve productivity: "By a sizable margin, life hackers are devotees not of Microsoft but of Apple" | | Date Created: 17 Oct, 2005, 06:49 AM |
 Anyone who considers themselves a knowledge worker overwhelmed with how many tasks they are simultaneously working on, and who are feeling their productivity is suffering and that there must be a better way, could do themselves a favour and read the Clive Thompson article in today's New York Times - one not hidden behind a paywall.
At the time of my writing, Steve Gillmor (the symbol atop left is the logo for his Attention.org group - my fear of flying blog is approved, btw, the current one has not been applied for, yet) hasn't blogged about this article which refers to "Attention":
"Information is no longer a scarce resource - attention is. David Rose, a Cambridge, Mass.-based expert on computer interfaces, likes to point out that 20 years ago, an office worker had only two types of communication technology: a phone, which required an instant answer, and postal mail, which took days. "Now we have dozens of possibilities between those poles," Rose says. How fast are you supposed to reply to an e-mail message? Or an instant message? Computer-based interruptions fall into a sort of Heisenbergian uncertainty trap: it is difficult to know whether an e-mail message is worth interrupting your work for unless you open and read it - at which point you have, of course, interrupted yourself. Our software tools were essentially designed to compete with one another for our attention, like needy toddlers."
Gillmor is in fact still getting his head around the NYT/Judith Miller story, as dense a story as one is going to read in a long while.
I'm sure he'll get to it soon.
I've been very interested in ideas of attention and productivity since finishing my Knowledge Management course at the University of Melbourne, and detecting a gap where KM was not discussed in a personal way.
There is a train coming down the tracks and whether its the Attention Express, or the Productivity Pony, those of us who use our heads for a living, and who use a computer to augment that process, are going to have to discover a better more workable relationship.
I've opined in this blog many times that Apple has a better handle on this nexus, while Windows scrambles my brain's functioning when I use it. I'll remind you I'm not a propeller head or geek or coder, and the part of my course in undergrad. psychology I really disliked was having to learn FORTRAN to do basic statistical analysis.
But I do know when technology augments, enables, extends and connects my brain's functioning, and in general it happens more when I use Apple's products than Microsoft's. By now, cognitive bias is also a factor, as is emotional bias, such that anything from Microsoft has to pass a higher standard of useability and trust to get me to pay attention, while I am drawn to Apple's products and thinking like a moth to light.
So it came as a delighted discovery to read in Thompson's article that many of those researching and developing better means to harness our capacity for attention for greater productivity employ Apple's technologies:
"By a sizable margin, life hackers are devotees not of Microsoft but of Apple, the company's only real rival in the creation of operating systems - and a company that has often seemed to intuit the need for software that reduces the complexity of the desktop. When Apple launched its latest operating system, Tiger, earlier this year, it introduced a feature called Dashboard - a collection of glanceable programs, each of which performs one simple function, like displaying the weather. Tiger also includes a single-key tool that zooms all open windows into a bingo-card-like grid, uncovering any "lost" ones. A superpowered search application speeds up the laborious task of hunting down a missing file. Microsoft is now playing catch-up; Vista promises many of the same tweaks, although it will most likely add a few new ones as well, including, possibly, a 3-D mode for seeing all the windows you have open.
Apple's computers have long been designed specifically to soothe the confusions of the technologically ignorant. For years, that meant producing computer systems that seemed simpler than the ones Microsoft produced, but were less powerful. When computers moved relatively slowly and the Internet was little used, raw productivity - shoving the most data at the user - mattered most, and Microsoft triumphed in the marketplace. But for many users, simplicity now trumps power. Linda Stone, the software executive who has worked alongside the C.E.O.'s of both Microsoft and Apple, argues that we have shifted eras in computing. Now that multitasking is driving us crazy, we treasure technologies that protect us. We love Google not because it brings us the entire Web but because it filters it out, bringing us the one page we really need. In our new age of overload, the winner is the technology that can hold the world at bay."
The article goes on to conclude that Apple's OS still needs hacking and "duct-taping" to individualise it to their "life hack" needs. But reading between the lines, and factoring in my cognitive bias once more, I believe Apple will get there and soon show us stuff we didn't know we wanted. This thought popped in after accidentally going back into the Macintouch archives and reading the early comments following the iPod's introduction in October 2001. Some of those comment makers must be chuckling with amusement how they didn't "see it" they way Apple did back then.
It's happening again, folks.
To wit: the day before submissions closed, I put in for doing a January MacWorld presentation on Personal Knoweldge Management and the Mac. I think following today's NYT's article, my chances of being accepted may have just increased. I'll keep you informed now that I have your attention.
(UPDATE: December 4, 2005: My application to MacWorld was rejected. I blog about it here.) |
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