Text 7921, 513 rader
Skriven 2005-10-26 20:27:32 av Ellen K. (1:379/45)
   Kommentar till text 7905 av Glenn Meadows (1:379/45)
Ärende: Re: Lifehackers Article
===============================
From: Ellen K. <72322.1016@compuserve.com>

Wow, thanks for posting that, I hadn't seen it.

Personally, I do NOT have my email set to let me know when new mail arrives,
rather I check my email every time I get to a stopping point in whatever I'm
working on.  I'm curious to know what other folks here do.

Also I do not have IM or a cellphone.    :)

One way I cut down on distractions is by working at home.  That way the breaks
happen when I need them as opposed to when somebody else needs one.

On Wed, 26 Oct 2005 14:29:34 -0500, "Glenn Meadows"
<gmeadow@comcast.net> wrote in message <435fd8cc@w3.nls.net>:

>This is a fascinating article that definitely hit home for me as I
>struggle to prioritize and multitask in our interrupt driven lifestyles
>that are full of non-stop distractions.  Some of the more interesting
>parts of the article were the findings that most people only spend 11
>minutes on any given project before being interrupted and after the
>interruption has ceased it takes 25 minutes to return to that task.  I
>also found the section on proficiency while using larger or multiple
>computer monitors interesting too.  I highly suggest taking a few
>minutes to give this a read - it's worth it.
>
>-------------------------
>
>http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/16/magazine/16guru.html
>
>October 16, 2005
>Meet the Life Hackers
>By CLIVE THOMPSON
>
>In 2000, Gloria Mark was hired as a professor at the University of
>California at Irvine. Until then, she was working as a researcher,
>living a life of comparative peace. She would spend her days in her lab,
>enjoying the sense of serene focus that comes from immersing yourself
>for hours at a time in a single project. But when her faculty job began,
>that all ended. Mark would arrive at her desk in the morning, full of
>energy and ready to tackle her to-do list - only to suffer an endless
>stream of interruptions. No sooner had she started one task than a
>colleague would e-mail her with an urgent request; when she went to work
>on that, the phone would ring. At the end of the day, she had been so
>constantly distracted that she would have accomplished only a fraction
>of what she set out to do. "Madness," she thought. "I'm trying to do 30
>things at once."
>
>Lots of people complain that office multitasking drives them nuts. But
>Mark is a scientist of "human-computer interactions" who studies how
>high-tech devices affect our behavior, so she was able to do more than
>complain: she set out to measure precisely how nuts we've all become.
>Beginning in 2004, she persuaded two West Coast high-tech firms to let
>her study their cubicle dwellers as they surfed the chaos of modern
>office life. One of her grad students, Victor Gonzalez, sat looking over
>the shoulder of various employees all day long, for a total of more than
>1,000 hours. He noted how many times the employees were interrupted and
>how long each employee was able to work on any individual task.
>
>When Mark crunched the data, a picture of 21st-century office work
>emerged that was, she says, "far worse than I could ever have imagined."
>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.
>
>Yet while interruptions are annoying, Mark's study also revealed their
>flip side: they are often crucial to office work. Sure, the high-tech
>workers grumbled and moaned about disruptions, and they all claimed that
>they preferred to work in long, luxurious stretches. But they grudgingly
>admitted that many of their daily distractions were essential to their
>jobs. When someone forwards you an urgent e-mail message, it's often
>something you really do need to see; if a cellphone call breaks through
>while you're desperately trying to solve a problem, it might be the call
>that saves your hide. In the language of computer sociology, our jobs
>today are "interrupt driven." Distractions are not just a plague on our
>work - sometimes they are our work. To be cut off from other workers is
>to be cut off from everything.
>
>For a small cadre of computer engineers and academics, this realization
>has begun to raise an enticing possibility: perhaps we can find an ideal
>middle ground. If high-tech work distractions are inevitable, then maybe
>we can re-engineer them so we receive all of their benefits but few of
>their downsides. Is there such a thing as a perfect interruption?
>
>
>Mary Czerwinski first confronted this question while working, oddly
>enough, in outer space. She is one of the world's leading experts in
>interruption science, and she was hired in 1989 by Lockheed to help NASA
>design the information systems for the International Space Station. NASA
>had a problem: how do you deliver an interruption to a busy astronaut?
>On the space station, astronauts must attend to dozens of experiments
>while also monitoring the station's warning systems for potentially
>fatal mechanical errors. NASA wanted to ensure that its warnings were
>perfectly tuned to the human attention span: if a warning was too
>distracting, it could throw off the astronauts and cause them to mess up
>million-dollar experiments. But if the warnings were too subtle and
>unobtrusive, they might go unnoticed, which would be even worse. The
>NASA engineers needed something that would split the difference.
>
>Czerwinski noticed that all the information the astronauts received came
>to them as plain text and numbers. She began experimenting with
>different types of interruptions and found that it was the style of
>delivery that was crucial. Hit an astronaut with a textual interruption,
>and he was likely to ignore it, because it would simply fade into the
>text-filled screens he was already staring at. Blast a horn and he would
>definitely notice it - but at the cost of jangling his nerves.
>Czerwinski proposed a third way: a visual graphic, like a pentagram
>whose sides changed color based on the type of problem at hand, a
>solution different enough from the screens of text to break through the
>clutter.
>
>The science of interruptions began more than 100 years ago, with the
>emergence of telegraph operators - the first high-stress, time-sensitive
>information-technology jobs. Psychologists discovered that if someone
>spoke to a telegraph operator while he was keying a message, the
>operator was more likely to make errors; his cognition was scrambled by
>mentally "switching channels." Later, psychologists determined that
>whenever workers needed to focus on a job that required the monitoring
>of data, presentation was all-important. Using this knowledge, cockpits
>for fighter pilots were meticulously planned so that each dial and meter
>could be read at a glance.
>
>Still, such issues seemed remote from the lives of everyday workers -
>even information workers - simply because everyday work did not require
>parsing screenfuls of information. In the 90's, this began to change,
>and change quickly. As they became ubiquitous in the workplace,
>computers, which had until then been little more than glorified
>word-processors and calculators, began to experience a rapid increase in
>speed and power. "Multitasking" was born; instead of simply working on
>one program for hours at a time, a computer user could work on several
>different ones simultaneously. Corporations seized on this as a way to
>squeeze more productivity out of each worker, and technology companies
>like Microsoft obliged them by transforming the computer into a hub for
>every conceivable office task, and laying on the available information
>with a trowel. The Internet accelerated this trend even further, since
>it turned the computer from a sealed box into our primary tool for
>communication. As a result, office denizens now stare at computer
>screens of mind-boggling complexity, as they juggle messages, text
>documents, PowerPoint presentations, spreadsheets and Web browsers all
>at once. In the modern office we are all fighter pilots.
>
>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.
>
>The upshot is something that Linda Stone, a software executive who has
>worked for both Apple and Microsoft, calls "continuous partial
>attention": we are so busy keeping tabs on everything that we never
>focus on anything. This can actually be a positive feeling, inasmuch as
>the constant pinging makes us feel needed and desired. The reason many
>interruptions seem impossible to ignore is that they are about
>relationships - someone, or something, is calling out to us. It is why
>we have such complex emotions about the chaos of the modern office,
>feeling alternately drained by its demands and exhilarated when we
>successfully surf the flood.
>
>"It makes us feel alive," Stone says. "It's what makes us feel
>important. We just want to connect, connect, connect. But what happens
>when you take that to the extreme? You get overconnected." Sanity lies
>on the path down the center - if only there was some way to find it.
>
>
>It is this middle path that Czerwinski and her generation of computer
>scientists are now trying to divine. When I first met her in the
>corridors of Microsoft, she struck me as a strange person to be studying
>the art of focusing, because she seemed almost attention-deficit
>disordered herself: a 44-year-old with a pageboy haircut and the
>electric body language of a teenager. "I'm such a spaz," she said, as we
>went bounding down the hallways to the cafeteria for a "bio-break." When
>she ushered me into her office, it was a perfect Exhibit A of the go-go
>computer-driven life: she had not one but three enormous computer
>screens, festooned with perhaps 30 open windows - a bunch of e-mail
>messages, several instant messages and dozens of Web pages. Czerwinski
>says she regards 20 solid minutes of uninterrupted work as a major
>triumph; often she'll stay in her office for hours after work, crunching
>data, since that's the only time her outside distractions wane.
>
>In 1997, Microsoft recruited Czerwinski to join Microsoft Research Labs,
>a special division of the firm where she and other eggheads would be
>allowed to conduct basic research into how computers affect human
>behavior. Czerwinski discovered that the computer industry was still
>strangely ignorant of how people really used their computers. Microsoft
>had sold tens of millions of copies of its software but had never
>closely studied its users' rhythms of work and interruption. How long
>did they linger on a single document? What interrupted them while they
>were working, and why?
>
>To figure this out, she took a handful of volunteers and installed
>software on their computers that would virtually shadow them all day
>long, recording every mouse click. She discovered 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,
>Czerwinski realized, 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?
>
>
>When Gloria Mark and Mary Czerwinski, working separately, looked at the
>desks of the people they were studying, they each noticed the same
>thing: Post-it notes. Workers would scrawl hieroglyphic reminders of the
>tasks they were supposed to be working on ("Test PB patch DAN's PC -
>Waiting for AL," was one that Mark found). Then they would place them
>directly in their fields of vision, often in a halo around the edge of
>their computer screens. The Post-it notes were, in essence, a
>jury-rigged memory device, intended to rescue users from those moments
>of mental wandering.
>
>For Mark and Czerwinski, these piecemeal efforts at coping pointed to
>ways that our high-tech tools could be engineered to be less
>distracting. When Czerwinski walked around the Microsoft campus, she
>noticed that many people had attached two or three monitors to their
>computers. They placed their applications on different screens - the
>e-mail far off on the right side, a Web browser on the left and their
>main work project right in the middle - so that each application was
>"glanceable." When the ding on their e-mail program went off, they could
>quickly peek over at their in-boxes to see what had arrived.
>
>The workers swore that this arrangement made them feel calmer. But did
>more screen area actually help with cognition? To find out, Czerwinski's
>team conducted another experiment. The 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.
>Some of the volunteers were so enthralled with the huge screen that they
>begged to take it home. In two decades of research, Czerwinski 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. So her group began devising tools that maximized screen space by
>grouping documents and programs together - making it possible to easily
>spy them out of the corner of your eye, ensuring that you would never
>forget them in the fog of your interruptions. Another experiment created
>a tiny round window that floats on one side of the screen; moving dots
>represent information you need to monitor, like the size of your in-box
>or an approaching meeting. It looks precisely like the radar screen in a
>military cockpit.
>
>
>In late 2003, the technology writer Danny O'Brien decided he was fed up
>with not getting enough done at work. So he sat down and made a list of
>70 of the most "sickeningly overprolific" people he knew, most of whom
>were software engineers of one kind or another. O'Brien wrote a
>questionnaire asking them to explain how, precisely, they managed such
>awesome output. Over the next few weeks they e-mailed their replies, and
>one night O'Brien sat down at his dining-room table to look for clues.
>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.
>
>Many of O'Brien's correspondents, it turned out, were also devotees of
>"Getting Things Done," a system developed by David Allen, a
>personal-productivity guru who consults with Fortune 500 corporations
>and whose seminars fill Silicon Valley auditoriums with anxious worker
>bees. At the core of Allen's system is the very concept of memory that
>Mark and Czerwinski hit upon: unless the task you're doing is visible
>right in front of you, you will half-forget about it when you get
>distracted, and it will nag at you from your subconscious. Thus, as soon
>as you are interrupted, Allen says, you need either to quickly deal with
>the interruption or - if it's going to take longer than two minutes - to
>faithfully add the new task to your constantly updated to-do list. Once
>the interruption is over, you immediately check your to-do list and go
>back to whatever is at the top.
>
>"David Allen essentially offers a program that you can run like software
>in your head and follow automatically," O'Brien explains. "If this
>happens, then do this. You behave like a robot, which of course really
>appeals to geeks."
>
>O'Brien summed up his research in a speech called "Life Hacks," which he
>delivered in February 2004 at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology
>Conference. Five hundred conference-goers tried to cram into his
>session, desperate for tips on managing info chaos. When O'Brien
>repeated the talk the next year, it was mobbed again. By the summer of
>2005, the "life hacks" meme had turned into a full-fledged grass-roots
>movement. Dozens of "life hacking" Web sites now exist, where followers
>of the movement trade suggestions on how to reduce chaos. The ideas are
>often quite clever: O'Brien wrote for himself a program that, whenever
>he's surfing the Web, pops up a message every 10 minutes demanding to
>know whether he's procrastinating. It turns out that a certain amount of
>life-hacking is simply cultivating a monklike ability to say no.
>
>"In fairness, I think we bring some of this on ourselves," says Merlin
>Mann, the founder of the popular life-hacking site 43folders.com. "We'd
>rather die than be bored for a few minutes, so we just surround
>ourselves with distractions. We've got 20,000 digital photos instead of
>10 we treasure. We have more TV Tivo'd than we'll ever see." In the last
>year, Mann has embarked on a 12-step-like triage: he canceled his
>Netflix account, trimmed his instant-messaging "buddy list" so only
>close friends can contact him and set his e-mail program to bother him
>only once an hour. ("Unless you're working in a Korean missile silo, you
>don't need to check e-mail every two minutes," he argues.)
>
>Mann's most famous hack emerged when he decided to ditch his Palm Pilot
>and embrace a much simpler organizing style. He bought a deck of
>3-by-5-inch index cards, clipped them together with a binder clip and
>dubbed it "The Hipster P.D.A." - an ultra-low-fi organizer, running on
>the oldest memory technology around: paper.
>
>
>In the 1920's, the Russian scientist Bluma Zeigarnik performed an
>experiment that illustrated an intriguing aspect of interruptions. She
>had several test subjects work on jigsaw puzzles, then interrupted them
>at various points. She found that the ones least likely to complete the
>task were those who had been disrupted at the beginning. Because they
>hadn't had time to become mentally invested in the task, they had
>trouble recovering from the distraction. In contrast, those who were
>interrupted toward the end of the task were more likely to stay on track.
>
>Gloria Mark compares this to the way that people work when they are
>"co-located" - sitting next to each other in cubicles - versus how they
>work when they are "distributed," each working from different locations
>and interacting online. She discovered that people in open-cubicle
>offices suffer more interruptions than those who work remotely. But they
>have better interruptions, because their co-workers have a social sense
>of what they are doing. When you work next to other people, they can
>sense whether you're deeply immersed, panicking or relatively free and
>ready to talk - and they interrupt you accordingly.
>
>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.
>
>In the early days of training Horvitz's A.I., you must clarify when
>you're most and least interruptible, so the machine can begin to pick up
>your personal patterns. But after a few days, the fun begins - because
>the machine takes over and, using what you've taught it, tries to
>predict your future behavior. Horvitz clicked an onscreen icon for
>"Paul," an employee working on a laptop in a meeting room down the hall.
>A little chart popped up. Paul, the A.I. program reported, was currently
>in between tasks - but it predicted that he would begin checking his
>e-mail within five minutes. Thus, Horvitz explained, right now would be
>a great time to e-mail him; you'd be likely to get a quick reply. If you
>wanted to pay him a visit, the program also predicted that - based on
>his previous patterns - Paul would be back in his office in 30 minutes.
>
>With these sorts of artificial smarts, computer designers could
>re-engineer our e-mail programs, our messaging and even our phones so
>that each tool would work like a personal butler - tiptoeing around us
>when things are hectic and barging in only when our crises have passed.
>Horvitz's early prototypes offer an impressive glimpse of what's
>possible. An e-mail program he produced seven years ago, code-named
>Priorities, analyzes the content of your incoming e-mail messages and
>ranks them based on the urgency of the message and your relationship
>with the sender, then weighs that against how busy you are. Superurgent
>mail is delivered right away; everything else waits in a queue until
>you're no longer busy. When Czerwinski first tried the program, it gave
>her as much as three hours of solid work time before nagging her with a
>message. The software also determined, to the surprise of at least one
>Microsoft employee, that e-mail missives from Bill Gates were not
>necessarily urgent, since Gates tends to write long, discursive notes
>for employees to meditate on.
>
>This raises a possibility both amusing and disturbing: perhaps if we
>gave artificial brains more control over our schedules, interruptions
>would actually decline - because A.I. doesn't panic. We humans are
>Pavlovian; even though we know we're just pumping ourselves full of
>stress, we can't help frantically checking our e-mail the instant the
>bell goes ding. But a machine can resist that temptation, because it
>thinks in statistics. It knows that only an extremely rare message is so
>important that we must read it right now.
>
>
>So will Microsoft bring these calming technologies to our real-world
>computers? "Could Microsoft do it?" asks David Gelernter, a Yale
>professor and longtime critic of today's computers. "Yeah. But I don't
>know if they're motivated by the lust for simplicity that you'd need.
>They're more interested in piling more and more toys on you."
>
>The near-term answer to the question will come when Vista, Microsoft's
>new operating system, is released in the fall of 2006. Though Czerwinski
>and Horvitz are reluctant to speculate on which of their innovations
>will be included in the new system, Horvitz said that the system will
>"likely" incorporate some way of detecting how busy you are. But he
>admitted that "a bunch of features may not be shipping with Vista." He
>says he believes that Microsoft will eventually tame the
>interruption-driven workplace, even if it takes a while. "I have viewed
>the task as a 'moon mission' that I believe that Microsoft can pull
>off," he says.
>
>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.
>
>Yet the truth is that even Apple might not be up to the task of building
>the ultimately serene computer. After all, even the geekiest life
>hackers find they need to trick out their Apples with duct-tape-like
>solutions; and even that sometimes isn't enough. Some experts argue that
>the basic design of the computer needs to change: so long as computers
>deliver information primarily through a monitor, they have an inherent
>bottleneck - forcing us to squeeze the ocean of our lives through a thin
>straw. David Rose, the Cambridge designer, suspects that computers need
>to break away from the screen, delivering information through glanceable
>sources in the world around us, the way wall clocks tell us the time in
>an instant. For computers to become truly less interruptive, they might
>have to cease looking like computers. Until then, those Post-it notes on
>our monitors are probably here to stay.
>
>Clive Thompson is a contributing writer for the magazine.

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