The New York Times Magazine has an article today called
Meet the Life Hackers. It's about how distracted our lives are, particularly if we use computers. It goes into more than you might expect. First it realizes that many distractions are in fact work related and not necessarily a bad thing. But then it goes on to find ways that people have used which help.
Surprisingly, the single thing that helped the most was a bigger monitor, showing a 10-44% speed improvement on tasks. Other suggestions were funneling everything through one system like a single to-do list in a word processor or emailing yourself all your tasks and keeping up on your email queue. This sounds a bit like Getting Things Done and it goes into that as well. It also wonders why computer programs themselves don't try to do more to manage our time more effectively and interviews researchers who are trying to do just that. Good stuff, but for now I'll continue to live from a plain text list I manage in Emacs.
1 comment:
That was interesting. I had always thought a big monitor was just a manifestation of a big ego. Getting a bigger monitor...or a flatter flatscreen...or better resolution than your cube neighbors seemed a office status symbol, but I guess not.
The section about using email or a word processing document to gather thoughts reminded me of a job I had. Along these lines, I sort of evolved into a continuous updating of a Wiki...if you needed to see me or ask me something...visit my Wiki....I had everything there, and well organized.
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