Cognitive overload

Thursday, December 30th, 2004

I’m a fairly easily distracted person. My schoolcards always had comments on them along the lines of “Good student but easily distracted”, “Sometimes a bit too much of a daydreamer” and “Needs to work on his short attention span”. I’ve always known this, and kind of assumed it was just my personality. But when I read articles like this one, I wonder if I’m the only one.

When I got interested in computers, everything was so amazing to me that nothing could divert my attention from the task I was performing at the moment. Quite frequently, people would talk to me and I would awnser them in a distracted sort of way while I kept looking at the screen and bashing on the keyboard. Later, I would recall nothing of even having talked to the specific person. Friends would visit me and find four rolled, unlighted cigarette’s next to my ashtray, two unfinished cigarettes which I was smoking at the same time and three half-rolled somewhere on my desk. I was so emerged in whatever it was that I was doing on the computer that I would forget about the cigarettes. Talk about concentrating on a single task. Naturally, those were very productive times.

Then.. I got an internet connection. Since then I’ve been much more easily distracted and haven’t been nearly as productive as I was before that. Instant messaging, IRC, E-mail, browsing, newssites, they all sucked up my time and attention. When my internet connection dies for more than about a day, my productivity suddenly goes through the roof.

I’m seeying the same thing at my work. Just when I really go up in my work and am coding like crazy somebody swings by to complain about this or that bug. The telephone rings, a high-priority e-mail comes in which needs immediate attention (or so claims the sender), etc. It’s killing my productivity.

I am now thinking about ways to stop being interrupted all the time while doing my job. Here are some rules that I’m going to adhere to:

• No e-mail reading/replying after 10:00 in the morning.
• No instant messaging clients running
• No IRC windows open.
• Firewall rules that kick in at 9:30 and which block all access to the Internet except for some specific resources (documentation, online radio stations, etc).
• No more listening to people that stop by my desk for useless stuff. They can send an e-mail (which I’ll read the next day) or they can file a bug-report in bugzilla if the want something from me.
• No telephone. I’ll simply won’t awnser it if I’m busy. (This one might be kind of tricky.. I hope my boss won’t get pissed off.. but it’s for the best)

I’ll be applying the same rules at home from now on. I’m even thinking of going unplugged at home. Since I now have a laptop, this should be do-able without too much crawling under the desk.