Powerful medicine against distraction

If you have followed my advise from the previous post, and have quit Farmville, you are probably still faced with distractions you just cannot erase from your life (you can quit smoking, but you can't quit eating).

David Neal recently gave a talk in Groningen in which he asked the audience to choose between two "self-help" books, one titled "Take control of your life!", and the other "Modify your environment to improve your life!" His prediction was that people typically prefer the former over the latter, because they overestimate the extent to which they can control their habits.

When we are faced with a potentially distracting multitasking situation, we have to ask ourselves the same question: are we going to be mentally strong, or are we going to modify our environment to avoid distraction?

Sometimes this choice is obvious. For example, the Dutch railways have special "Silence" compartments, so if I want get work done on the train I prefer them over compartments where everyone is chatting. Why make that choice? Because I know that talking by others will distract me in an unpleasant way, and there is no way I can overcome this by force of will.

But the situation is different when working on a computer, and temptations for distraction are attractive, like email, Facebook, Twitter, Farmville, et al.? Here typical advice focusses on mental discipline: only do your email once a day, focus on your task, etc. And even though this may help some, an alternative is to make sure we cannot be tempted at all. There are several solutions available for this. A mild medicine is a program called Focusbar. You type into focusbar what you are supposed to be doing, and it will periodically pop up to remind you of what it is you are supposed to do. So while you are reading the status of your friends, it will remind you that what you are really supposed to do is work on your thesis. As if you didn't know that. Now, some research suggests that people interact with their computers as if they are people (see Clifford Nass' The man who lied to his laptop), and might be intimidated to follow stern advise by a machine, but it doesn't work for me.

No, my favorite program is called Freedom. Freedom's brilliance is its simplicity. You start it up, and it will ask you for a number of minutes. It will then block your access to the internet for that amount of time. No cheating by killing the application, only rebooting your computer works (and I am not even sure that that really works). To go back to David Neal's self-help choices: while Focusbar appeals to you to take control yourself, Freedom modifies your environment by bluntly blocking you from whatever distraction. Of course you can still cheat if you have a Smartphone or iPad lying around, but they are still more than just a click away, and if you keep them out of sight you might be safe.

Sometimes you do need Internet for your productive work (like writing a blog), and for that purpose there are more sophisticated programs around, like Concentrate. Concentrate lets you specify which sites you are allowed to go to, and which not, and also blocks applications for you that are not part of your task. My former graduate student Jelmer Borst is an enthusiastic user, but I prefer the simplicity of Freedom.

What I find surprising is how efficient it is to change your environment instead of relying on the force of will. There are interesting analogs, apart from the train, for example in controlling bad food habits. Instead of having to be strong a hundred times to stay away from the cookie jar each time the temptation rises, you only have to be strong once in the supermarket if you decide to not buy them.

How to improve your productivity? Dump Farmville!

Is our brain addicted to internet distractions? Some people think human intelligence is going downhill because we can no longer focus on the things that are important too us. For example, Nicholas Carr claims that the internet is permanently rewiring our brains, gradually transforming us into internet junkies who can no longer get anything done.

Now, you may not fully agree with Carr's doomsday scenario, but it is nevertheless undeniable that many people feel their productivity is hurt by unproductive interruptions and distractions. Indeed, studies have shown that people are interrupted quite often (depending on how you count every 20 minutes or so), and that half of these interruptions is self-initiated. The devious thing is that after the interruption is over, people often don't go back to their main task, but switch to other minor interrupting tasks.

We probably all know the drill: you are working on a paper, but you see that your email inbox flag goes up. So, we are tempted away from our paper (we deserve a little break, right?), and check our email (email needs to be checked, right?). But instead of going back to writing, we post a tweet, check Facebook, check the news, until we feel guilty enough to go back to writing. At that point we have lost our mental context, and need to invest time to get back into it.

And before you know it the day is over and all you did was write half a page.

So what are all these devious distracting tasks? They are things that "need" periodic checking. Interruptions and distractions can be functional, and being flexible in attending these items can be productive. Answering emails is definitely productive. Checking the news? Maybe. Twitter and Facebook? Dubious. But there is one kind of task that need periodic checking that is utterly worthless. I'm referring to games that require periodic maintenance.

I have nothing against games, and do in fact like them a lot, but games are for leisure. They are not work. Periodic maintenance games don't respect the border between work and leisure.

So take Farmville, probably the most successful example. In Farmville you have to maintain crops, but it is not a game you can play continuously. You tend your crops, do some weeding and sowing, and then you have to wait, and return to the game later for some harvesting. If you wait too long, your crops will die and your score will diminish. In other words, this game is nestling itself among the other lingering goals in your mind, and will intrude each time your mind is looking for an excuse to interrupt itself from the important things you are doing. But Farmville and its ilk can't even claim the excuse of usefulness, as opposed to email and news. And it gets even worse! Because they are "social" games, you are supposed to bug your friends into participating in the game as well. So if you don't remind yourself to tend your crops, your friends will, so there is even social pressure to do your virtual chores.

To conclude, if there is one way to improve your productivity without any costs at all, quit Farmville! Burn down the virtual house and let the zero-calory crops die! It will clean your mind.

Driver distraction–one more attempt

The prototypical multitasking topic (apart from gender) is driver distraction. This morning the Dutch police and traffic safety organization launched a new campaign to warn drivers against multitasking while driving. Their motto is "Een beetje chauffeur laat zich niet afleiden" (which means something like: "If you are a cool driver you don't let yourself be distracted"). One of the goals is to try to convince people that even though they might think they are better at multitasking than others, they probably aren't.

Although I hope they have some success with the campaign, I am not very optimistic.

Problem 1: Multitasking is not just eyes

Even though using a cell phone while driving is illegal in the Netherlands, calling hands-free isn't. This is also what the campaign focusses on: your eyes have to be on the road. However, research has shown that driving with a hands-free set is as distracting as with a normal phone. This should not surprise us too much: making the call itself (i.e., dialing) is a much shorter task than having a phone conversation. But it shows that even though the driver may look at the road and have his hands on the wheel, he or she can still be distracted due to conflicting demands on working memory ("You want me to buy apple sauce? Ehrr.., but now I forgot what the maximum speed was...") The focus on the idea that is the eyes and hands that are responsible for multitasking trouble is particularly worrisome, because more and more technology tries to alleviate that aspect of multitasking–while ignoring the others. In particular, I have seen several mentions of the new iPhone 4S's Siri feature (you can talk to your phone and it talks back) as the perfect way to use it while driving.

Problem 2: People can multitask, so don't pretend they can't

What is the mantra of people that try to teach us to better our lives? People cannot multitask, they are built to only carry out one task at a time (David Peebles sent me this link in which some talking head is reiterating this as if it were truth). If that were true there wouldn't be a problem! But on the contrary, people can multitask quite well in certain situations, but not in others. My first post on "het nieuwe pinnen" shows an example of how a small modification in situation can change good multitasking into bad multitasking. And that's the trouble with traffic: there are many situations that allow for multitasking, but that can change rapidly into situations in which multitasking suddenly becomes very dangerous. The cognitive demands of driving vary widely in time, making reliable multitasking impossible. But because of the frequent low-demand periods, the temptation to multitask remains (along with the mistaken conviction that there is no harm in it).

I am not sure what the right way is to prevent people from multitasking in the car, but if we focus on the wrong issues we will definitely not crack the problem.

Innovation thwarts multitasking

The way we pay for things has improved tremendously over the last couple of decades. As a student, I still had to go to the bank to retrieve money. To get that money I needed special forms that the bank sent me on a semi-regular basis, but that would sometimes run out. Now we just need a debit card that can be used everywhere and worldwide.

Unfortunately, the latest development has made paying slightly more complicated, because designers have not payed attention to the human capacity and need for multitasking.

Just as a cultural sidenote: in the Netherlands, you are yourself responsible for bagging the groceries in the supermarket. As a consequence, you have two more-or-less parallel tasks at the cashier: you have to take care of the payment while at the same time bagging your groceries. One of the central ideas around multitasking that I will present in this blog more often is that problems in multitasking occur when we need two cognitive resources at the same time.

In the grocery case the contested resources is not mental, but it is your hands: bagging groceries typically requires two hands, while paying typically does as well.

In the "old" system, there was a good solution on how to allocate the "hands" resource:

1. Take the debit card out of your wallet swipe it through the reader, and but it back in your wallet. Now but your wallet back in your pocket.
2. Enter your pin number
3. Now start bagging your groceries. If you keep up with the cashier, you have bagged your last item just after the cashier announces the total.
4. The total will appear on the reader, and all you have to do is press the "yes" key.
5. And that's it!

But now enter the new system. The new system no longer uses the magnetic strip, but a chip on the card. This is all more secure, but it is also technology and not usability. So bring out the trumpets, it is time for "het nieuwe pinnen"!

1. You again bring out your card, and put it in the reader. But, now the label warns you "Don't take out the card until the transaction is finished!". So you leave it, but are now stuck with your wallet in your hands.
2. You would like to bag your groceries now, but you first have to put your wallet away in order to free your hands.
3. Hopefully you can now keep up with the cashier in bagging your groceries.
4. Once this is done, the cashier announces the total.
5. You now have to enter your pin, check the amount and press ok. You now have to wait until your transaction is approved.
6. Only after the approval you can take out your card. But hey, where's my wallet? Hopefully it is in your pocket, and not at the bottom of your grocery bag.

Now, the disadvantage of this additional hassle may be minor compared to payment 20 years back at a time when people still use checks to pay groceries (are you listening US?), but still I wouldn't be surprised if it takes 5-10 seconds extra per customer. And although this may not seem much, it adds up: an additional cashier in a larger supermarket, or longer lines leading to more pointless waiting.

This example is a nice illustration of how multitasking can work well, and how it can go wrong, even though the situation can only be different in a small detail. In the old system the cashier and the customer could carry out their parts in parallel, while in the new system they have to wait for each other. The brain works in a similar way: if multiple tasks are lined up well, it can carry them out efficiently, but if they are not, delays and mistakes are the result.