Free Hamlet's BlackBerry by William Powers Page B

free-market society is itself an ingenious form of connectedness, one in which the goal is to sell goods, services, and ideas to as many people as possible and reap the rewards. To thrive in the marketplace, businesses and other organizations are constantly seeking competitive advantages, in technology above all. From the start of the digital age, it’s been management gospel that an office can’t be too connected. The more wired an organization and its workers are, to each other and the worldbeyond, the better positioned they are to compete and thrive. In other words, the pursuit of excellence requires the pursuit of connectedness.
    Lately, however, it’s become clear that it’s not so simple. What’s true in our individual lives and families is equally true in the workplace: the tool that giveth also taketh away. Once again, it all comes down to what digital busyness does to the mind. These gadgets are adept at performing various different tasks simultaneously and switching quickly among them. As I wrote this sentence on my laptop, for instance, in addition to the word-processing document I was focused on, there were seven other applications open, plus dozens of internal processes working in the background. When I clicked away briefly from this text just now to check my e-mail, the computer deftly made the switch, and just as deftly switched back. One second it was crisply displaying my words as I typed them, the next it was showing me what was in my inbox, and then (since the e-mail I was waiting for hadn’t arrived) it returned immediately to the words, with no perceptible loss in performance.
    The human mind can also juggle tasks, of course, which explains why you can sit in a café and read a book, taste the coffee you just sipped, and hear the pleasant music playing in the background, all at the same time. However, we can only really pay attention to one thing at a time. If the book is gripping, the music will fade into the background of your consciousness, and you’ll forget to sip the coffee, discovering a half hour later that it’s gone cold. And, unlike computers, when we switch tasks—either by choice or because we’re suddenly interrupted—it takes time for our minds to surface and focus on the interruption, and then still more time to return to the original task and refocus on that .
    Psychologists tell us that when you abandon a mental task to attend to an interruption, your emotional and cognitiveengagement with the main task immediately begins to decay, and the longer and more distracting the interruption, the harder it is to reverse this process. By some estimates, recovering focus can take ten to twenty times the length of the interruption. So a one-minute interruption could require fifteen minutes of recovery time. And that’s only if you go right back to the original task; jam other tasks in between and the recovery time lengthens further.
    Returning to the café, let’s say that while you’re reading that great book, a friend stops by to say hi. Just as you begin chatting, your phone rings and you ask the friend to hold on a second while you answer it. As you’re taking the call, the waitress interrupts and asks if you want a refill. While she’s holding the carafe over your mug awaiting an answer, the café’s fire alarm goes off. In a matter of minutes, you’ve gone from three potential objects of interest (book, music, coffee), with one squarely at the center, to seven potential objects (book, music, coffee, friend, phone, waitress, fire alarm), with none at the center. Satisfying immersion has given way to unsatisfying confusion. Even when things have calmed down again, the spell is broken and you might as well forget about the book.
    What does this have to do with offices and technology? These two café scenarios represent what’s happened to the American workplace in the last several decades, as screens have added