Losing focus: Why tech is getting in the way of work
1–10 of 46 posts
Re: Losing focus: Why tech is getting in the way of work
#2I can't keep focus because there is a different article every day on HN about how to keep focus in a new way.
Re: Losing focus: Why tech is getting in the way of work
#3[deleted]
Re: Losing focus: Why tech is getting in the way of work
#4I don't get it. They used a metric of looking at different screens as a lack of focus tool, and yet I've just had a nice 2 hour long session of developing a script, where I kept glancing between the script and the output on 2 monitors to see if I had fixed it. By their metric I was not focused, and yet I was just telling my colleague I had a great 2 hour long focused session
Re: Losing focus: Why tech is getting in the way of work
#5pkorzeniewski - your post is dead. I work from home 90% of the time and I find it really hard not to be distracted by technology (social media). I think that overcrowded offices and technology are two orthogonal problems here.
But the trend still seems to be for technology to add more noise. OS X comes with a super-chatty Notification Center that increasingly brings in noise from your phone, smart watches are distracting by default, and I can't imagine what kind of social notification bullshit the Internet of Things will enable. How can we fight this trend?
Re: Losing focus: Why tech is getting in the way of work
#6pkorzeniewski - your post is dead. I work from home 90% of the time and I find it really hard not to be distracted by technology (social media). I think that overcrowded offices and technology are two orthogonal problems here. But the trend still seems to be for technology to add more noise. OS X comes with a super-chatty Notification Center that increasingly brings in noise from your phone, smart watches are distrac…
[..] I find it really hard not to be distracted by
technology (social media)
[..] How can we fight this trend?
Re: Losing focus: Why tech is getting in the way of work
#7pkorzeniewski - your post is dead. I work from home 90% of the time and I find it really hard not to be distracted by technology (social media). I think that overcrowded offices and technology are two orthogonal problems here. But the trend still seems to be for technology to add more noise. OS X comes with a super-chatty Notification Center that increasingly brings in noise from your phone, smart watches are distrac…
[..] I find it really hard not to be distracted by technology (social media) [..] How can we fight this trend? There is an obvious solution for at least part of the problem, isn't there?
> There is an obvious solution for at least part of the problem, isn't there?
Not without spending a lot of time configuring applications. Now I find Android more difficult to configure than Windows Advanced Server.
For example, in the past Twitter only notified you about tweets for you, then they started to play with the discovery stuff and send you all kind of tweets that may interested you. Sure, I can go to the configuration and disable this stuff but only after realizing their notification behavior changed. Thing about this multiplied by many applications.
Re: Losing focus: Why tech is getting in the way of work
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
[..] I find it really hard not to be distracted by technology (social media) [..] How can we fight this trend? There is an obvious solution for at least part of the problem, isn't there?
> There is an obvious solution for at least part of the problem, isn't there? Not without spending a lot of time configuring applications. Now I find Android more difficult to configure than Windows Advanced Server. For example, in the past Twitter only notified you about tweets for you, then they started to play with the discovery stuff and send you all kind of tweets that may interested you. Sure, I can go to the c…
/etc/hosts is your friend.
Re: Losing focus: Why tech is getting in the way of work
#9For a way to use tech to actually increase your focus: http://focusr.co
Re: Losing focus: Why tech is getting in the way of work
#10I don't get it. They used a metric of looking at different screens as a lack of focus tool, and yet I've just had a nice 2 hour long session of developing a script, where I kept glancing between the script and the output on 2 monitors to see if I had fixed it. By their metric I was not focused, and yet I was just telling my colleague I had a great 2 hour long focused session
They probably meant 'window', i.e. what application had their focus. That's probably also not a very good metric though, given that developers will often flip between editors, terminals and browsers rapidly. It compares with 2004, although it doesn't specify in what area; I'm sure that single-application focus is also highly dependent on the area of work and the software used. Some people can do all their work in one application, others need half a dozen or more.
Also, iä! fhtagn!