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The Over-Engaged Knowledge Worker

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Re: The Over-Engaged Knowledge Worker

#51

Post by TuringTest »

steve1977 wrote: post #40
colllectorof wrote: post #35

>This is the reality of knowledge work that none of these conceptualizations address: it’s hard (in very specific ways), some of it we don’t want to do, and the work we don’t want to do piles up and becomes dominant simply because it remains undone. Let me rephrase this for you. A lot of so-called "knowledge work" is just tedious, mind-numbing bullshit. Not only that, but you have to plow through it while fighting in…

Browsers aren't real tools. They are designed to make for smooth information consumption Well yeah. They're browsers, that's what they are. "To browse: an act of casual looking or reading."

Then we need to create the category of builders as the base tool for web work, and relegate browsers to a secondary role.

Re: The Over-Engaged Knowledge Worker

#52

Post by TuringTest »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #50
steve1977 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Browsers aren't real tools. They are designed to make for smooth information consumption Well yeah. They're browsers, that's what they are. "To browse: an act of casual looking or reading."

They're not really browsers - they're web page viewers. The views are organised by the needs of the source technology - "pages" generated by a web server - not by the needs of the user. A lot of useful features - cross-referencing, comparisons, task-based content searches, dynamic content update notifications - are either impossible or poorly implemented on the server side. There's never been an active browser that t…

To be fair, every time someone tries to advance in the way of an integrated information tool, it gets a lot of backlash at tech sites from people saying that "a browser should be a browser and just show me the pages, nothing else".

Not that everybody feels that way, but those people get vocal.

Re: The Over-Engaged Knowledge Worker

#53

Post by chriswarbo »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #50
steve1977 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Browsers aren't real tools. They are designed to make for smooth information consumption Well yeah. They're browsers, that's what they are. "To browse: an act of casual looking or reading."

They're not really browsers - they're web page viewers. The views are organised by the needs of the source technology - "pages" generated by a web server - not by the needs of the user. A lot of useful features - cross-referencing, comparisons, task-based content searches, dynamic content update notifications - are either impossible or poorly implemented on the server side. There's never been an active browser that t…

Early on, the Web was imagined to have a plethora of "agents" (bots) which act on behalf of their users, extracting information from pages, following links, aggregating the relevant data, etc.

This worked really well for search engines, but certain economic incentives crept in which pretty much killed off this idea. In particular:

- Many sites gained revenue by advertising

- Advertising only really works if a human is viewing it (it's possible to integrate advertising into the data, with product placement, "native advertising", etc. but that's more expensive than slapping some Javascript in some iframes)

- Exposing data publically in easily parsed formats will mostly stop humans from viewing the page. Hence so much data is now in silos.

- Exposing services, like search, to bots can get expensive. Hence the rise of API keys.

There are other reasons too, like scraping being hard and fragile due to styling having too much influence over markup (CSS helped a little; a more radical attempt was sending raw XML and creating the page via XSLT). The rise of Javascript-only sites, and the difficulty of implementing all of the many JS APIs that a site might try to use, has also hindered alternative user agents.

The end result is the Web being dominated by a handful of user agents: a few search crawlers and a few user-facing browsers :(

Re: The Over-Engaged Knowledge Worker

#54

Post by C1sc0cat »

colllectorof wrote: post #35

>This is the reality of knowledge work that none of these conceptualizations address: it’s hard (in very specific ways), some of it we don’t want to do, and the work we don’t want to do piles up and becomes dominant simply because it remains undone. Let me rephrase this for you. A lot of so-called "knowledge work" is just tedious, mind-numbing bullshit. Not only that, but you have to plow through it while fighting in…

"Browsers aren't real tools." oh yes they are you probably haven't worked pre browser based systems.

eg just before I switched to the web in 1995 I worked on an oracle forms system.

To deploy a pilot system to 5 seats the Other developer and I went to Liverpool and spent 2 day setting up those 5 people - this required feeding 15 or 16 floppy disks in the right order to install the oracle forms product.

As I said to my boss after the project was done imagine the savings if your rolling this out to 500 people and you could use the existing browser.

Re: The Over-Engaged Knowledge Worker

#55

Post by ehnto »

txdejk wrote: post #38
ehnto wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That id an interesting take on flow meaning you are overcomplicating things. That explains what was happening to me pretty well I think. I was too bored to reach a state of flow but if it were more challenging I would have been re-inventing something. I have switched domain since I burnt out which is perhaps why I can now find new challenges and be able to reach flow.

As someone who works in healthcare and has to juggle quite a bit of technical info on quite a few different active individual patients and who has also read other poster's responses above, I'm kinda taken aback that there is such a lack of higher level organization going on. Is it just something that isn't taught or that is but people just don't want or like to do?

I can only speak for software, but as an industry it doesn't have any clear framework of process at an individuals level. It's all very much left to the individual on how they organise themselves, and a lot of people (including me) never got the memo that it's something you should think about or else there can be consequences (like burn out, inefficiency). Just generally speaking the software industry is a melting pot of loose ideals when it comes to actually working. There are no regulations, no unions, no standard tooling, hell sometimes we make our own tools, set our own hours, move our own goalposts.

I think that's why software companies are often approached with quite a bit of caution by other businesses. It's not like hiring an engineering firm, where you can be pretty certain you'll get an industry standardized result.

Re: The Over-Engaged Knowledge Worker

#56

Post by TeMPOraL »

C1sc0cat wrote: post #54
colllectorof wrote: post #35

>This is the reality of knowledge work that none of these conceptualizations address: it’s hard (in very specific ways), some of it we don’t want to do, and the work we don’t want to do piles up and becomes dominant simply because it remains undone. Let me rephrase this for you. A lot of so-called "knowledge work" is just tedious, mind-numbing bullshit. Not only that, but you have to plow through it while fighting in…

"Browsers aren't real tools." oh yes they are you probably haven't worked pre browser based systems. eg just before I switched to the web in 1995 I worked on an oracle forms system. To deploy a pilot system to 5 seats the Other developer and I went to Liverpool and spent 2 day setting up those 5 people - this required feeding 15 or 16 floppy disks in the right order to install the oracle forms product. As I said to m…

That has nothing to do with knowledge work; the core solution in your example isn't even the browser, or the WWW - it's the Internet in general, which allows a company to avoid the logistics of shipping software on an actual (air)ship. You could achieve the same with an FTP client. Using a browser as a runtime for your application has its own benefits and drawbacks, but that's another topic.

GP's point is that browsers ain't real tools for working with knowledge. I wholeheartedly agree. Today's browsers are complicated application runtimes that allow vendors to serve content however they wish. Vendors of Internet services have their own goals, of which helping the user is one of the least important. That's why UX on the web is one of horrible inefficiency and near-zero interoperability. A proper tool for knowledge worker need to support end-user customization and end-user control over content as first-class concern.

Re: The Over-Engaged Knowledge Worker

#57

Post by TeMPOraL »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #50
steve1977 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Browsers aren't real tools. They are designed to make for smooth information consumption Well yeah. They're browsers, that's what they are. "To browse: an act of casual looking or reading."

They're not really browsers - they're web page viewers. The views are organised by the needs of the source technology - "pages" generated by a web server - not by the needs of the user. A lot of useful features - cross-referencing, comparisons, task-based content searches, dynamic content update notifications - are either impossible or poorly implemented on the server side. There's never been an active browser that t…

> A lot of useful features - cross-referencing, comparisons, task-based content searches, dynamic content update notifications - are either impossible or poorly implemented on the server side.

Dynamic content update notification is a solved problem - how many sites ask you daily to enable notifications? It's an issue of will, not way. As for others - those are really client-side concerns, they should be implemented in the user agent (i.e. browser).

> There's never been an active browser that tries to integrate information instead of being a dumb page viewer with tabs and some form filling options.

Agreed there never have been (to my knowledge) an active browser that's fully suitable for knowledge work. That said, the few features there were supporting, to paraphrase Pólya, the intelligent reader, have over time been diminished or removed from the browsers. For instance, both RSS feeds and user-styling used to be first-class features of browsers; both are now either invisible or gone.

Re: The Over-Engaged Knowledge Worker

#58

Post by TeMPOraL »

noir_lord wrote: post #41
rfrey wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me introduce you to the song of the Emacs People.

Could be, but the features he lists are also all available in Intellij (I know because I use all of them and Intellij in the same way as he describes).

Must be. Emacs is way too large for OP to "use every last feature" of it.

Re: The Over-Engaged Knowledge Worker

#59

Post by TeMPOraL »

philipodonnell wrote: post #15
harryf wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So to me it made some sense. Putting it in my own terms, he argues knowledge workers are _by default_ overloaded and they use distractions as a necessary form of relief from the pressure - the distractions aren't the problem, they're a symptom. Right now we're too focused on tools and strategies to make us "more efficient", block distractions and promote collaboration. Instead we should focus on reducing the mental d…

Can chrome or Firefox do an "exit but save all my tabs"? I find myself force closing Chrome because I can use the recover tabs when I come back.

I just do `killall firefox` in the shell. On the next start, you'll get a session restore page.

I learned to treat browsers like this because of Chrome, actually, and its resident processes that still eat my RAM even after I close all browser windows.

Re: The Over-Engaged Knowledge Worker

#60

Post by signaturefish »

pcblues wrote: post #23
ehnto wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Minimizing context switches has been my angle after I burnt out. I automate things that take me out of context and use every last feature of my IDE to make sure I don't have to alt tab all over the place. Terminal, database, docs and code is all in my IDE. It feels more like sitting down at a specialized workstation than a general computer and it keeps me focussed and in flow. Not only is that a less stressful state…

I minimise the impact of unexpected context switches by keeping a running log what I am doing or should do next in a document for each project. It might seem like a waste of time but I can safely mentally let the whole current context go when I am interrupted for an urgent job and I don't have to keep a stack of contexts in my head at once. It is especially useful in getting back up to speed in a context that had to…

Engineering logbooks are a great idea (and electronic/mechanical engineers have been doing it for a while - because it works!).

I use a spiralbound notebook and a fountain pen for mine, because I find the change of tools helps me to think about the project I'm logging on a meta level. I tried doing it in a textfile and it didn't work so well for me, but people are different.

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