Is It A Distraction Or Procrastination?

from the how-do-you-deal-with-it? dept

The New York Times has a very interesting article about computer distractions. There have been articles about this before. Thanks to computers and the internet, it's so easy to be doing something else, whether that's checking email, instant messaging, fiddling with your music collection, or just surfing the web. The Times piece focuses on the idea of getting people into a "flow" state and making sure that interruptions and distraction only occur when people aren't in a flow state. For example, emails only get delivered after you hit "save" on the document you're working on. This seems a little backwards to me. As the article notes, when people are in a state of flow, they barely even notice outside distractions. So, saving things like email notifications until later aren't necessarily going to do anything. The real issue is that these aren't so much distractions, as they are the result of people procrastinating. In other words, it's often not proactive distractions that are the problem, but people's inability to get themselves into a state of flow themselves. In such a state, they go looking for distractions, rather than being interrupted by them. If someone wanted to have software to deal with that, it should simply prevent a user from accessing certain features until they complete certain tasks, or for a certain period of time.

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