Re-engineering life interruptions

As Web services automate the work performed by millions of workers, where will these folks go next? Not to worry. People are the exception handlers in all automated workflows, and intelligence and judgment won’t be automated anytime soon. What does worry me, though, is how we’ll connect people and services. Managing that scarcest of resources, our attention, is a huge challenge.

At a recent meeting with my son’s teachers and guidance counselor, timely notification of missing homework was the issue. Messages were sent but not received because the channel of communication -- papers sent home in the kid’s backpack -- did not guarantee reliable delivery. I’d rather the teachers’ records were accessible to me on a secure Web site -- with an RSS feed, of course -- but our school district isn’t there yet.

Could I be notified by e-mail if assignments weren’t done? “Yes,” I was told, “if you e-mail us a request for information, we’ll respond.” Couldn’t they just ping me in case of exceptions? “No.”

So I wrote a Python script to send a message to each teacher (“Subject: All OK this week?”) and scheduled it to run every Thursday. Crazy? Yes and no. Clearly my solution isn’t what they had in mind, and I’d like to think that in their shoes I’d initiate as needed. But I’m not responsible for 90 students and I’m as interrupt-driven as anyone else.

In a blog essay, I riffed on Clive Thompson’s “Meet the Life Hackers,” a New York Times Magazine story about how Microsoft researchers are trying to help people cope with interruptions and how alpha geeks rely on “life hacks” to optimize their attention. In an NPR interview, Thompson nailed the essence of our dilemma. It’s true that interruptions can distract us from our work, he said, but it’s also true that interruptions are part of our work. When we speak the language of interruption, our vocabulary leaves much to be desired.

Everyone has different preferences, so it’s vital that people choose which channel to be interrupted on. Phone? Sure. E-mail? Fine. RSS? OK. Instant message? Absolutely. Any of the above, based on your presence indicator? Cool.

But stuffing the same messages down one channel or another doesn’t alter the nature of those messages, or reduce the total effort required to process them. To rewrite that equation, we’ll need to tap our latent visual, auditory, tactile, and maybe even olfactory abilities. Today’s notification systems make poor use of that rich sensorium.

One of the Microsoft researchers’ key findings was that use of multiple large monitors helps information workers avoid context switches, making them more productive. Expanding the field over which our visual pattern recognizer can range is a good idea, but it only scratches the surface of what’s possible. More importantly, we need to enrich those visual patterns. The visual cortex can absorb dense information displays when, as graphics guru Edward Tufte tirelessly points out, those displays are carefully designed.

Of course we can react to nonvisual patterns too. A couple of years ago, in a column entry called “The Network Song,” I wrote about an experimental system that translates server logs into cricket chirps and birdsong. If living in a state of continuous partial attention is the permanent new reality, let’s engineer our interruptions to be subtle, natural, and pleasing to the senses.