Being everlastingly in touch is the unwritten job description for today’s knowledge workers. It comes at the expense of personal lives and, increasingly, the actual tasks we perform. Today’s workers inhabit an information economy in which the scarcest resource is their own attention.
Clearly, the nature of work has changed, as the West has tipped from manufacturing economies to information and service economies. Tasks are less compartmentalized, more collaborative, and geometrically more dispersed across business units and time zones. The boundary between the workplace and personal time, once as precise as the thunk of a time-clock is increasingly fluid.
The advent of the silicon chip has made possible an avalanche of electronic devices that are ever more capable of accessing and storing information. When these smart gadgets are connected to networks, the information overload and its effects multiply exponentially. While the Internet enables frictionless commerce among organizations, systems that never forget impose unique pressures on their users. In a digital world, information has no half-life. It doesn’t decay; it just spreads out. As cc lists expand across functional disciplines and time zones, users feel compelled to weigh in or risk being thought derelict in their duty. On a company-wide scale, everybody’s two-cents can encumber decision-making like barnacles on a ship.
American corporations invest an average of $6,000 per employee in information technology, four times more than twenty years ago. The tools are empowering, but the flip-side of empowerment is that workers are increasingly on their own to decide how to invest their time. When the Center for Work/Life Policy surveyed knowledge workers in 2006, 72 percent said that technology helped them do their jobs well; but more than half said it actually lengthened their workday. In addition, nearly two thirds said that work encroached on family life.
Linda Stone, who has worked for both Apple and Microsoft, has seen how people engaged with technology on a wide variety of platforms and networks, and what she saw was almost always the same—workers overwhelmed by so much information that their ability to attend for more than a short time was compromised. Stone coined the term "continuous partial attention" to describe how knowledge workers scan, select and focus. An anthropologist from Mars, watching us skip from task to task would conclude that Earth’s office workers have the attention span of fruit flies.
Most of us didn’t enter the workforce with Attention Deficit Disorder, but there’s evidence that rapid switching among tasks produces physical changes in the brain that have a similar effect. The areas of the brain that manage rapid switching and store “temporary” knowledge are not the areas where deliberative thinking gets done. Russel Poldrack’s neuroimaging lab at UCLA has studied how people learn in multitasking situations compared to single-task environments. While multi-taskers perform as well as single-taskers, they appear to be less able to generalize from what they learn, Poldrack concluded. "Even if distraction does not decrease the overall level of learning, it can result in the acquisition of knowledge that can be applied less flexibly in new situations."
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