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Sunday
Feb102008

Could the Interruption Economy Sack Prosperity?

Sensory Overload by dav

Conventional wisdom says that technology - and nowadays the Internet - will always continue to advance and bring with it productivity gains and prosperity. That's certainly been the case for years. However, historically there are pauses. After the benefits of the Industrial Revolution were fully realized it took awhile for the next big era to begin. I wonder if we're about to enter a similar lull now that the Information Age is arguably almost 30 years old.

Mark Cuban argues that the Internet is now becoming a hinderance to our productivity. Idris Moote makes an even stronger case. He notes that productivity growth has gradually slowed since 2004. Moote cites statistics showing that interruptions from e-mail, cell phones, instant messaging, and blogs take up nearly 30% of each day; on an annualized basis, this represents a loss of 28 billion hours for the entire US workforce.

The United States - and other pockets of the developed world - are hooked on two drugs: information and busyness. As I've written many times, our rush to keep up with inputs can't scale and this may cause a sizable number of people to eventually cut back on info-crack, perhaps drastically.

The runaway success of my good friend Tim Ferriss' book, the Four Hour Workweek, is a direct manifestation of a desire that millions secretly have. If enough people get the willpower to say "enough" then spending on gadgets and time spent online could decline. In a worst case scenario, companies would retrench R&D spending and slow innovation. That's just one possibility of many, of course - and the most extreme (and unlikely).

The X factor here is actually a Y factor - Generation Y. They grew up in an age of information saturation. Gen Y'ers crave what psychiatrist Edward Hallowell calls screen sucking. The Internet is in their veins. They know no other way.

I am hopeful that as every successive generation emerges that never knew a world without the Net, the possibility for such a doomsday scenario decreases. That's not to say there won't be pain however. An informal digital divide has emerged between geeks and those who are blissfully and decidedly low tech. However, it's clear that we need new tools for managing interruptions - and they may not be technological, but social. Our prosperity may depend on it.

Reader Comments (14)

Didn't the same thing happen with television? The noble notion that television could educate, enrich, and transform was replaced by a great time-waster. Instead of transporting the remote participant to the opera or a symphony, the technology was rapidly overwhelmed by entertainment, because the business model required captured attention.

How is this any different? The more sources of information you plug into, the more they have to compete with each other for your attention. And the winners tend to be the cupcakes of communication, instead of the fruits and veggies.
February 10, 2008 | Unregistered CommenterIke
Nice comparison by Ike. For that reason I stopped watching TV altogether a couple of years ago - and I have not missed it one bit. It's all about choices and priorities as determined by personal return on attention and time.

To me Twitter makes sense, but not Facebook; LinkedIn is useful, other tools far less. The blog is my digital home page because it gives me the opportunity to give back in content while learning and growing. I don't log on when I am traveling, I read instead. And I have been caught during the occasional stare at the sky, a landscape and outside the window of my office.
February 10, 2008 | Unregistered CommenterValeria Maltoni
Interesting post. Some comments from someone who is fairly young. I am 21, still in college working on a degree in Computer Science, so that's where I am coming from. I find myself personally desiring to do more and more and stay connected all the time. At the same time it most certainly is not with just one thing or one certain subject area. I find that if I get tired of one thing, I move onto the next and then keep moving. I find that the information rarely becomes a sort of burden. If anything I find it enormously powerful that I can gain access to more information faster than any previous generation. It enables a great many possibilities that I would argue are only just being realized. So information overload a problem for GenY, I don't think so. We are adapting filters that allow a much more nuanced processing of information, than I have observed in those even a few years older than me and definitely by those double or more my age. That means both skimming, skipping and a host of others way to channel and control what information we process and don't process.
February 10, 2008 | Unregistered Commenterjtyost2
Web-based services as true utilities are just coming to market. For instance, I know of some professionals (marketers and otherwise) that are really using LinkedIn in powerful ways. But it took both a critical mass of users and enhanced features from LinkedIn to accomplish that.

Perhaps we're all still searching for the ultimate productivity tool that fosters what Frans Johansson calls "Intersections" in his book, The Medici Effect.

@JYYOST2: Thanks for the perspective. The younger people I know don't complain of information overload, where those my age and older are overwhelmed by IM, email, RSS, etc. Most people your age will most likely be working in jobs that don't necessarily exist now anyway, so your generation will define what is productive activity and what is not for yourselves.



February 11, 2008 | Unregistered CommenterTodd C
i think the problem w/ the productivity analysis from mark cuban is in how we measure productivity. you listed a lot of activities (blogging through im'ing) that were 100% impossible 15 or 20 years ago.even if blogging or email takes a lot of time from each day, the amount of information being consumed is massive. that increased rate of information access needs to be adequately defined within whatever formula is used to calculate productivity.it's not enough to say, "wow! look at this. people are spending 30% of their days online," as it doesn't address what people are doing on the internet. sure there's some time being wasted looking at cat photos w/ silly captions or reading up on sports teams (or whatever floats a person's boat) but that's definitely information that wasn't being transfered before, or if it were, at what rate? certainly at a snail's pace compared to now.that's a productivity increase of such a sustainable level that not adequately contextualizing the situation would easily lead someone to believe that people are "wasting time". that's certainly not the case from my perspective.
February 11, 2008 | Unregistered Commentermessels
A lot of this has to do with our attention span. I believe Seth Godin mentioned this in one of his books; that a few decades ago the best selling books were over 600 pages, now it's not uncommon for the best selling book to be under 200 pages.

I also believe that the definition of productivity is rather subjective and will vary depending on who you ask. Productivity and connectivity can be 2 very different things, but then again for most executives they are one and the same.
February 11, 2008 | Unregistered CommenterJacob Morgan
A lot of this has to do with our attention span. I believe Seth Godin mentioned this in one of his books; that a few decades ago the best selling books were over 600 pages, now it's not uncommon for the best selling book to be under 200 pages.

I also believe that the definition of productivity is rather subjective and will vary depending on who you ask. Productivity and connectivity can be 2 very different things, but then again for most executives they are one and the same.
February 11, 2008 | Unregistered CommenterJacob Morgan
We called it infoglut in the 1980s. No big deal. Nothing new except more options giving one infoglut.
February 11, 2008 | Unregistered CommenterTaran Rampersad
I think that productivity is decreasing only because of the unrealistic expectations, and focus on money over and above everything else. In cases where people are very passionate about their work, and enjoying it, they are able to tune out everything and be very, very productive.
February 12, 2008 | Unregistered CommenterSam Rose
Working is just like going to the gym. Go when you are tired and it takes you twice as long to do the same work. Go when you are fresh and you feel guilty about leaving after 30 minutes.

We need permissions, folks, to be effective not busy. Anyone for the beach?
February 13, 2008 | Unregistered CommenterJo
I definitely think that we are subject to more interruptions than we used to be.

I don't think that new technology is the problem, more the fact that people haven't yet learned how to use it effectively. For example, I only check my email at work once during the day because otherwise I know someone will be either a) sending a funny forward or b) asking a question that really isn't important. People need to learn the boundary between using technology for work and for pleasure and keep within.



February 13, 2008 | Unregistered CommenterRobert
@JYYOST2: I am also a digital native. I grew up with the Web; I started middle school with AIM and college with Facebook. Now I'm getting ready to graduate college in the middle of another huge boom in the digital economy. I can't imagine not working and socializing with these technologies; it's a deeply ingrained habit. Productivity would suffer, at least in the beginning, as I worked to adjust to a linear focus and style of work.

On a seperate note: I'm really interested in seeing what happens when more of our personal space on the Web is monetized and integrated into our work. Our social tools are now used as enterprise tools.
February 13, 2008 | Unregistered CommenterAmanda Mooney
I am of the manual/electric typewriter generation but I am gladly trying to upgrade my skills to be functional with the 'Net world. I am beginning to read blogs because I want to set up a virtual assistant site and the blogs allow me to see who is talking about what.I have not made any major investments yet but I see the value of using some software packages that will lead me to discover the keywords needed to achieve sufficient ranking to get traffic for my site. One I have seen mentioned is http://www.RaSof.com which is a product of James Brausch. I will probably investigate this venue once I have done a litle more with my website.I was a journalism major as an undergrad and then a combination education/library science major so I have expected interruption and sensory overload. I find it easier to control when the overload occurs by getting the headline information on the 'Net and following up by the television and back to the 'Net for more details. I ahve almost abandoned the newspaper for information because they have become the home of advertising and not the source of news.

February 14, 2008 | Unregistered Commenternuzlady
Im worried also about the economy screwing with internet revenue!thanks for the informative post

February 15, 2008 | Unregistered CommentersdfBaby

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