As someone making the effort to cut down on checking my e-mail, I like Dan Russell’s advice. I find Microsoft’s response to the problem of distraction both sad and amusing: isn’t the solution not to use more software but to get away from software? In other words, to step away from the machine?

Before using any time-saving technology, ask yourself if you could perform the task…more efficiently using an old-fashioned method such as walking across the office and talking face to face.

Gah! I’m all for old-fashioned methods and tools, but I do wish people would stop interrupting. Unless it’s truly an emergency, please respect the other person’s time and send an email.

There’s one card from Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies that stands out when thinking of this: “Use filters”.

I’m starting to find that concentrating my interrupt load on a device that’s physically small enough to only be able to show one interrupt at a time has done a lot for my ability to work in a state of flow and not in a state of thrash more of the time. The other thing that’s helping is not having additions to the TODO list show up in an infinte unsorted queue but go in each deliberately and with some negotation before being added.

Some thinking from a few years ago is here:

http://vielmetti.typepad.com/vacuum/2004/04/managing_interr.html

My current device that interrupts me is a Blackberry, so i get some fraction of my email buzzing me as it comes in, but not random IM and IRC windows unless I am deliberately in that mode.

Good post Merlin. I have often said that technology has not made us less overwhelmed, instead it has made us more efficient at being more overwhelmed.

It is hard to get away from the notifications from our software. We are settled into the middle of a shouting crowd. Each shouter wants our undivided attention. Each shouter is unaware of the other shouters. If I silence one I have only reduced the noise a little. I need to be able to silence them all. A universal switch for notifications. No amount of intelligent software will understand the changing needs and rhythms of my day. So funnel all the notifications — desktop software, remote software, telephones, pagers — through my current notification system preference. (My desktop now. My cell phone when on the road.) And then let me turn it on, down, and off.

Yeah, exactly, Andrew. A terrific example of this need is MS Entourage, which is functionally very strong at tracking todos and events, but it relies on a janky external app for showing me alarms. It has almost no configurability, zero filtering, and relies on a bunch of non-standard-behaving dropdown menus for me to interact with it. It kind of sours how otherwise strong the main app is at its job if it falls short at the interaction point where I need it to be smarter.

I’m thinking this notional standard should have things like multiple categories and tags and operate basically “headless,” just sending streams of XML data to whatever “notification hub” you’ve configured. THAT’s where all the filtering and customization happens. Where you could say, for example,

“For the next THREE HOURS, send LO-PRIORITY ONSCREEN notifications HOURLY for [EMAILS | IMs] from MYBOSS and MYTEAM; MID-PRIORITY POPUPS for [ANY] from MYGIRLFRIEND; HI-PRIORITY POPUPS for any EVENT tagged EMERGENCY; else send to EVENTINBOX without notification”

An app that does this pretty well now is Adium, which, as apps go, has an extraordinary level of customization, honoring my “Groups” and letting me make granular decisions about the kind of notifications I want. I want that abstracted to all kinds of apps and notifications, and I want it controllable from a central, configurable location.

Is that so much to ask? ;-)

The Envoy system detailed below is what first got me thinking about breaking part the request for information, notices of its availability, and its delivery.

The envoy framework: an open architecture for agents http://www.dgp.toronto.edu/~gf/papers/Envoy%20System.pdf

ok, so some questions on this.

What should the notifications look like? I’m thinking an icon somewhere that changes color or dances or something to let you know an event has made it through your filters.

Also, until such a time as apps speak the hub’s language (if that time comes) I think proxies could be used to force them to work. IE your mail client goes through a proxy that will send events to the hub and then let things trickle through to your mail client. Besides email and various IM clients, what else would be useful to get this started?

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