Surely I can’t be the only person who finds this “research” completely silly? Important things are dealt with promptly while unimportant things are not…. OMG UNDERLYING PRINCIPLE OF LIFE ON EARRTH!!!

I just don’t get this at all.

[…] “Ladies Having Gone Wild”? Way to rock the passive voice. […]

I just don’t get this at all.

[Jesus Christ, this plus five emails from people remarking on how dumb and obvious this. Okay fine. Lemme ‘splain…]

One of the perpetual promises of technology has always been that we’ll finally have the tools we need to be more efficient and to deal with larger amounts of “stuff” than in previous times. And time and again that’s shown to be a complete myth; the washing machine didn’t open up hours of extra time each week—it just increased people’s expectations of what could be accomplished and how quickly.

Same with email, which used to always be sold as this great time-saving leveler that would bring untold levels of convenience to our lives. Seriously you remember that? No more drudgery of phone calls, meetings, and pagers. Wow, how swell that will be! 1996 is going to be the best year ever.

So flash forward ten years post-AOL, and now we all have 2000 messages in our inbox and we struggle not to drown; we answer the boss’s crap first because we’re terrrified she’ll see the mask slip and discover how screwed and behind we are thanks to all this wonderful “convenience.” Yay, email.

The point that you (and apparently several other people) find so blinking obvious is really only clear in retrospect, AFAIC. The fact that we’ve enabled—even fought—to bring all these whizbang new implements into our lives just to leave us worse off than we were in the 19th century seem pretty dang notable to me; we have even less grasp of how to change behavior than people had then, except now, who has the time to fix it? Gotta go check my email.

Please. If this is all so bloody obvious, why aren’t more people thrilled with the condition of their inbox right now?

“daugerrotypes of Ladies Having Gone Wild.”

Okay, I had to laugh out loud at that one. Gold.

How to get your roommates to clean

Have a problem with messy roommates? There is a great thread at Ask Metafilter that will help you out. For example, you could try this if the problem’s in the kitchen: Buy your own pots and use them. Anytime someone…

Sure, Merlin — I didn’t mean t be snarky (well, maybe I did) — but this is the kind of thing I was referring to:

Biologists have noticed similar patterns when they plot the actions of birds foraging for food. Birds will make many short flights, but occasionally very long ones – the same pattern found in answering letters and emails. Barabási suggests that animals might use a common mechanism, selected by evolution, to decide among competing tasks.

As far as I can tell from the article in TNS, no one has actually checked to see if birds prioritize tasks using the same mathematical formula. Rather, it’s just suggested that, because birds too have tasks they must prioritize, and appear to prioritize them, we must all be following the same as-yet-undetermined-or-even-detected evolutionary law. This is just total speculation! When TNS writes, “The pattern could reflect some basic biological encoding that shows up in everything from humans at work to birds foraging for food,” that is a pretty big “everything” and a pretty big “could.”

And it’s worth noting, too, that what the finding shows is that there is a similar distribution of priority between email and letter-writing. While Darwin and Einstein were writing one letter a day, I’m writing dozens of emails a day. So there have been gains in efficiency. I don’t have any emails that have been waiting inmy inbox for years, for example. I think you may be right that the psychological impact of work has actually become more severe with the introduction of these technologies—but certainly the total efficiency has increased, right?

That’s a minor point, though. The main thing is that the article is pretty hyperbolic, and, given that hyperbolic articles about evolutionary psychology are actually a pet peeve of mine, I was unable to resist the snark….

[…] [Via Slashdot, 43Folders.] […]

Merlin,

The fact that people and animals tend to do the most important things first is hardly a surprising finding, as others have pointed out.

The fact that technology has not given us infinite capacity—freeing us from the need to prioritize—is also hardly surprising.

Yeah, but who saw it coming? Not the “wonders of the future!” people, who projected a considerably more relaxed society (flashback to World’s Fair/Disneyland displays).

Thus conscience doth durn near make Luddites of us all…

I think this IS interesting. I remember reading an article on the archives of the Premier of my Province, a man who got a lot done and was highly respected. Many of his notes were short one, sentence replies jotted on the letter he had received. These notes where then sent to assistants to compose or forward. I was amazed at how short, sweet and simply the replies were. It was stuff like, “Excellent idea, I want a presentation on this.” or “This will not work under current situation.” And that was IT.

Maybe I’ll get promoted, if I can just become concise….

Gordon