Raiding the inarticulate since 2010

accelerated academy acceleration agency AI Algorithmic Authoritarianism and Digital Repression archer Archive Archiving artificial intelligence automation Becoming Who We Are Between Post-Capitalism and Techno-Fascism big data blogging capitalism ChatGPT claude Cognitive Triage: Practice, Culture and Strategies Communicative Escalation and Cultural Abundance: How Do We Cope? Corporate Culture, Elites and Their Self-Understandings craft creativity critical realism data science Defensive Elites Digital Capitalism and Digital Social Science Digital Distraction, Personal Agency and The Reflexive Imperative Digital Elections, Party Politics and Diplomacy digital elites Digital Inequalities Digital Social Science Digital Sociology digital sociology Digital Universities elites Fragile Movements and Their Politics Cultures generative AI higher education Interested labour Lacan Listening LLMs margaret archer Organising personal morphogenesis Philosophy of Technology platform capitalism platforms populism Post-Democracy, Depoliticisation and Technocracy post-truth psychoanalysis public engagement public sociology publishing Reading realism reflexivity scholarship sexuality Shadow Mobilization, Astroturfing and Manipulation Social Media Social Media for Academics social media for academics social ontology social theory sociology technology The Content Ecosystem The Intensification of Work The Political Economy of Digital Capitalism The Technological History of Digital Capitalism Thinking trump twitter Uncategorized work writing zizek

How often do you interrupt yourself?

From Attention Span by Gloria Mark loc 1637:

In a first study, we logged computer activity of thirty-two people over five days to get a precise measure. We found that our study participants averaged checking their inboxes seventy-four times a day, replicated a year later in another study where we logged the computer activity of forty people for twelve workdays and found that they checked email an average of seventy-seven times a day. One dedicated person checked their email 374 times a day. We could also get a fairly good estimate of how often email checks were due to external or internal interruptions by whether people used email notifications. Most participants—41 percent—checked email without notifications, i.e., they self-interrupted to check it, and 31 percent of our participants primarily checked email from notifications, which would be external interruptions. The remainder—28 percent—did have notifications turned on but reported that they checked email about equally due to external or self-interruptions.

It isn’t quite what Gloria Mark is saying here, but I’m tempted to frame this as bad faith. We impute a capacity to control our work to external factors, whereas in a reality we are self-interrupting albeit in a way that loosely anticipates and responds to those external interruptions. The way in which we craft ourselves in relation to external constraints, above and beyond what is strictly speaking required by them*, makes the ensuing problem much worse than it would otherwise be. What is the problem?

As interrupted tasks pile up, you carry that tension around with you, and it becomes more and more of a drain on your resources. You certainly want to limit the stress by the end of the workday as there are carryover effects of bringing stress from the office into your personal life.[30] Those unfinished tasks churn around in your thoughts, and what you can do to reduce that churning is to externalize your memory of that unfinished task.

Attention Span by Gloria Mark, loc 1751

*See also academic over-publishing while blaming the incentives of research assessment which encourage a smaller volume, as well as sometimes explicitly calling for quality over quantity.

, , , , ,
,