Category Archives: Articles

Gloria Mark, professor in the department of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, says that when people are interrupted, it typically takes 23 minutes and 15 seconds to return to their work, and most people will do two intervening tasks before going back to their original project. This switching leads to a build up of stress, she says, and so little wonder people who have high rates of neuroticism, impulsivity, and are susceptible to stress tend to switch tasks more than others.

Read the full story at Quartz.

The flash drive exposes the great lie of technological progress, which is the idea that things are ever really left behind. It’s not just that an obsolete technology from the year of Saturday Night Fever still lurks unseen in the dank corners of a shiny new MacBook; it’s that it’s something that is relied upon regularly. The technology historian Thomas Hughes calls these types of devices “reverse salients”—those things that interrupt and disturb the forward movement of technology. They reveal the ugly truth that lies behind each slick new presentation from Google, Apple, or Microsoft: Technical systems are cobbled together from left-over pieces, digital Frankenstein’s monsters in which spare parts and leftovers are awkwardly sutured together and pressed into service. It turns out that the emblems of the technological future are much more awkwardly bound to the past than it’s comfortable to admit.

Read the full story at The Atlantic.

An expression of concern about the algorithms that shape what Americans read before they vote.
Asked what proposition Americans ought to be debating, UC Irvine Professor Gloria Mark mused on the way technology affects the health of deliberative democracy.

Read the full story at The Atlantic.

“We’re in this environment in the workplace where it’s a structure that’s set up by the technology that makes it really difficult for people to monotask,” said Gloria Mark, professor of informatics at the University of California–Irvine who studies distraction in the workplace. “You can, of course, turn off technology and focus, but then individuals who do that are penalized because they’re not available for interacting with colleagues, they’re not available if their manager needs to contact them, so they’re stuck between a rock and a hard place.”

Read the full story at Slate.

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society, formally recognized Chancellor’s Professor of Computer Science Michael Franz and Chancellor’s Professor of Informatics Paul Dourish as 2015 ACM Fellows at a special reception and banquet in San Francisco over the weekend of June 11. Franz earned the ACM Fellow rank for his contributions to just-in-time compilation and optimization to compiler techniques for computer security. Dourish was honored as an ACM Fellow for his contributions in social computing and human-computer interaction. For more details about Franz, Dourish and their accomplishment, visit the original fellowship announcement.
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Banning or putting restrictions on email, the research suggests, can dramatically increase individual productivity and reduce stress. Researchers from the University of California, Irvine and the U.S. Army cut off email usage for thirteen civilian office workers and measured the effects on productivity and stress. The researchers first took participants through a three-day baseline period in which they were interviewed and observed both visually and with computer monitoring software (to see how which programs they used, how often, and how much their work was interrupted). They even measured the participants’ heart rates (as a proxy for stress levels). Then they pulled the plug on email, installing a filter on the participants’ email program—which would file away all incoming messages for later reading and remove all notifications.

Read the full story at Harvard Business Review.

Cal Newport’s recent book champions the virtues of dedicated time for uninterrupted thinking. But can the perpetually overtasked modern worker make “deep work” a reality?

Read the full story at Knowledge@Wharton.