Day: July 6, 2003

During an early dinner on July 4th, I took several family snapshots. I threw in this landscape shot just because, and to see how it would turn out. 4 megapixels isn’t enough to replace film, but it’s getting there. Taken near Hyde and Chestnut in San Francisco. WARNING: The full picture is about 1MB, and I didn’t cut it down from its width or 1704 pixels, or its height of 1770, so you’ll have to scroll, probably.

This New York Times story “The Lure of Data: Is It Addictive?” feels like an old story. Technology lets us stay ‘always on’ and all of us, especially business folks, are taking advantage of the opportunity… perhaps without any true productivity benefit. If you’ve read James Gleick’s Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything, written in 1999, you’ve heard this tale before. And I’m sure Gleick is just the most recent teller of this tale… if I were to go pull the book off the shelf, I could re-use one of his historical examples which remind us that these tendencies are not new. Anyway, with all that griping, I’m glad I read the article, if only for this quote:

ACCORDING to research compiled by David E. Meyer, a psychology professor at the University of Michigan, multitaskers actually hinder their productivity by trying to accomplish two things at once. Mr. Meyer has found that people who switch back and forth between two tasks, like exchanging e-mail and writing a report, may spend 50 percent more time on those tasks than if they work on them separately, completing one before starting the other.

I think this is true, at least personally. I find myself fighting the urge to start the next task before I finish the one in progress.

(I’ll update the NYTimes.com URL later with the archive-friendly URL when I see it in NetNewsWire.)