Manoj Saxena is a man heavily
immersed in technology. For many years he ran IBM’s famed Watson project. Today
he is a successful venture capitalist and seeds many more technology companies
encompassing the next wave of technology and innovation.
So, why then is he advocating
that in the tech companies he now runs, staff have mandatory unplug days? A technologist preaching technology time
outs? Blasphemous!
On the face of it, this may
appear strange. But it is really not. In fact, it appears surprisingly well
thought out. On predetermined holidays/dates his companies go into electronic silence. No emails, no texts,
not even phone calls for work. Just time to relax, rejuvenate and reconnect
with family and friends. Manoj postulates we – all of us – are rapidly
approaching an electronic saturation point. Like others, he believes that the
always-on and connected mantra is no longer the panacea it may have appeared to
be. It is taking a toll. He wants to go even further and extend the technology
moratorium to at least one of the weekend days, if not both.
This sentiment is shared with many
other technologists including none other than Steve Jobs. Steve was apparently a
self-described “low-tech” parent who restricted his own kids’ access to
technology for some of the same reasons. In fact Jobs had such strong
reservations about allowing his kids unfettered and perpetual access to
technology that he confessed that his wife and kids accused him of being a
fascist! The man who may have single-handedly brought touchscreens into our
lives, had serious concerns about the long-term effects of engaging in
touchscreen technology for extended periods of time.
According to Walter Isaacson who spent many hours in the Job’s household
while writing his book, face-to-face family time came before any screen time.
No iPads were permitted at the dining table.
The always connected life-style
takes many tolls – from cost to productivity to creativity. Every economics
student knows that switching involves
cost. Today, when multi-tasking with technology has become a virtual epidemic,
why would we think it has no adverse effect?
Erica Fox, the best-selling author and Harvard professor
recently wrote an excellent piece titled “Is Never Offline, good for business
and life?” where she was reacting to the recent Time Magazine cover “Never
offline”. She rightly points out that those who are never offline spend too
much time reacting and not enough solving problems. They make decisions in
a “frenzied and buzzing state of mind”. They are also becoming less and less
familiar with focused attentive work and face-to-face relationships.
In a landmark report, Gloria
Mack of the University of California at Irvine, found that typically a person
in an office experiences a paltry 11 minutes before an interruption. And it then takes an average of 25 minutes
before that person can return to the original task! What is the quality of
work with such rapid and incessant switching generally driven by technology?
New research from the Carnegie
Mellon University’s Human-Computer Interaction Lab shows that if you try to do
two things at the same time, both things
suffer! They found that the distraction of an interruption turned test
takers in their lab to become on average of 20 percent dumber. It was enough to
turn a B-minus student (80 percent) into a failure (62 percent).
According to Stanford
sociologist, Clifford Nass,who conducted some of the first tests into the effects
of multi-tasking, those who cannot resist doing two things at the same time are
“suckers for irrelevancy”. Apparently,
we are not just suckers for that new text message or email, but it is actually
making us stupid.
All this should concern
organizations of every type. According to the WSJ, distractions cost companies money. One survey in 2011 found that
businesses might be losing as much as $ 10,000 per employee every year due to
distractions and poorly designed technology. Many among us answer every instant
message, email or text at the very moment it arrives. And yet, how many
companies have programs where employees are being counselled on the impact of
multi-tasking and its effect on the company’s bottom line? Or how to manage the
multiple avenues for interruption we all face in any office today?
In a recent book just released
this September, “The Organized Mind”, Daniel Levitin (a professor of psychology
at McGill University) explores many facets of our lives under the stress of
information overload and multi-tasking. According to Prof. Levitin,
multi-tasking puts us into a dopamine-addiction loop which is similar to
cocaine addiction. Each time we do a new small task, our brains reward us with
a tiny shot of dopamine, which is the chemical in our brains responsible for
pleasure. He quotes a famous study in the 1950s where rats were given the
opportunity to press a bar to get a shot of dopamine. Soon they were pressing
the bar to the exclusion of everything including eating, drinking, sleeping and
even sex! They died of starvation and dehydration. Levitin strongly suggests
that we spend time away from our devices otherwise it will become like any
other addiction.
So should we all abandon our
devices? Not exactly.
According to Marshall Van
Alstyne, an associate professor at Boston University and MIT, be very cautious
about technologies like social media and those which interrupt you constantly,
because that interruption dramatically reduces productivity. The solution,
according to him, is to batch time and tasks. So, rather than checking your
email every time the notification appears – turn the notification off, and
check email once every hour or couple of hours. Don’t interrupt your research
paper or memo every time the phone dings and informs you that someone has sent
you a text. Turn the ding off.
Manoj, Steve Jobs (and many other technology luminaries) are
right. They were involved with the creation of the technologies which may have resulted
in our distracted way of life. Many now recommend we need to adjust, and are calling
for technology time-outs and less multi-tasking. They should know. And unlike
many of us, some of them are actually doing something about it.
