Hamlet's BlackBerry

by William Powers

  For years, businesses didn’t see this problem or pretended it wasn’t there. It finally got their attention when it started showing up in the bottom line. One study by Basex, a leading research firm that focuses on technology issues in the workplace, found that workers were spending more than a quarter of their day managing distractions. As a result, the firm concluded, businesses were seeing “lowered productivity and throttled innovation.” In 2009, Basex estimated that information overload was responsible for economic losses of $900 billion a year.

  As this and similarly shocking data emerged, the technology industry, typically viewed as one of the great engines of prosperity, has found itself playing the uncustomary role of economic villain. Having created the tools that got us into this pickle—and, not incidentally, having watched its own ultra-connected workforces struggle with it daily—it realized the onus was on it to do something. A few years ago, concerned executives from some of the largest tech companies, including Microsoft, Google, Xerox, and Intel, got together with academics, consultants, and other interested parties and formed a nonprofit called the Information Overload Research Group. Its mission was to raise awareness and come up with solutions to “the world’s greatest challenge to productivity.” The New York Times reported the news of the group’s founding on its front page, under the headline “Lost in E-Mail, Tech Firms Face Self-Made Beast.”

  SO MUCH OF our existence is wrapped up in our efforts to earn money and stay afloat that it sometimes seems as though life is just about business. But the challenge we’re talking about here isn’t ultimately economic or organizational; it’s a human challenge that affects everything modern humans do. The most compelling indicator of its seriousness isn’t a dollar figure or a productivity statistic but a signal coming loud and clear from the place where all human industry begins: inside our heads. There’s a feeling, an impulse that surfaces regularly now in all kinds of situations, personal and professional. It’s the desire for a reprieve, a break from the digital crowd.

  It’s in the weary comments of friends, neighbors, and colleagues about overflowing inboxes and children who can’t be pried from their screens. It’s in the immense popularity of yoga and other meditation practices, which now serve as useful, albeit temporary, respites from digital busyness. It’s in the Slow Life movement—slow food, slow parenting, slow travel—with its valuable message that everything has simply gotten too fast.

  It’s in the quiet car on the train and the sign at the cash register that says, “We will be happy to serve you when you have completed your cell phone conversation.”

  It’s in mobile phone throwing, an international “sport” invented by some puckish Finns as “a symbolical mental liberation from the restraining yoke of being constantly within reach.” The annual world championships draw whimsical media attention, but the stories tend to leave out a telling fact: Finland ranks among the most connected countries on Earth. It seems that the more connected we are, the heavier the yoke.

  Not many of us can afford to throw away our tools, so the next best thing we can do is run away from them. Thus the burgeoning interest in “unplugged vacations” and travel to extremely remote places. “You won’t find a television, telephone or WiFi outlet in any of the 22 cottages at Petit St. Vincent, an idyllic resort on its own private island in the Grenadines,” reports a business-travel magazine. “What you will discover are stretches of empty, pristine white beaches sprinkled with hammocks and shady trees and a plethora of quiet nooks to cuddle with a good book.” As it happens, people can still use their smart phones on this island—in a wireless world nothing is as private as it seems—but the owner calls that “a terrible mistake.” On a different island, a resort has a creative solution to this problem, an “Isolation Vacation” package that offers “a seven-night getaway” for $999, with the requirement that on checking in you turn over your mobile devices to the staff, to be locked up for the week.

  With connectedness approaching ubiquity, physical remoteness no longer ensures isolation. This is an important shift we haven’t quite wrapped our minds around. I see it when friends who live in bustling metropolitan areas tell us they envy our “disconnected” life in a far-flung place. One of them, a New Yorker who visits the Cape every summer, complained to me about the endless hours her children spend messaging and gaming on their screens back in the city. “You’re lucky,” she said, “you don’t have this problem on Cape Cod.” Oh no? It doesn’t matter if home is a noisy urban walk-up or a quaint cottage on a secluded bluff. If you have a screen and can pick up a signal, your mind is in the same placeless place. Still, the romance of the away-from-it-all life persists, as if we’re trying to wish it back into being.

  Wishing isn’t enough. Imagine you woke up one morning and found that one of your most treasured possessions—say, a painting that had always hung on a certain wall and made you happy every time you looked at it—had been stolen. You’d want it back, of course. Would you just dream about recovering the painting, in the hope that dreaming alone would magically restore it to the wall? Or would you take action? We gab endlessly about the relative merits of our various digital devices, which ones are faster and easier to use, and barely utter a peep about what they’ve spirited away and how to regain it. It’s hard to talk about this missing possession, because it’s intangible and amorphous. It’s an absence that we miss, of demands and distractions, rather than a presence. How do you get back something you can’t even describe?

  We’re all in the same boat, and what we need is what I found by accident when I fell out of mine. The problem is, we also want and need our devices. A few days after my What Larks! mishap, I bought a new mobile phone. Of course I did. I wasn’t interested in being cut off from the world, and, practically speaking, I couldn’t be. Besides, my phone is also a source of happiness.

  Spectacular benefits and enormous costs, in the very same tools. If we could just grow the former and shrink the latter, the potential of life in this connected world be boundless. Screens would be instruments of freedom, growth, and the best kind of togetherness, as they should be. The question is how.

  Chapter Four

  SOLUTIONS THAT AREN’T

  The Trouble with Not Really Meaning It

  Shortly after the technology executives founded the nonprofit Information Overload Research Group, with the explicit goal of fighting excessive digital connectedness, Microsoft launched a new ad campaign. It featured Bill Gates, Microsoft’s chairman, in a series of humorous skits with the comedian Jerry Seinfeld, touting the company’s technologies.

  “Bill, you’ve connected over a billion people,” Seinfeld said in one of the sketches. “I can’t help wondering what’s next. A frog with an e-mail? A goldfish with a Web site? Amoeba with a blog?”

  Gates suggested he wasn’t too far off. The screen then went blank except for a two-word slogan: PERPETUALLY CONNECTED. Not moderately or rather connected, not connected within reason or as needed, but perpetually connected, as in ceaselessly, without pause. At the same time that the tech industry was garnering major media attention and plaudits for finally recognizing that spending all of one’s time connecting via screens is a terrible idea, Microsoft turned around and offered that same idea as its mission and, by implication, ours.

  This sort of thing happens all the time with industries whose products can be addictive or otherwise hazardous. The alcoholic beverage industry stands foursquare against alcoholism and says so in public service campaigns, while it simultaneously spends billions of dollars encouraging us to drink. With booze, at least there’s a genuine distinction between pushing alcohol, which the industry does, and pushing alcoholism, which it doesn’t. In promoting a lifestyle of never-ending connectedness, the technology business (and Microsoft is hardly alone in this) is encouraging the unhealthy extreme, the digital equivalent of alcoholism. Perpetually connected equals perpetually zoned out, and nobody knows it better than those companies. In studies of workplace overload, the most shocking statistics and
anecdotes—employees so distracted, they can barely think—come from the technology sector.

  The same digital doublethink prevails in the media, a business that’s supposed to tell it like it is and clear up confusion on important public issues. For years now, news outlets have been dutifully covering what’s been aptly called the Too-Much-Information Age. Though rarely given prominent play, these pieces are a minor staple in even the most tech-positive outlets. Wired.com, for instance, warned in a headline that “Digital Overload Is Frying Our Brains.”

  At the same time, the news media push nonstop connectedness as eagerly as any Silicon Valley titan, and for the same reason: business demands it. They need an audience for their product, and the bigger the audience, the better. If 2 million people are visiting your Web site once a day for ten minutes each, that’s very nice. If those same 2 million are glued to it around the clock, clicking constantly on your latest content and ads, breaking away only for meals and bathroom runs, that’s excellent! You’re in the money! Hence the same outlets reporting on the perils of overload also promote it, sometimes simultaneously.

  “Warning,” began a piece by the Wall Street Journal’s “Information Age” columnist L. Gordon Crovitz. “On average, knowledge workers change activities every three minutes, usually because they’re distracted by email or a phone call. It then takes almost half an hour to get back to the task once attention is lost…. Consider the rest of this article an 800-word test of your ability to maintain attention.” It was a smart piece, articulating well the case for a new approach while praising the tech leaders for their nonprofit effort. “It’s encouraging that the most information-intense companies are trying to overcome their own overload.” As I read this in the paper’s digital edition and tried to meet the 800-word challenge, my eye was drawn to a colorful box on the right side of the screen, where a “house ad” (from the paper itself) was flashing the message “STAY CONNECTED 24/7 VIA EMAIL NEWSLETTERS & ALERTS…FREE Registration. Sign up Today.” That is, Click here for more overload. Columnists have no control over ad copy, but for the reader, the dissonance is hard to miss, an echo of one’s own internal conflict.

  On the morning public radio show The Takeaway, the host John Hockenberry asked listeners to share how they escape the distractions of their gadgets. “Tell us your stories of focus,” he said, offering a Web address for posting of same. So if, like me, you happened to be focused quite nicely on this broadcast—nothing dovetails better with making breakfast than a good radio show—you were supposed to find the nearest screen and thereby dilute that focus, in order to share with the world…how you focus! For a moment I actually considered it. There was a screen steps away, and I was well aware that while tapping out my thoughts on focus I could dart off and peek at my inbox. You know, just to check. “I think we’re all in danger of being on a short cell phone leash,” said one listener who called in a comment, presumably using his cell phone.

  So it goes, the dog endlessly chasing its tail. And it’s easy to see why. What’s a technology giant supposed to do, run ads urging the public to ease off on its technology habits? Of course not. No news organization in its right mind is going to say, “Come to our Web site—but not too often, okay?” And it’s a very good thing that a radio show is having a discussion about focus. We should talk more about this and share ideas, and what better way to share them than digitally? The screen is by far the best place to get a message out these days, and there’s nothing wrong with that. If your message is that people are going overboard with screens, then that’s where you need to be, because it’s where the most afflicted are.

  We’re all speaking out of both sides of our mouths on this issue. When the word “CrackBerry” was in vogue a few years ago, those who uttered it most often and most bitterly were the addicts themselves. The question is why one of the two sides—that we’re all overdoing it with screens—is not having any appreciable effect.

  It’s not as if nobody’s trying. As awareness of the quandary has grown, so has the search for solutions. Here again, the business world has been leading the way because, as one IBM researcher put it, “There’s a competitive advantage of figuring out how to address this problem.” So far the ideas have come in two basic varieties. The first is old-fashioned time management, the notion that one can impose order on the digital chaos by setting aside certain times of day, or certain days of the week, for particular tasks. For example, there are people who limit their e-mail checks to fixed hours of the day, say at 9 A.M., 1 P.M., and 5 P.M. Some businesses have applied the time management approach broadly through companywide screen hiatuses, such as no-e-mail Fridays. The aim is not just to discourage excessive screen time but also to encourage face-to-face interaction, which is often more efficient and productive than long, multi-recipient e-mail chains. If everyone is disconnected at the same time, they’re more likely to come out of their cubicles and talk.

  Despite numerous experiments along these lines, time management solutions haven’t taken off. In many cases, workers simply cheat to get around the restrictions. The reason it’s hard to make such methods work is that they’re essentially diets, but rather than counting calories they count screen hours. And like all diets, they seem far more feasible in the abstract than in practice. In a world where everyone is gorging on connectedness, it takes serious willpower to say, “None for me today, thanks.” Besides, screens are at the heart of most people’s professional and personal lives, and taking them away, even for half a day, means falling behind on all fronts.

  The second approach looks to technology itself as the answer. Here the solutions range from simple software switches, which allow anyone to shut off her inbox or signal others that she’s currently unavailable, to elaborate filters and “digital assistants” programmed to assess the relative importance of incoming messages and keep trivia at bay. These, too, have been around for years, in some cases available for free online. Yet how many of us are using them?

  The technological approach has a couple of weaknesses. One is that it typically focuses on the symptoms—too many messages and other tasks on the screen—without touching their sources. It’s nice to see only the messages that your e-mail robot has rated important, but that doesn’t mean the lesser ones cease to exist or won’t have to be dealt with later. Nor will it stop the world from sending you more. And though filters reduce the apparent supply of tasks, they do nothing about the demand you generate yourself. Let’s say you install an e-mail filter that successfully hides your low-priority incoming traffic, gaining you an average of thirty minutes a day. What’s to stop you from spending that extra time creating new outgoing messages of your own or just going off to idly check headlines or your stock portfolio or that baseball blog you’re addicted to? Connectedness begins at home, and, let’s face it, we’re our own worst enemies.

  Another weakness of the technological route is that it’s based on the often erroneous assumption that laborsaving devices actually save labor. If the digital era has taught us anything, it’s that a new technology frequently creates more work than it saves. Once you’ve installed a digital assistant to monitor your e-mail, who’s going to monitor the assistant—adjust the settings, clear out the rejects file, update the software regularly, and perform all the other time-intensive housekeeping chores that screen life requires? Assuming you don’t have a staff of assistants at your beck and call, I think you know who those duties will fall to.

  Some of the technocures for overload seem designed to make it worse. There’s software that can sense a worker’s keyboard and mouse activity and use this to gauge when he or she can be interrupted. The assumption is that if you’re not tapping or clicking, you aren’t doing anything important. Just sitting there thinking doesn’t count as valuable work, though it’s in that state of aimless reverie that the best ideas tend to come, the prized “eureka” moments. Another widely touted idea is to increase the rate at which we process our digital information, cramming more content into each minute. For instance,
there’s a gadget that displays e-mail messages one word at a time “for accelerated reading speeds that can reach up to 950 words a minute.” Perhaps this is possible, but does anyone seriously believe it aids thinking or reflection?

  As if to acknowledge that more technology is not the answer, some have suggested we instead off-load our digital burdens onto other human beings. A popular self-help book recommended the outsourcing of e-mail and other drudge work to paid assistants in the developing world, as the author himself did by hiring a few such people in India. “It’s the fourth morning of my new, farmed-out life,” Timothy Ferriss writes, “and when I flip on my computer, my e-mail inbox is already filled with updates from my overseas aides.” Again, note the bias toward busyness, the crowded inbox as the measure of success. It also reads like some back-to-the-future version of the British Raj. Your downloads are ready, Sahib. So much for technology as liberation.

  All of these efforts are aiming for the same worthy goal—a saner work life—and all have the same basic flaw. They’re seeking outward answers to an inward problem. Our busyness doesn’t just take place in our minds, it’s our minds that orchestrate it and allow it to happen. When anyone mentions the mind today, most of us immediately think of the brain, though they’re not the same thing. When I talk to friends about the challenges of connected living, nine times out ten they bring up neuroscience, a field that’s been exploding in recent years, thanks to imaging technologies that allow researchers to observe the brain in action. Today there’s no more impressive lead-in than “According to a new neuroscience study…” Perhaps, the hopeful thinking goes, the answer will be found there.