Cory Doctorow has a column at Internet Evolution about interruptive media, multitasking, and focus:

The mature information worker is someone who can manage his queues effectively, prioritizing and re-prioritizing as new items crop up, doing the fast-context-switching necessary to respond to an email while waiting for a file to download or a backup to complete. It's a little like spinning plates, and when you get the rhythm of it, it can be glorious. There's a zone you slip into, a zone where everything gets done, one thing after another clicking into place.

But once you add an interruptive medium like IM, unscheduled calls, or pop-up notifiers of mail, flow turns into chop. The buzz, blip, and snap of a thousand alerts turn plate-spinning into hell, as random firecrackers detonate over and over again, on every side of you, always there in your peripheral vision, blowing your capacity to manage your own queue as they rudely insert themselves into your attention.

I'm not making a bad pun when I say I'm of two minds about this. On one hand, I often need constant, small disruptions in my work processes to (ironically) keep me on task: very loud music, for example, seems to help. The tiny muted bell of incoming email echoes around at the edge of my awareness. The article list in NetNewsWire scrolling in the background as the RSS feeds update provide a background rhythm to my work. The human mind is extraordinarily resilient, and what seems like an interruption to some people is just a lullaby to others. And what seemed like a jarring noise five years ago now sounds like a far-off, distant ching to me now, like wind chimes on the porch. (Talk to anyone who has spent their life living near railroad tracks—the trains don't wake them in the night.

Sure, cognitive research says that interruptions slow people down and confuse them when they're trying to add numbers. I spend very little time trying to add columns numbers.

On the other hand, if Cory Doctorow says those interruptions are a bad thing, at least for him, who am I to argue? But I think this is till all too new for us to get our heads around.

[via Boing Boing]