Softpanorama (slightly skeptical) Open Source Software Educational Society

May the source be with you, but remember the KISS principle ;-)

Information Overload

In Greek mythology, Sisyphus, an evil king,
was condemned to Hades to forever roll a big rock to the top of a mountain,
and then the rock always rolled back down again.
Similar version of Hell is suffered every day by people
 managed by micromanagers and control freaks.
 

There can be several possible reasons if infornation overload:

• Too much information
• Can't understand information
• Don't know if the information exists
• Don't know where to find information
• Can't acccess infornation
• Don't know if the information is accurate

It can occure in large variety of situations:

1. Sipping information from a fire hose. this situation is typical for colledge students, see Mental overload
2. Self inflicted overload, suffering from Obsessive-compulsive disorder: a broad category of "voluntary workaholics" belongs here.  Computer gamers are typical victims of this type of chronic overload.  This is a kind of addition to computers.
3. Red Tape induced or bureaucratic overload.  Often is connected with the situation that workload is normal but to accomplish anything requires tremendous additional and counterproductive efforts. this is a situation typical for large corporations, especially when working for a clueless Control Freaks: micromanager who makes accomplishing anything extremely difficult and drown you in useless paperwork supposly needed to him/her to make a decision that often should be made on the spot.
4. Working in the environment where one person has just too many responsibilities and just cannot cope with then (typical situation in startups', where often the whole IT department is two or three people).
5. Prolonged exposure to stress (Working for a corporate psychopath  is the most  typical example of work situation of this type)
6. Drowning in an ocean of mostly information ( spam and associated  email overload is one example of this trend)

Prolonged exposure to information overload produces so called information fatigue syndrome.  Symptoms include paralysis of analytical capacity, increased anxiety, greater self-doubt, and a tendency to blame others.  Long exposure produces symptoms similar to post-traumatic stress syndrome and in milder form is intrinsically connected with demoralization and burnout.  Here the most helpful page is probably Softpanorama Humor Archive. Unique Collection of Open Source Related Humor. Humor is one of the most affecting methods of fighting stress and  overload. It helps a person to remain positive in difficult situations more effectively that most drugs.

When people are faced with more information than they can process, they become unable to make decisions or take action. There are two important aspects of this problem: 

• Overwhelming complexity of the situation and/or the fact that useful signal is lost in noise. Typical examples include intelligence gathering, pilots in complex meteorological conditions and during "blind" landing, network troubleshooting. We can also add to this category troubleshooting of complex programming and/or networking problem when complexity of the stuff is over human capacity to comprehend and people spend days trying to figure out what is wrong and why.  Network administrators and security analysts know this type of situations pretty well.
   

• Information overload with "junk" information when civilization produces more information than necessary for normal functioning, with most information of low quality. This is kind of new type of pollution, information smog. Information smog replaced information scarcity as an important personal and social problem.

  • Printing press smog. What started out as a liberating stream during the Renaissance has turned into a deluge of chaos. In the USA, for example, there are ten thousand of newspapers and magazines. There are also more than 100,000 new book titles published every year (and it's probably more than a million world-wide) and just for the record, over 60 billion pieces of advertising junk mail come into our mail boxes every year. Everything from telegraphy and photography in the 19th century to the silicon chip in the twentieth has amplified the instream of information, until matters have reached such proportions today that for the average person, information no longer has any relation to the solution of problems. In mild forms printing press smog is usually pretty benign.  You just need to eradiate the view that 'Knowledge is Power' and start  regularly throwing out Computer magazines that were never opened ;-). 

  • Internet smog: Situation deteriorated due to Internet. Typical Google search is an example of junk dominance. It also vividly demonstrates that most information is of low quality, repetitive or outright deceptive (financial information belongs to the latter category). Internet smog is larger and more dangerous problem then printing press smog as it masks useful information making it essentially unavailable. Some forms of Internet smog such as email overload and its ultimate manifestation  -- email spam -- can now be effectively controlled by technical means.

Often information overload is typical for high-tech startups. "Technology has changed, but human nature hasn't. Whether it's the Gold Rush of 1849 or the Web Rush of l999, people are people. More often than not, they're miserable, nasty, selfish creatures, driven by vanity and greed, doing whatever they can to get ahead, even if it means stepping on the person next to them, crushing the weak, and destroying themselves in the process." Actually this is not true.  The IT industry is a unique environment; we are truly given a more choice as to where our priorities lie than in many other jobs. But there is no free lunch. You want a cool job? Don't expect to work for a huge company and get paid the big bucks. You want to make good money? Don't expect to be able to leave the office in the middle of the day just to sit in the park and drink coffee. You want to make great money? Don't expect to work 40 or even 50 hours a week...

Actually startups aren't about the paradise, nor are they viable for those who crave security. They are about risk, not just financial but also emotional and intellectual. Some think that the rewards for success are worth it, some not... It's true that some startups hire, than harass and inflict burnout on programmers and sys-admins. Life in the fast lane can be brutal - long hours, almost no employer-employee loyalty, greed and moral cowardice, back-stabbing, pressure, etc. If you don't want to do what your boss want, a startup can probably find immigrant that will do it for less money. That is the Silicon Valley Way (TM).

Many visitors to this page are probably system administrators. And it's sad to say but sysadmins are often the janitors of e-business. To clean up the messes from the ugly packages superfast growth and unrealistic schedules they often work long, late hours. It's a thankless job (although not the only one and not the most miserable one...) Anyway the reality is that sysadmins/programmers in startups and small companies that are struggling to survive. Sometimes are also put under substantial stress... I'm surprised most of them aren't more neurotic from sleep deprivation. 

At the same time many sysadmins in established companies working with "Gold" coverage from Sun or HP can surf the WEB for 80% of the day... And if you can rarely showed up before 11 a.m., sometimes it is just a survival skill to stay past midnight once in a while... In large companies most sysadmin roles aren't always firefighting, and not so much stress, but they tends to wear on a capable person pretty quickly. Sometimes it is really look like cleaning. You clean it today, but in a month everything return to the same state.  Sometimes it make sense to play an idiot in large company in best traditions of Peter Principle. Officially recognized low-performers often can spend 90% of their time addressing only 10% of problems that high-performer needs to address. The most valued employees in large companies are often on the verge of burn-out because they are too overloaded and have way too many pressures, conflicts and demands combined with too few rewards, acknowledgments and successes.

For IS top guns it might make sense to stop for a moment to dig infodirt and ask themselves a simple question "Does working with the fancy hardware and software (let's assume for a moment that Unix can be fancy first five years or so ;-) worth 60 hours a week or even 40 hours of cleaning infodirt?". Independent of your answer thinking about this may help to adjust your priorities :-).

Pseudo-Attention Deficit Disorder:  Some programmers are perversely wired. It is not uncommon for them to be sitting in a meeting and using a hand-held device to exchange instant messages surreptitiously — with someone in the same meeting. You have Pseudo-attention deficit disorder if:

• I find my mind wandering from tasks that are uninteresting or difficult
• I say things without thinking and later regret having said them.
• I make quick decisions without thinking enough about their possible bad results
• I have a quick temper, a short fuse
• I have trouble planning in what order to do a series of tasks or activities
• In group activities it is hard for me to wait my turn.
• I usually work on more than one project at a time, and fail to finish many of them.

Dr. Nikolai Bezroukov

Old News ;-)

[Jul 1, 2008] Rough Type Nicholas Carr's Blog

Make information free, and we'll become gluttons of information, as Rob Horning notes in an interesting post today:

As behavioral economists (most vociferously, Dan Ariely) have pointed out, we find the promise of free things hard to resist (even when a little thinking reveals that the free-ness is illusory). So when with very little effort we can accumulate massive amounts of “free” stuff from various places on the internet, we can easily end up with 46 days (and counting) worth of unplayed music on a hard drive. We end up with a permanent 1,000+ unread posts in our RSS reader, and a lingering, unshakable feeling that we’ll never catch up, never be truly informed, never feel comfortable with what we’ve managed to take in, which is always in the process of being undermined by the free information feeds we’ve set up for ourselves. We end up haunted by the potential of the free stuff we accumulate, and our enjoyment of any of it becomes severely impinged. The leisure and unparalleled bounty of a virtually unlimited access to culture ends up being an endless source of further stress, as we feel compelled to take it all in. Nothing sinks in as we try to rush through it all, and our rushing does nothing to keep us from falling further behind—often when I attempt to tackle the unread posts in my RSS reader, I end up finding new feeds to add, and so on, and I end up further behind than when I started.

Information may be free, but, as Horning explains, it exacts a price in the time required to collect, organize, and consume it. As we binge on the Net, the time available for other intellectual activities - like, say, thinking - shrinks. Eventually, we get bloated, mentally, and a kind of intellectual nausea sets in. But we can't stop because - hey - it's free.

[Jun 23, 2008] Multitasking Considered Detrimental

Posted by kdawson on Monday June 23, @02:20AM
from the but-we-knew-this dept. djvaselaar sends along an article from The New Atlantis that summarizes recent research indicating that multitasking may be detrimental to work and learning.. It begins, "In one of the many letters he wrote to his son in the 1740s, Lord Chesterfield offered the following advice: 'There is time enough for everything in the course of the day, if you do but one thing at once, but there is not time enough in the year, if you will do two things at a time.' To Chesterfield, singular focus was not merely a practical way to structure one's time; it was a mark of intelligence... E-mails pouring in, cell phones ringing, televisions blaring, podcasts streaming--all this may become background noise, like the 'din of a foundry or factory' that [William] James observed workers could scarcely avoid at first, but which eventually became just another part of their daily routine. For the younger generation of multitaskers, the great electronic din is an expected part of everyday life. And given what neuroscience and anecdotal evidence have shown us, this state of constant intentional self-distraction could well be of profound detriment to individual and cultural well-being."

The New Atlantis » The Myth of Multitasking

In one of the many letters he wrote to his son in the 1740s, Lord Chesterfield offered the following advice: “There is time enough for everything in the course of the day, if you do but one thing at once, but there is not time enough in the year, if you will do two things at a time.” To Chesterfield, singular focus was not merely a practical way to structure one’s time; it was a mark of intelligence. “This steady and undissipated attention to one object, is a sure mark of a superior genius; as hurry, bustle, and agitation, are the never-failing symptoms of a weak and frivolous mind.”

In modern times, hurry, bustle, and agitation have become a regular way of life for many people—so much so that we have embraced a word to describe our efforts to respond to the many pressing demands on our time: multitasking. Used for decades to describe the parallel processing abilities of computers, multitasking is now shorthand for the human attempt to do simultaneously as many things as possible, as quickly as possible, preferably marshalling the power of as many technologies as possible.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, one sensed a kind of exuberance about the possibilities of multitasking. Advertisements for new electronic gadgets—particularly the first generation of handheld digital devices—celebrated the notion of using technology to accomplish several things at once. The word multitasking began appearing in the “skills” sections of résumés, as office workers restyled themselves as high-tech, high-performing team players. “We have always multitasked—inability to walk and chew gum is a time-honored cause for derision—but never so intensely or self-consciously as now,” James Gleick wrote in his 1999 book Faster. “We are multitasking connoisseurs—experts in crowding, pressing, packing, and overlapping distinct activities in our all-too-finite moments.” An article in the New York Times Magazine in 2001 asked, “Who can remember life before multitasking? These days we all do it.” The article offered advice on “How to Multitask” with suggestions about giving your brain’s “multitasking hot spot” an appropriate workout.

But more recently, challenges to the ethos of multitasking have begun to emerge. Numerous studies have shown the sometimes-fatal danger of using cell phones and other electronic devices while driving, for example, and several states have now made that particular form of multitasking illegal. In the business world, where concerns about time-management are perennial, warnings about workplace distractions spawned by a multitasking culture are on the rise. In 2005, the BBC reported on a research study, funded by Hewlett-Packard and conducted by the Institute of Psychiatry at the University of London, that found, “Workers distracted by e-mail and phone calls suffer a fall in IQ more than twice that found in marijuana smokers.” The psychologist who led the study called this new “infomania” a serious threat to workplace productivity. One of the Harvard Business Review’s “Breakthrough Ideas” for 2007 was Linda Stone’s notion of “continuous partial attention,” which might be understood as a subspecies of multitasking: using mobile computing power and the Internet, we are “constantly scanning for opportunities and staying on top of contacts, events, and activities in an effort to miss nothing.”

Dr. Edward Hallowell, a Massachusetts-based psychiatrist who specializes in the treatment of attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder and has written a book with the self-explanatory title CrazyBusy, has been offering therapies to combat extreme multitasking for years; in his book he calls multitasking a “mythical activity in which people believe they can perform two or more tasks simultaneously.” In a 2005 article, he described a new condition, “Attention Deficit Trait,” which he claims is rampant in the business world. ADT is “purely a response to the hyperkinetic environment in which we live,” writes Hallowell, and its hallmark symptoms mimic those of ADD. “Never in history has the human brain been asked to track so many data points,” Hallowell argues, and this challenge “can be controlled only by creatively engineering one’s environment and one’s emotional and physical health.” Limiting multitasking is essential. Best-selling business advice author Timothy Ferriss also extols the virtues of “single-tasking” in his book, The 4-Hour Workweek.

Multitasking might also be taking a toll on the economy. One study by researchers at the University of California at Irvine monitored interruptions among office workers; they found that workers took an average of twenty-five minutes to recover from interruptions such as phone calls or answering e-mail and return to their original task. Discussing multitasking with the New York Times in 2007, Jonathan B. Spira, an analyst at the business research firm Basex, estimated that extreme multitasking—information overload—costs the U.S. economy $650 billion a year in lost productivity.

Changing Our Brains

To better understand the multitasking phenomenon, neurologists and psychologists have studied the workings of the brain. In 1999, Jordan Grafman, chief of cognitive neuroscience at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (part of the National Institutes of Health), used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans to determine that when people engage in “task-switching”—that is, multitasking behavior—the flow of blood increases to a region of the frontal cortex called Brodmann area 10. (The flow of blood to particular regions of the brain is taken as a proxy indication of activity in those regions.) “This is presumably the last part of the brain to evolve, the most mysterious and exciting part,” Grafman told the New York Times in 2001—adding, with a touch of hyperbole, “It’s what makes us most human.”

It is also what makes multitasking a poor long-term strategy for learning. Other studies, such as those performed by psychologist René Marois of Vanderbilt University, have used fMRI to demonstrate the brain’s response to handling multiple tasks. Marois found evidence of a “response selection bottleneck” that occurs when the brain is forced to respond to several stimuli at once. As a result, task-switching leads to time lost as the brain determines which task to perform. Psychologist David Meyer at the University of Michigan believes that rather than a bottleneck in the brain, a process of “adaptive executive control” takes place, which “schedules task processes appropriately to obey instructions about their relative priorities and serial order,” as he described to the New Scientist. Unlike many other researchers who study multitasking, Meyer is optimistic that, with training, the brain can learn to task-switch more effectively, and there is some evidence that certain simple tasks are amenable to such practice. But his research has also found that multitasking contributes to the release of stress hormones and adrenaline, which can cause long-term health problems if not controlled, and contributes to the loss of short-term memory.

In one recent study, Russell Poldrack, a psychology professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, found that “multitasking adversely affects how you learn. Even if you learn while multitasking, that learning is less flexible and more specialized, so you cannot retrieve the information as easily.” His research demonstrates that people use different areas of the brain for learning and storing new information when they are distracted: brain scans of people who are distracted or multitasking show activity in the striatum, a region of the brain involved in learning new skills; brain scans of people who are not distracted show activity in the hippocampus, a region involved in storing and recalling information. Discussing his research on National Public Radio recently, Poldrack warned, “We have to be aware that there is a cost to the way that our society is changing, that humans are not built to work this way. We’re really built to focus. And when we sort of force ourselves to multitask, we’re driving ourselves to perhaps be less efficient in the long run even though it sometimes feels like we’re being more efficient.”

If, as Poldrack concluded, “multitasking changes the way people learn,” what might this mean for today’s children and teens, raised with an excess of new entertainment and educational technology, and avidly multitasking at a young age? Poldrack calls this the “million-dollar question.” Media multitasking—that is, the simultaneous use of several different media, such as television, the Internet, video games, text messages, telephones, and e-mail—is clearly on the rise, as a 2006 report from the Kaiser Family Foundation showed: in 1999, only 16 percent of the time people spent using any of those media was spent on multiple media at once; by 2005, 26 percent of media time was spent multitasking. “I multitask every single second I am online,” confessed one study participant. “At this very moment I am watching TV, checking my e-mail every two minutes, reading a newsgroup about who shot JFK, burning some music to a CD, and writing this message.”

The Kaiser report noted several factors that increase the likelihood of media multitasking, including “having a computer and being able to see a television from it.” Also, “sensation-seeking” personality types are more likely to multitask, as are those living in “a highly TV-oriented household.” The picture that emerges of these pubescent multitasking mavens is of a generation of great technical facility and intelligence but of extreme impatience, unsatisfied with slowness and uncomfortable with silence: “I get bored if it’s not all going at once, because everything has gaps—waiting for a website to come up, commercials on TV, etc.” one participant said. The report concludes on a very peculiar note, perhaps intended to be optimistic: “In this media-heavy world, it is likely that brains that are more adept at media multitasking will be passed along and these changes will be naturally selected,” the report states. “After all, information is power, and if one can process more information all at once, perhaps one can be more powerful.” This is techno-social Darwinism, nature red in pixel and claw.

Other experts aren’t so sure. As neurologist Jordan Grafman told Time magazine: “Kids that are instant messaging while doing homework, playing games online and watching TV, I predict, aren’t going to do well in the long run.” “I think this generation of kids is guinea pigs,” educational psychologist Jane Healy told the San Francisco Chronicle; she worries that they might become adults who engage in “very quick but very shallow thinking.” Or, as the novelist Walter Kirn suggests in a deft essay in The Atlantic, we might be headed for an “Attention-Deficit Recession.”

Paying Attention

When we talk about multitasking, we are really talking about attention: the art of paying attention, the ability to shift our attention, and, more broadly, to exercise judgment about what objects are worthy of our attention. People who have achieved great things often credit for their success a finely honed skill for paying attention. When asked about his particular genius, Isaac Newton responded that if he had made any discoveries, it was “owing more to patient attention than to any other talent.”

William James, the great psychologist, wrote at length about the varieties of human attention. In The Principles of Psychology (1890), he outlined the differences among “sensorial attention,” “intellectual attention,” “passive attention,” and the like, and noted the “gray chaotic indiscriminateness” of the minds of people who were incapable of paying attention. James compared our stream of thought to a river, and his observations presaged the cognitive “bottlenecks” described later by neurologists: “On the whole easy simple flowing predominates in it, the drift of things is with the pull of gravity, and effortless attention is the rule,” he wrote. “But at intervals an obstruction, a set-back, a log-jam occurs, stops the current, creates an eddy, and makes things temporarily move the other way.”

To James, steady attention was thus the default condition of a mature mind, an ordinary state undone only by perturbation. To readers a century later, that placid portrayal may seem alien—as though depicting a bygone world. Instead, today’s multitasking adult may find something more familiar in James’s description of the youthful mind: an “extreme mobility of the attention” that “makes the child seem to belong less to himself than to every object which happens to catch his notice.” For some people, James noted, this challenge is never overcome; such people only get their work done “in the interstices of their mind-wandering.” Like Chesterfield, James believed that the transition from youthful distraction to mature attention was in large part the result of personal mastery and discipline—and so was illustrative of character. “The faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again,” he wrote, “is the very root of judgment, character, and will.”

Today, our collective will to pay attention seems fairly weak. We require advice books to teach us how to avoid distraction. In the not-too-distant future we may even employ new devices to help us overcome the unintended attention deficits created by today’s gadgets. As one New York Times article recently suggested, “Further research could help create clever technology, like sensors or smart software that workers could instruct with their preferences and priorities to serve as a high tech ‘time nanny’ to ease the modern multitasker’s plight.” Perhaps we will all accept as a matter of course a computer governor—like the devices placed on engines so that people can’t drive cars beyond a certain speed. Our technological governors might prompt us with reminders to set mental limits when we try to do too much, too quickly, all at once.

Then again, perhaps we will simply adjust and come to accept what James called “acquired inattention.” E-mails pouring in, cell phones ringing, televisions blaring, podcasts streaming—all this may become background noise, like the “din of a foundry or factory” that James observed workers could scarcely avoid at first, but which eventually became just another part of their daily routine. For the younger generation of multitaskers, the great electronic din is an expected part of everyday life. And given what neuroscience and anecdotal evidence have shown us, this state of constant intentional self-distraction could well be of profound detriment to individual and cultural well-being. When people do their work only in the “interstices of their mind-wandering,” with crumbs of attention rationed out among many competing tasks, their culture may gain in information, but it will surely weaken in wisdom.

[Feb 24, 2008] The Mythology of Information Overload Library Trends Find Articles at BNET.com by Tonyia J. Tidline

1/1/99 | Library Trends,

This project combines ideas from mythology, folklore, and library and information science in an effort to make sense of an aspect of modern culture that is frequently perceived as troublesome. Discussions of information overload, "data glut," or "information anxiety" are abundant in popular culture but do little to shed light on the origin of this problem. Library and information science work sidesteps the need to verify the existence of information overload, seeking instead to mitigate its effects. The discipline has produced a vast literature that addresses user perceptions, information needs, and information-seeking behavior. Information management, information retrieval, and attendant notions such as relevance have also received much attention. Within both popular culture and library and information science research, information overload is usually described or defined by means of anecdote or by associated symptoms.

However constituted, popular and scholarly attention confirms information overload as a recognized and resonant cultural concept that persists even without solid corroboration. Mythology and folkloristics are used here as analytic tools to suggest that information overload can be viewed as a myth of modern culture. Here myth does not mean something that is not true but an overarching prescriptive belief.

[ Mar 29, 2007] Disadvantages of hard work.

Motivation.

If you have arrived at this page, you may well be asking "why?". In fact, "Why does someone want to write about the disadvantages of hard work, when we are all told incessantly how beneficial it is?"

I conducted an experiment. I entered the terms

"hard work" disadvantages

into http://www.google.com/ (try it for yourself) and found over 21,000 hits.

I then rephrased my question and entered

"disadvantages of hard work"

into Google and got precisely zero hits. No-one on the entire web, it would seem, has written this phrase. Why not? Clearly it is "culturally verboten".

I was motivated to ask this question of the search engine, as, after many years of teaching in the University sector, I have met a significant number of people who I consider have been significantly damaged as individuals by subscribing to the "hard work is necessary" hypothesis.

So let us put the record straight here, and spell out some of the advantages of working just sufficiently to satisfy the various criteria of emotional and spiritual need, the demands of the job, the necessity of keeping body supplied with food clothing and shelter, and the social requirements of interacting with others.

Case histories

Among the people I have observed who subscribe to the "hard work is good" hypothesis are several University academics whose ability to think clearly, and administer effectively, are adversely affected by their permanent state of tiredness. Often, these folk feel the need to intervene when it is inappropriate. People like this generally are unhappy with the status quo, and feel that any change or intervention is bound to be for the better.

Among the students I have met, there are significant numbers whose ability to learn and retain information, let alone process it effectively, have been compromised by years of being forced to acquire unnecessary skills and learn unnecessary facts; I maintain this has actually physically damaged their brains, and that an enlightened court of law would award them damages against their educational institutions. Often, this kind of mental overload seems to be a prerequisite for admission to the course being taken.

At Berkeley (Uni Calif) in the 1960s I noticed that the ability of overworked students to express themselves clearly in spoken English was severely impaired. This was confirmed in the early 1980s when a telephone conversation with a Physics grad student in a Californian University had to be abandoned as the person in question could not communicate fluently. It is also noticeable that overworked students cannot sequence or recall simple facts like names, addresses, and telephone numbers with accuracy. Neither can they spell accurately or proof read what they have written. They also try to "rote learn" ineffectually, as they cannot repeat accurately what they have just seen, read, or heard.

Among the medics I have met, there are a significant number, likewise, who "do what they do, regardless" - thus if you go to a physician you get dosed up with drugs; to a surgeon, you get cut open; in fact, each specialist tries to fit your ailment into his own field of competence. This activity is unrelated to the needs of the case.

Among the politicians I have known, the greatest damage to society is caused by those people who regard themselves as the greatest "movers and shakers". Moreover, there is a class of commentator that regards the activity of "moving and shaking" to be intrinsically beneficial, without regard to the end effects.

Choice in the marketplace

Much of the excessive pressure to work harder, to produce more for less, and to drive staff harder is justified by the mantra "choice for the consumer". It is a psychological observation that given excessive choice, the majority of people have extreme difficulty in exercising it and arriving at a rational purchasing decision. Supermarkets should note this. It is far easier to choose from a limited range of goods than from acres of produce spread out among miles of shelving.

The same observation applies to the motivation of students on modular degree courses. Excessive choice leads to a shallow educational experience. It is also somewhat demotivating for the student. I am often asked to delimit my course materials so that the student knows what is not to be covered in the exam tests.

Feedback regulation

There is a report at www.discover.com that the brain (specifically, the left pre-frontal cortex) undergoes structural changes on long exposure (many years) to stress such as overwork. This makes the brain's owner more disposed to see the negative side of events, rather than the positive. One can see a certain amount of self-regulation here, for positive disposition in a person predisposes him/her to work harder. We can also identify the scientific reasons for negative reactions to excessive perceived stress and the onset of depressive illness caused directly by being subjected to a heavy workload.

Optimum range of workload

It is apparent that most people have a range of demand that they can tolerate, or even feel comfortably happy with. Below the lower limit they feel discontented and underutilised, and above the upper limit they seek to shed work and may even become bad-tempered. An attribute of people who rise to high positions within their organisations is that they are very tolerant of a wide range of work demands; they find occupations for themselves if lightly loaded, and they are benign under pressure, even if it is unreasonable. For this reason, they are candidates for promotion.

Shared views

The tenor of this argument is shared by Prince Charles in a report in the Guardian newspaper on Tuesday 13th Sept 2005.

[ Mar 09, 2007] A very good memo on mental overload from Washington College

Trying to sip information from the fire hose is a difficult and challenging task :-). This memo might help.

In today’s world, mental overload is a fact of life. Fortunately, by applying some simple techniques from the computer world, you can avoid some of the costly consequences of a too full brain!

SIGNS OF AN OVERLOAD

A too-full computer can:
· give you error messages
· run slower
· take longer to process information
· crash

A too-full brain can cause you to:
· make mistakes
· forget to do something
· let things slip through the cracks
· become sluggish
· loose creativity
· become unproductive
· procrastinate
· become indecisive
· get stressed out
· experience a total mental break down

[ Mar 09, 2007] Mental overload by Katherine Lewis

Does excessive multi-tasking like happens to college students make us stupid?  The answer is tentative yes:

• "You are trying to feed information through various kinds of processing channels in the brain which have limited capacity and are really only available for one thing at a time."

•  "A lot of tasks we have to do, there are little moments of gaps which you can steal for another task," said Hal Pashler, psychology professor at the University of California in San Diego. "The interesting hidden cost ... is that (we) may be strikingly unable to recollect what happened."

• "To the degree that tasks rely on similar processes, they are more likely to interfere with each other. For instance, talking on the phone and writing an e-mail is hard, because both involve language, Poldrack said."

• "The answer is to choose carefully when you take on more than one job at once. For high-priority or complex tasks, you might want to shut down your e-mail, turn off the phone and close your office door.

Multi-tasking may be too much for the brain to handle Friday, March 09, 2007

BY KATHERINE REYNOLDS LEWIS

NEWHOUSE NEWS SERVICE

We feel so efficient, listening to a teleconference while sorting e-mail and eating lunch at the same time. But experts warn that instead of completing three tasks in the space of one, we're really spending more time to achieve mediocre results.

"Research that's looked at multi-tasking shows that you can't do it well -- no one can," said Kristin Byron, assistant professor of management at Syracuse University. "You're fighting the way your brain works."

The brain acts on just one task at a time. What we perceive as simultaneous multi-tasking is really rapid switching back and forth to keep different tasks going -- even if one is as simple as deciding to lift the sandwich for another bite.

It's like the classic vaudeville act of spinning plates. Your brain can set a task in motion, then another, and then another, before returning to pick up the first task, explained David Strayer, a psychology professor at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.

"If the demands of any given task aren't too taxing, you can get two, three, four plates going up, but at some point you're going to reach a threshold when they're going to crash."

You may avoid driving while talking on a cell phone because of the physical challenge of holding both phone and steering wheel. But Strayer's research shows hands-free cell phone use is just as dangerous while driving. The risk comes in toggling between the two mental demands.

Moreover, subjects in a recent study scored significantly lower on IQ tests they took while driving. "When your attention is taken away from a task, you are not going to perform it as smartly," Strayer said.

So does multi-tasking make us stupid?

It's not an outlandish conclusion. A 2005 study sponsored by Hewlett-Packard found the average worker lost 10 IQ points when interrupted by ringing telephones and incoming e-mails -- about equal to the cost of missing an entire night of sleep.

"Interruptions are time-consuming, and they are dangerous in the sense that they can lead to errors," said David E. Meyer, a psychology professor at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. "You are trying to feed information through various kinds of processing channels in the brain which have limited capacity and are really only available for one thing at a time."

Whenever we drop one task to perform another, we face "resumption costs" -- the time and energy it takes to orient ourselves when we return to the original task. It's true that interweaving two lengthy tasks can take less total time than performing the tasks separately. But there's a price.

"A lot of tasks we have to do, there are little moments of gaps which you can steal for another task," said Hal Pashler, psychology professor at the University of California in San Diego. "The interesting hidden cost ... is that (we) may be strikingly unable to recollect what happened."

That's because the free moments in each task -- such as waiting for a partner to respond in a conversation -- appear to be used to store or consolidate memories. If we talk on the phone while checking e-mail, it's at the expense of downtime our brains need.

"The conversation plus the e-mail may take less of your life, but the cost is that tomorrow you may not know exactly what you said," Pashler said.

Thus, if you try to take in new material or facts while multi-tasking, you'll have a tougher time learning, said Russell A. Poldrack, psychology professor at the University of California in Los Angeles.

Does all this mean we should never check our Blackberries while waiting in line at the grocery store? Or even sip a cup of coffee while listening to a conference speaker? After all, multi-tasking is woven into the fabric of modern life. More than 85 percent of people multi-task, and 67 percent believe they do it well, according to a survey by Apex Performance, a Charlotte, N.C., training firm.

Fortunately, the experts give us some slack. "You can't say in every situation it would be better to always focus on one task," Poldrack said.

If you're a stock trader who has to respond quickly to a lot of information, it makes sense to monitor multiple televisions and computer screens at once, he said. It may not matter that the next day you're hazy about which news anchor said what.

Certain physical actions, like walking or eating, are so hard-wired that they don't tax our brains much. There's certainly no harm in combining simple, low-stakes tasks, like folding laundry and watching television. And if background music energizes you to finish your work, that may outweigh the cost of your mind shifting between listening and crafting a report, Poldrack said.

Similarly, talking to an adult passenger doesn't hurt your driving the way talking on a cell phone does, Strayer has found. That's because the person in your car is attuned to the driving environment, and will pause the conversation when a tricky maneuver approaches.

To the degree that tasks rely on similar processes, they are more likely to interfere with each other. For instance, talking on the phone and writing an e-mail is hard, because both involve language, Poldrack said.

The answer is to choose carefully when you take on more than one job at once. For high-priority or complex tasks, you might want to shut down your e-mail, turn off the phone and close your office door. Apex Performance founder Louis Czoka even recommends that clients shut their eyes to focus on a teleconference.

[Feb 18, 2007]  Crazy hours becoming the new standard - Forbes.com - MSNBC.com

Just how bad have things gotten? That's the subject of Extreme Jobs: The Dangerous Allure of the 70-Hour Workweek, a recent study from the Center for Work-Life Policy. The study found that 1.7 million people consider their jobs and their work hours extreme, thanks to globalization, BlackBerries, corporate expectations and their own Type A personalities.

... .... ....

What Hewlett and Buck Luce found in their survey was that workers were themselves to blame. Many of the people interviewed for the study say they love their jobs and are reluctant to lessen their work load. In Agoglia's case, working for the small business consulting group was exactly what she wished for. Now she only comes into the office on a need basis. "It offers an opportunity for someone like me who needs more breathing room," she says, "but it also fulfills my desire to be challenged in my job."

That kind of fulfillment has its hazards. Sixty-four percent of those surveyed said their work pressures are self-inflicted but say it is taking a real toll on them individually. Nationally, 70 percent, and globally, 81 percent, say their jobs undermine their health in terms of exercise, diet and the impact of stress. Nationally, 46 percent, and globally, 59 percent, say it gets in the way of their relationships and nationally, 50 percent, say it affects their sex life.

Not surprisingly, men and women have a different take on the extreme nature of their jobs. In the global survey, 58 percent of men and 80 percent of women say they didn't want to work these hours for more than one more year. Says Buck Luce: "For women there's a flight risk. But men get burned out and are able to stick with it. There's a tremendous stigma for men who say, 'I can't do this.' That means there aren't going to be women at the top ranks of companies."

[Jan 18, 2007] Kelly Forrister Is there such a thing as obsessive-compulsive productivity

I wasn't surprised to read that 40% of Americans work 50 hours or more per week and rarely disconnect from their work, even on vacation. I hear about it all the time in my seminars where people feel like an 8 hour day is slacking off and working at night after the kids go to bed and in the morning before the office really opens is the only way they can stay on top of things.

Is it that people have too much to do or is it that they just don't have trusted systems (ala GTD) to feel like they can disconnect?

I've heard David Allen mention that we've always had too much to do. I don't think BlackBerry's necessarily create more work, it's just now people have higher expectations about how fast the work needs to get done.

Someone in one of my seminars recently told me she takes her laptop on vacation just to stay on top of her email (people actually hissed when she said this, perhaps from the fear that this will become expected.) The "vacation tax" of coming back to hundreds, if not thousands, of emails is just not worth it to her.

[Jan 17, 2007] BlackBerrys Don't Fit in Bikinis or obsessive-compulsive productivity by Joe Robinson

August 13, 2006 ( Los Angeles Times) It's vacation prime time. Millions of wage-earners are on the road, in the air or on the water in search of overdue recreation, relaxation and adventure. But for too many, it will be a futile quest, thanks to a big, fat killjoy stowed away on the trip: OCP, or obsessive-compulsive productivity, a frantic fixation to wring results from every minute of the day, even our play.

Americans have always had an insistent work ethic. But thanks to technology that allows us to get things done 24/7, growing job demands and the elevation of efficiency to an unofficial national religion, many vacationers simply can't turn off their productive machinery. Every minute of the day, even of play, must be productive.

It's a habit that's increasingly counterproductive, evident in soaring job-stress bills (a $300-billion-a-year tab for U.S. business, according to the American Institute of Stress, a nonprofit organization) and longer workweeks. Nearly 40% of Americans work more than 50 hours a week. The all-output, all-the-time mandate of OCP wires us to do holidays like jobs. We cram downtime with to-do lists and a performance-review mentality that dooms trips to disappointment because we couldn't see or do everything we wanted. The trip's experience is an afterthought in a crazed race to polish off sights to the finish line of the holiday.

But trying to make a vacation productive is like trying to get a cat to bark. It's the wrong animal for the outcome, because vacations aren't about output. Instead, they're about the realm of an increasingly rare species — input — that can't be measured by a performance yardstick. The most packed itinerary can't quantify play, fun, wonder, discovery, adventure. How do you tally the spray of an exploding waterfall? The pattern of ripples on a sand dune? How do you produce quiet?

The productivity of U.S. workers has doubled since 1969, according to Boston College economist Juliet Schor. But none of the dividends have come back in additional free time. The added time that greater productivity creates is simply fodder for more productivity increases — and OCP jitters that we must get more done. How much production is enough?

Even on the job, too much time on task can lead to burnout, heart disease, carpal tunnel syndrome, mistakes, costly do-overs and rote performance. A study last year by the University of Massachusetts Medical School found that chronic 12-hour workdays increase your risk of illness or injury by 37%.

Work without time to think, analyze or recharge feeds knee-jerk performance and the hurry-worry of stress. Everything appears urgent when there isn't time to judge what is truly urgent and what isn't.

More than anybody else's, Americans' identity comes through labor. But the reflex to define self-worth by what we get done makes it hard to relax without a heap of guilt because there's always something next on the horizon to handle. Our focus on future results shrinks our experience of living and, ironically, the very thing we need for optimum performance — input.

The consulting firm McKinsey & Co. asked managers where they got their best ideas. It wasn't at the office. Rather, inspiration came when people were at play — on the golf course, running. Research on fatigue in the workplace since the 1920s shows that performance rises after a break in the action, whether a break of a few seconds or 15 minutes.

Studies have also found that job performance improves after a vacation. Income doubled at the H Group, an investment services company in Salem, Ore., after owner Ron Kelemen increased employee time off to 3 1/2 weeks. When Jancoa, a Cincinnati cleaning company, switched to a three-week vacation policy, worker productivity soared enough to cut overtime. Profits jumped 15%.

The true source of productivity isn't nonstop output. It's a refreshed and energized mind, something vacations specialize in.

But for that to happen, we must leave the OCP drill sergeant at home. Vacations require a different skill set — leisure skills. Without them, we lapse into default mode — produce, produce, produce. My retired father was stunned when he visited his former company and found a couple of his fellow retirees back at their desks. They didn't know what else to do.

As kids, we knew how to entertain ourselves. But many of us lost the knack when we learned that play for its own sake didn't produce rewards — status, pats on the back, money, goodies. Once we're in OCP territory, we've forgotten how to do things simply because we enjoy doing them.

Researchers say we had it right as kids. "Quality of life does not depend on what others think of us or what we own," contends psychology professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in "Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience." "The bottom line is, rather, how we feel about ourselves, and about what happens to us. To improve life one must improve the quality of experience."

Famed for his studies on when people are at their happiest, Csikszentmihalyi adds that "when experience is intrinsically rewarding, life is justified in the present."

Things we do for our amusement are particularly good at improving that experience, delivering what's supposed to come out of all that production — self-worth, a sense of competence and, best of all, life satisfaction. Upping levels of performance can't generate happiness, psychologists contend, because production is tied to external approval, which is gone by the next morning's to-do list. But research shows that the more active your leisure lifestyle is, the higher your life satisfaction. Leisure also increases initiative, confidence and a positive mood.

So, if you haven't taken your vacation yet, maybe it's time to dust off the leisure portfolio and resuscitate the childhood practice of play. The packing list should include participation, engagement, spontaneity, a nonjudgmental attitude, the ability to ferret out amusements, take detours, wander without aim, plunge into things you haven't done before, and get out of your head and into direct experience. Along the way you may discover something long forgotten. Recess rules.

Continued

Recommended Links

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Anxiety and Obsession with Work

What Constitutes an Addiction

Computer addicts tend to lose all sense of time when they are on-line. They are drawn so deeply into the world of bytes and bits that they do not notice entire days passing by. They forget to eat, sleep, go to school, and even care for their children. They shirk responsibilities, slack off at work, and miss appointments because they are unable to pull themselves away. The virtual world and the real world are competing for their attention, and the virtual world often wins.

Anxiety Disorders Education Program

The Anxiety Disorders Education Program is a national education campaign developed by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) to increase awareness among the public and health care professionals that anxiety disorders are real medical illnesses that can be effectively diagnosed and treated. More than 19 million Americans suffer from anxiety disorders, which include panic disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, phobias and generalized anxiety disorder. They suffer from symptoms that are chronic, unremitting and usually grow progressively worse if left untreated. Tormented by panic attacks, irrational thoughts and fears, compulsive behaviors or rituals, flashbacks, nightmares, or countless frightening physical symptoms, people with anxiety disorders are heavy utilizers of emergency rooms and other medical services. Their work, family and social lives are disrupted, and some even become housebound. Many of them have co-occuring disorders such as depression, alcohol or drug abuse, or other mental disorders. Because of widespread lack of understanding and the stigma associated with these disorders, many people with anxiety disorders are not diagnosed and are not receiving treatments that have been proven effective through research.

DG DISPATCH - ECNP Generalized Anxiety Disorder Has Worst Impact On Quality Of Life

Brain Lock Free Yourself from Obsessive-Compulsive Behavior A Four-Step Self-Treatment Method to Change Your Brain Chemistry

A reader from America , July 2, 1999 Excellent! A DYI approach to OCD and related disorders. A friend gave me this book and it is excellent. If you have OCD or even a related disorder it gives you a practical approach to learning to deal with and outsmart your disorder.

Take me, frinstance, while I do not have any checking compulsions, I have suffered from anxiety disorder and occasionally intrusive, disturbing thoughts for a number of years. (Other than that I am your regular guy, you wouldn't know I had a disorder if you saw me). This book gives you a 4-step method of "reframing" OCD in a way that makes it manageable. Ultimately, the authors say, by using their method you can "retrain your brain" and actually alter your brain chemistry in a positive direction and thus reduce the original symptoms to something liveable.

Buy it (or have a friend give it to you...) :-)

Stop Obsessing! How to Overcome Your Obsessions and Compulsions

The Boy Who Couldn't Stop Washing The Experience and Treatment of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder

A reader from Santa Fe, NM , July 16, 1998 A good description of the problem and some solutions This book contains well-written descriptions of obsessive-compulsive disorder -- it's informative, clear, and a pleasure to read. And for those of us who either suffer from these disorders or are close to someone who does, it's an eye-opener: you are NOT the only person who's ever had to deal with this problem, and there IS hope for curing it! For all these reasons, I highly recommend the book. Two cautions, however: (1) The book gave a good description of the ways of treating OCD as of the date it was written. Since then, however, there have been many new developments, so, if you're specifically interested in treatments, you'll need to look up some more recent books and articles. (2) "Obsessive-compulsive personality disorder" (OCPD) is a related but different condition, and it's possible that someone who exhibits similar symptoms but doesn't have full-blown OCD suffers from this instead. (My mother has never gone in for compulsive hand-washing, but she's rigid, intolerant, controlling, and a pack rat on a truly monumental scale. That's OCPD.) The treatments for the two conditions differ -- drugs are more helpful for OCD than OCPD, for example. As with any mental condition, it's absolutely necessary to have a thorough professional diagnosis; don't just march into your doctor's office demanding Prozac, or stock up on St. John's Wort at your local herbalist's.

Social Anxiety Disorder

Humor

[Jan 15, 1999 ] Man Crashes Car As 50 Pagers Ring At Once -- pretty funny

KIEV (Reuters) - A Ukraine businessman who bought a pager for each member of his staff as a New Year gift was so alarmed when all 50 of them went off at the same time that he drove his car into a lamp post, a newspaper said Thursday.

The unnamed businessman was returning from the pager shop when the accident happened, the Fakty daily reported. ''With no more than 100 meters to go to the office, the 50 pagers on the back seat suddenly burst out screeching. The businessman's fright was such that he simply let go of the steering wheel and the car ploughed into a lamp post.''

After he had assessed the damage to the car, the businessman turned his attention to the message on the 50 pagers. It read: ''Congratulations on a successful purchase!''

Etc

Reducing information overload A comparative study of hypertext systems

How to deal with Information Overload on the Internet The intelligent agent concept

The Clever Project -- IBM project

The tremendous growth in the price-performance of networking and storage has fueled the explosive growth of the web. The amount of information easily accessible from the desktop has dramatically increased by several orders of magnitude in the last few years, and shows no signs of abating. Users of the web are being confronted with the consequent information overload problem. It can be exceedingly difficult to locate resources that are both high-quality and relevant to their information needs. Traditional automated methods for locating information are easily overwhelmed by low-quality and unrelated content. Thus, the second generation of search engines will have to have effective methods for focusing on the most authoritative among these documents. The rich structure implicit in the hyperlinks among Web documents offers a simple, and effective, means to deal with many of these problems. The CLEVER search engine incorporates several algorithms that make use of hyperlink structure for discovering high-quality information on the Web.
 

• Information Management Principles
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Last modified: November 09, 2008