
Notes on 'The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World' - luu
http://scattered-thoughts.net/blog/2017/04/26/notes-on-the-distracted-mind-ancient-brains-in-a-high-tech-world/
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tmail21
Ever increasing distraction and "real-time" communication and collaboration
are reaching a point of diminishing returns and actually decreasing our
productivity.

The book Deep Work, by Cal Newport is a start on identifying the problem and a
possible solution (i.e. isolate yourself for stretches of time to accomplish
Deep Work).

Unfortunately, we live in a world where collaboration is necessary. So, what's
the solution?

One possibility is to come up with a collaboration solution that is built from
the ground up to be asynchronous in nature. (Deep Collaboration as the enabler
of Deep Work)

Such a solution would complement our real-time collaboration solutions.

~~~
nradov
E-mail, wikis, discussion forums, and issue trackers are all collaboration
tools built from the ground up to be asynchronous in nature. Are you looking
for something else?

~~~
tmail21
Agreed that all of these can be used asynchronously. However, I would refer to
these as "incidentally-asynchronous", in the sense that their design goals
were not primarily to be asynchronous (and hence support "Deep Work").

The major determinant of asynchronous deep collaboration efficiency is number
of "cycles-to-outcome". (where a cycle is roughly a request/response loop).

Email because of its lack of shared state collaboration generates lots of
extra cycles because of confusion on shared state (i.e. attachment nightmare).

Conversely, something like online document collaboration supports shared state
collaboration, but is really poor at "what happened". For all but the smallest
of documents this leads to compounding "implicit document rot" on every
iteration. Alternatively, it leads to ever increasing time to "catchup" once
again vastly expanding cycles-to-outcome.

Neither is good with accountability (something that issue trackers are good
with). Lack of accountability is another driver of increasing cycles-to-
outcome.

A deep collaboration solution that enables Deep Work could be designed from
first principles based on minimizing cycles-to-outcome.

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kjhughes
I found the noted acceleration in time to 50 million users to be very
interesting:

    
    
       radio       38y
       telephone   20y
       tv          13y
       cellphone   12y
       internet     4y
       ipod         3y
       myspace      2.5y
       facebook     2y
       youtube      1y
       angry birds 35d

~~~
ashark
I wonder what they'd look like if you changed the target to a percentage of
global population. Moving target, so it'd be harder to figure out, but say
time to 5% or similar. It'd surely make the numbers less dramatic.

~~~
jerf
From 38 years to Angry Birds is 2.6 orders of magnitude. Population has
increased by a lot less than that since radio. It's close to 400, so a radio
population of one billion would have to be 400+ billion today to scale
linearly. You are correct that it would be somewhat less dramatic, but it
would still be impressively dramatic.

I'm just doing some Fermi estimates here to give a sense of what sort of
change we'd get in reaction to your idea in the spirit of fun, not anger,
because I enjoy this sort of thing.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_problem)

~~~
ashark
As pointed out in the notes the Angry Birds entry is a bit of a _non sequitur_
since that's more like measuring how fast a given new TV show's viewership
increased after TVs were already extremely common, and it's not exactly a
_world-changing technology_ like most of the other things on the list. It's
not comparable to the other things, and was probably included for effect
rather than its belonging on the list by shared criteria with the other items.

I expect the others would look far less dramatic as a percentage—I'd guess the
12-year cell phone number and the 38-year radio number especially would move
far closer together if percentages rather than an absolute count were used.
TV/cell phone might well reverse, since they're already so close. The table
sets off some serious "lying with numbers" warning bells.

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asciimo
Many of these subjects are discussed in the popular Learning How To Learn
online course [[https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-
learn](https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn)]. I finally
signed up for it and I'm grateful. Sure, we all know how to learn, otherwise
we wouldn't be here. This course provides practical techniques for learning
more information, better, and with greater durability. Plus science!

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ashark
A cursory search for the briefly-mentioned Tools of the Mind program does not
make it seem "promising". However, social science and education research is
terrible and lots of organizations conducting research and pushing meta-study-
backed recommendations have an agenda ($$$). Anyone in the field willing to
offer some insight?

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_pmf_
That's the kind of stuff that UX should focus on, not some hog wash handwavy
fuzzy pop science.

