In congratulations to vael, with his new office job, I present a fifteen minute video about why people can’t get work done at work - mainly because they’re interrupted by managers, meetings, and other employees, all of which are things they can’t avoid.
Given that the rest of us do most (if not all) of our work in isolation, within reach of a computer, the distractions we face are voluntary (or perhaps compulsive). We may get no work done because we check our e-mail, facebook, browser based games, etc. every fifteen minutes. He proposes that we go through stages of work, similar to stages of sleep (which you should already know about), and that we need long stretches of uninterrupted time to properly get anything done. Also like stages of sleep, there may be natural lulls in our productivity, at which point we can check our e-mail without any harm.
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Also pretty good is Tom Chatfield’s 7 Ways Games Reward the Brain. I love the idea of using this kind of info to “game” people into being more productive, healthy, efficient, or… well, better at everything really.
Nice video! I’d say it’s pretty accurate, but a little exaggerating at times. My problem working at home is the voluntary distractions… I’m planning to quit or at least go a lot easier with Backyard Monsters. Godville I’m just torturing my dude in. EBZ is the only one I’m really caring for, and for obviously good reason.
At work, I do do work, but sometimes I have questions about the system. It’ll be as easy as “do we have a class/function for that?” and it’s enough to distract my partner like the video says. ;x We get lots of people coming in too, as I said before it’s like receiving a quest in a video game.
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Today at work I brought my external hard drive and I swapped some music with my partner. I love Disney soundtracks! :D Aladdin and The Little Mermaid. There’s not many musicals being made by Disney anymore. Back in my day, it seems, nearly everything was a musical. I hope I see those days again for my children.
Speaking of which, I set up the PS2. The power cord was thrown away by either my dad’s wife or him, thankfully in my public trash bag so all I had to do was fish through it. Then dad remembered he had the connector for the video. Long story short, now we can let the kid watch educational movies such as The Grinch and Matrix Revolutions.
Oh, fine. My step-nephew has some kid-friendly DVDs. I’ll bust out Coraline when she’s 3 years old. Best to subject them to the harsh realities of unreality while they’re young.