需要注意的是，信息不再是一種稀缺的資源。大衛·羅斯是一位住在馬薩諸塞州的劍橋大學計算機接口方面的專家。值得指出的是，在20年前，工作的時候只有兩種通信方式：一種是電話，它可以做到即時交互，另一種則是郵件，這需要很多天的時間。 “現在我們在不同的地方則有更多的交流方式”羅斯說。

　　Information is no longer a scarce resource - attention is. David Rose, a Cambridge, Mass.-based expert on computer interfaces, likes to point out that 20 years ago, an office worker had only two types of communication technology: a phone, which required an instant answer, and postal mail, which took days. "Now we have dozens of possibilities between those poles," Rose says.

　　你應該怎么樣可以快速回復電子郵件嗎?或即時消息?當計算機網絡出現中斷的時候，人們的交流會陷入一種不確定性的陷阱：我們很難確定電子郵件是否會打斷你的工作，因為除非你自己打開并閱讀它 - 當然，從這一點來看，是你打斷了自己。我們的軟件工具基本上就是了參與我們所關注的互相競爭，就像為了嬰兒一樣。

　　How fast are you supposed to reply to an e-mail message? Or an instant message? Computer-based interruptions fall into a sort of Heisenbergian uncertainty trap: it is difficult to know whether an e-mail message is worth interrupting your work for unless you open and read it - at which point you have, of course, interrupted yourself. Our software tools were essentially designed to compete with one another for our attention, like needy toddlers.

　　這就是在現代辦公室為什么我們有如此復雜且混亂的情緒的原因, 當我們感覺到興奮的時候好像在洪水中沖浪一樣。

　　It is why we have such complex emotions about the chaos of the modern office, feeling alternately drained by its demands and exhilarated when we successfully surf the flood.

　　This can actually be a positive feeling, inasmuch as the constant pinging makes us feel needed and desired. The reason many interruptions seem impossible to ignore is that they are about relationships - someone, or something, is calling out to us.

　　The upshot is something that Linda Stone, a software executive who has worked for both Apple and Microsoft, calls "continuous partial attention": we are so busy keeping tabs on everything that we never focus on anything.

　　"It makes us feel alive," Stone says. "It's what makes us feel important. We just want to connect, connect, connect. But what happens when you take that to the extreme? You get overconnected." Sanity lies on the path down the center - if only there was some way to find it.

　　It is this middle path that Czerwinski and her generation of computer scientists are now trying to divine. When I first met her in the corridors of Microsoft, she struck me as a strange person to be studying the art of focusing, because she seemed almost attention-deficit disordered herself: a 44-year-old with a pageboy haircut and the electric body language of a teenager. "I'm such a spaz," she said, as we went bounding down the hallways to the cafeteria for a "bio-break." When she ushered me into her office, it was a perfect Exhibit A of the go-go computer-driven life: she had not one but three enormous computer screens, festooned with perhaps 30 open windows - a bunch of e-mail messages, several instant messages and dozens of Web pages. Czerwinski says she regards 20 solid minutes of uninterrupted work as a major triumph; often she'll stay in her office for hours after work, crunching data, since that's the only time her outside distractions wane. #p#分頁標題#e#

　　In 1997, Microsoft recruited Czerwinski to join Microsoft Research Labs, a special division of the firm where she and other eggheads would be allowed to conduct basic research into how computers affect human behavior. Czerwinski discovered that the computer industry was still strangely ignorant of how people really used their computers. Microsoft had sold tens of millions of copies of its software but had never closely studied its users' rhythms of work and interruption. How long did they linger on a single document? What interrupted them while they were working, and why?

　　To figure this out, she took a handful of volunteers and installed software on their computers that would virtually shadow them all day long, recording every mouse click. She discovered that computer users were as restless as hummingbirds. On average, they juggled eight different windows at the same time - a few e-mail messages, maybe a Web page or two and a PowerPoint document. More astonishing, they would spend barely 20 seconds looking at one window before flipping to another.

　　Why the constant shifting? In part it was because of the basic way that today's computers are laid out. A computer screen offers very little visual real estate. It is like working at a desk so small that you can look at only a single sheet of paper at a time. A Microsoft Word document can cover almost an entire screen. Once you begin multitasking, a computer desktop very quickly becomes buried in detritus.

　　This is part of the reason that, when someone is interrupted, it takes 25 minutes to cycle back to the original task. Once their work becomes buried beneath a screenful of interruptions, office workers appear to literally forget what task they were originally pursuing. We do not like to think we are this flighty: we might expect that if we are, say, busily filling out some forms and are suddenly distracted by a phone call, we would quickly return to finish the job. But we don't. Researchers find that 40 percent of the time, workers wander off in a new direction when an interruption ends, distracted by the technological equivalent of shiny objects. The central danger of interruptions, Czerwinski realized, is not really the interruption at all. It is the havoc they wreak with our short-term memory: What the heck was I just doing?

　　When Gloria Mark and Mary Czerwinski, working separately, looked at the desks of the people they were studying, they each noticed the same thing: Post-it notes. Workers would scrawl hieroglyphic reminders of the tasks they were supposed to be working on ("Test PB patch DAN's PC - Waiting for AL," was one that Mark found). Then they would place them directly in their fields of vision, often in a halo around the edge of their computer screens. The Post-it notes were, in essence, a jury-rigged memory device, intended to rescue users from those moments of mental wandering.

　　For Mark and Czerwinski, these piecemeal efforts at coping pointed to ways that our high-tech tools could be engineered to be less distracting. When Czerwinski walked around the Microsoft campus, she noticed that many people had attached two or three monitors to their computers. They placed their applications on different screens - the e-mail far off on the right side, a Web browser on the left and their main work project right in the middle - so that each application was "glanceable." When the ding on their e-mail program went off,  http://ukthesis.org/jsjwl/ they could quickly peek over at their in-boxes to see what had arrived.

　　The workers swore that this arrangement made them feel calmer. But did more screen area actually help with cognition? To find out, Czerwinski's team conducted another experiment. The researchers took 15 volunteers, sat each one in front of a regular-size 15-inch monitor and had them complete a variety of tasks designed to challenge their powers of concentration - like a Web search, some cutting and pasting and memorizing a seven-digit phone number. Then the volunteers repeated these same tasks, this time using a computer with a massive 42-inch screen, as big as a plasma TV.