Chris Jobling's List: readings

• • Need to come back to this at some point...
• Everyday, when you fire up your browser and type in some arbitrary URL in the b
• rowser’s address bar, you are taking the red pill.

• Increasingly though, I see signs that the essential freedoms of the web are being undermined by a cadre of companies through the introduction of new technologies and interfaces that, combined, may spell the death of the URL.

   

  Call me crazy, but it seems obvious enough when you put on the right colored paranoia goggles.

2 more annotations...

• Britons are increasingly overlapping their media habits - tapping out e-mails while watching TV, reading a paper while answering texts from friends. But, asks Hugh Wilson, does media multi-tasking mean instead of doing a few things well, we are just doing more things badly?
• According to the Ofcom analysis, the average Briton spends seven hours a day watching or using media. But that figure rises to nearly nine hours when you squeeze in time many of us now spend using several devices at once.
• So we watch telly while surfing the net, or continually check Facebook updates while writing a report, or send instant messages while talking on a mobile phone.
• But it's not quite as simple as that, as my frustrating evening demonstrated. A raft of studies has found that, actually, multi-tasking is a good way to do several things badly.

• f you want to be productive it's best not to multi-task at all, says Dave Crenshaw, a productivity coach and author of The Myth of Multitasking.

   

  "When people attempt to multi-task, what they are really doing is switching rapidly back and forth between tasks, what I call 'switchtasking'. These switches cause people to lose time, and be incredibly less productive."

   

  If you have to multi-task, at least try and take control of your technology.

   

  "Your mobile phone ringer doesn't need to be on all the time. You can turn off computer e-mail notification as well. Become master over the nagging beeps and buzzes by creating some silence."

   

  Crenshaw also says we should schedule times to switch our attention, rather than doing it randomly or from habit.

   

  "Set regular times in the day and week to check your email and voicemail. If you participate actively in social media, as I do, have set times where you can focus on it."

3 more annotations...