Group items tagged

Intrinsic load is the natural load required to complete a task. It can be easy sometimes (driving from home to school) or heavy on others (being an air traffic controller), but we can be trained to cope with it. The Germane level of load is the optimum level we can cope with, where we maximise the load we are under. In lessons and projects we can feel that Germane load as 'flow', where everything's going in our favour, and then... Extraneous load comes along, where we all go wrong, especially when we are communicating information in, say, a presentation. It's when, mid flow, the grass starts getting cut outside. Or when someone has to leave a meeting early. Overload occurs here. The person who missed the earlier part of the meeting, or left early, or the sensation that someone is talking at you when you're in deep conversation with another person opposite, or the kid who doesn't understand where you're at, who isn't with you because they didn't understand the initial point of the project...

That's according to research firm Basex, which chose "information overload" as its 2008 "Problem of the Year." Failure to solve the problem will lead to "reduced productivity and throttled innovation."

The Atlantic ran a lengthy piece on the false promise of multitasking in its November edition (subscribers only), using as one of its epigraphs a line by Publilius Syrus: "To do two things at once is to do neither."

In a 2007 Pew survey, 49 percent of Americans described themselves as having "few tech assets" and said that constant connectivity was an annoyance, not a liberation.