Software, Interrupted

Just when you finally came to terms with your e-mail addiction, blogs came along, then IM, then Twitter, and now we are all zombies. As it turns out, e-mail is a dangerous distraction.

In a study last year, Dr. Thomas Jackson of Loughborough University, England, found that it takes an average of 64 seconds to recover your train of thought after interruption by e-mail. So people who check their e-mail every five minutes waste 8 1/2 hours a week figuring out what they were doing moments before.

I would suspect that Twitter and random IMs must double the wasted time leading to 17 hours a week of figuring out what you were just doing. This constant distraction is similar to gambling, heeding to a "variable interval reinforcement schedule" which is the same feeling you get from playing a slot machine.

"This means that rather than reward an action every time it is performed, you reward it sometimes, but not in a predictable way. So with e-mail, usually when I check it there is nothing interesting, but every so often there's something wonderful--an invite out or maybe some juicy gossip--and I get a reward." This is enough to make it difficult for us to resist checking e-mail, even when we've only just looked. The obvious solution is to process e-mail in batches, but this is difficult. One company delayed delivery by five minutes, but had so many complaints that they had to revert to instantaneous delivery. People knew that there were e-mails there and chafed at the bit to get hold of them.

As an interesting contrast, the NY Times published a piece earlier this week about the Brave New World of Digital Intimacy that helps to explain how all this connectivity actually might be making our lives better.

Today I am on blog, Twitter, IM, cell phone, and three different e-mail accounts...at least until I get to the casino.

Over on the NY Times, David Pogue explains how he deals with the deluge of daily emails he receives.

Here are the questions he answers:
A) How many wackos do you hear from in a day?
B) How do you handle said wackos?
C) Do you use elaborate file/folder systems?
D) How much of your day is spent on replying to e-mails?
E) How do you determine who gets a reply?
F) How often do you check e-mail?
G) What advice would you give to a public figure about what to watch out for if you publish your e-mail address?"

As much as I like open source, there is something to be said for not having to install or maintain applications. But that doesn't mean it's smart or realistic to move all the applications in your enterprise to on-demand delivery.

As Gary Rivlin writes in today's NY Times "few software companies make the move to platform status" let alone the ones that have no footprint on the desktop. This is something I noted back in September after the Dreamforce event which reinforced my belief that enterprise software isn't going anywhere--at least not infrastructure software.

In the case of infrastructure (like networking and integration), and desktop environments (like Windows) it's hard to get excited about doing everything through a browser. Not that it?s a bad idea, but as I learned on my trip to Japan last week it's not entirely feasible at this point to do everything via the internet. Rivlin writes:

And yet for Benioff, the company's chief executive, that is not enough. He wants to turn Salesforce into a platform like Microsoft's Windows operating system, a product so popular that it is the foundation for a veritable ecosystem of software developers.

If you at the on-demand subscription offerings from Microsoft and SAP, both mediocre by comparison to Salesforce.com or SugarCRM (also available open source) the main advantage they have is that the existing user base is tied to a set of desktop applications which reinforce the desktop computing paradigm.