Written July 2008
by Cliff Feldwick
I have been driving lately with the radio off. Not so startling a revelation, I’m sure, and not particularly noteworthy perhaps, but an experiment. I noted several months ago how turning off the distractions on your computer (pop-ups announcing a new e-mail, news feeds) can help you concentrate. So can removing other “over-feeds” into your senses. It came to me after a Columbia Festival of the Arts event that returning to the car and immediately putting on a CD negated part of the beauty of the performance – almost immediately something else crowded out the memories of what I had just seen, making it lesser in some respects.
Not that there aren’t some times when music, preferably loud, is just what’s needed. On the 6-1/2 hour drive to visit my daughter, on long stretches of Pennsylvania roads that have lighter traffic than we can imagine around here, it’s the Pretenders, Pat Benatar, or Bruce, turned up high that keep my fingers drumming and my mind alert.
But reducing the input of the extraneous can be worthy. One of the most successful, smartest men I’ve encountered (he sold his company in his 30’s and is now “managing his investments”) had time in his schedule for reading and thinking. That’s it – reading and thinking. His staff knew he was not to be disturbed except for actual fires (no drills) during this time. And yes, it was during the day when he was at his sharpest, not as an afterthought. Door closed, he made plans and looked at articles of what others had done. Try doing that at a regular job – probably impossible. But if you can eke out some time for yourself like that when you’re the boss, or later at night if you have to, try it as your own experiment.
Conversely, note how many people you see at the gym, walking, or otherwise in situations where human interaction could actually happen, who isolate themselves with iPods and such. Part of the ADHD-R-Us philosophy of constant stimulation.
Juggling
This also corresponds with the recent (and about time) push-back about multi-tasking, or as I like to put it “doing several things badly at one time”. Think about it – don’t you get much better at something when you get absorbed in it? We all know about being “in the flow” – so deeply into something that time disappears. How can that happen when you’re constantly interrupting things, shifting gears and picking up where you left things?
The exception? Perhaps leaving something that isn’t working, taking some time on something else, and returning to the original, maybe with an insight gained from not staring at it for so long. Of course, this used to called “taking a break” and was often accompanied by taking a walk, the physical exercise (and removal from the original surroundings) being a significant part of loosening up the mind.
But of course, this won’t do for the HR types who ask, as part of many interviews, “How are you at multi-tasking?” How long till they start to put this down as a negative answer? But since you’re not really tied to their strings, try concentration for yourself. Might be addictive.
Gates Exits
Bill Gates is (once again?) saying good-bye to Microsoft. He did an interview with PC Magazine where he did more than a little puffery about how MS led the world to where it is today, but occasionally admitted that things didn’t go according to his visions. His characterization of the “Google guys” as being in the right place at the right time (even if he did say they were smart) sidesteps the question of how his minions could have been so blind to the power of the Internet until other people were so far ahead. No matter.
One thing he did say was quite on target: “There's a lot of work to be done in security. Right now the tradeoff is between the user having to see a lot of things that they don't really understand versus choosing how promiscuous things want to be and what they want to run. We haven't made the breakthrough that makes it easy for people to understand what type of risk they are taking for which actions, so they are just getting a lot of stuff that they don't know how to answer. Even with all these great mechanisms, they can do things that are quite dangerous. It is not an easy problem to solve, but there is a lot to be done with that.”
Oh so true. Installing or un-installing a program, setting up a new security suite, hooking up to a new mail server – all usually involve making choices that may be obvious to skilled software writers or network administrators, but baffle most users. Probably a lot of the spyware that infects most PC’s comes in because people don’t know what shields to put up, or they get annoyed at the constant requests for permission to do something, so they open things up and thus make it easy for the black hats. Makes work for the spyware killers and anti-virus programmers, I suppose.
Cliff Feldwick is president of Riverside Computer Consultants, and does network set-ups, PC troubleshooting and similar ghastly tasks for a living, when not contemplating picking up where Bill Gates left off. He may be reached at 410-880-0171 or at cliff@feldwick.com.