A much needed button
The need is hardly new. If you’re like every knowledge worker on the planet, you’ve been suffering for years from the incessant inflow of interruptions (one every three minutes on average, research shows) that chop your workday into tiny fragments. The outcome is “Continuous Partial Attention”, and the cost to productivity has been described in detail in my series of insight articles about the effects of information overload.
Closing your office door won’t solve this problem. First, because many offices don’t have doors in this day and age – and if they had, there’d still be the endless incoming messages – email, social media, smartphones…
So wouldn’t it be nice if we had a button we could punch that would simply put an end to all the interruptions, like those Do Not Disturb doorknob signs in hotels?
Enter MyFocus
It would be nice indeed, and Canadian startup CanFocus Technologies has come up with just such a button. Their product, MyFocus, is a collection of buttons – one is a large physical button you connect to your computer’s USB port; the others are software buttons in applications for the computer and for your smartphone. All the buttons are linked, so you can turn them all to be Green or Red (the physical button actually changes the color of its illuminated rim). And here is the trick: once you make the buttons Red, your Email, Facebook, Skype, Instant messaging, and other incoming communications are put in a holding pattern: none of them are delivered to you until you go Green again. Meanwhile the large glowing red button on your desk signals to coworkers that you wish to be left in peace. How cool is that?!
You can watch this neat invention in action in the videos on the Kickstarter page where CanFocus are inviting the public to crowdsource MyFocus development from beta to a consumer product,
Other Do Not Disturb solutions
What’s neat about MyFocus is that it addresses together, in perfect synchrony, the two classes of interruptions: physical (coworkers dropping in to ask you “just a quick question”, or just to chew the rag) and electronic (“You’ve got mail”). Previously, we’ve only seen attempts to provide the button for each class in isolation.
Consider ClearContext Pro, a comprehensive productivity enhancement add-in for Microsoft Outlook. This excellent product incorporates a “Do Not Disturb” button that cuts off incoming email notifications for a duration you specify. Users of Gmail may want to consider instead Inbox Pause, which cuts off not only the notifications but holds the messages themselves, in a manner similar to CanFocus.
The only previous hardware button I’ve seen, in a different but critical context, was implemented by the Ford Motor Company. They’ve included a hardware “Do not Disturb” button in some recent car models, which allows the driver to block incoming phone calls and text-message alerts while the vehicle is moving.
The combo solution from CanFocus takes all this to the next step, and has one unique attribute: it relies on other humans to observe the glowing button and avoid disturbing you in person. Whether this will work may depend on the specific workplace culture, i.e. to what extent people value their coworkers’ concentration and the common good; it will be interesting to keep an eye on this product once it goes out of beta.
And if you want to help it do that, you can go and chip in to the Kickstarter drive!
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Wayda go, Ford! Stop driver distractions!
If we need to push a button to keep us from checking email messages or to silence our instant messages/texts, I wonder if that signifies some people are addicted to constant interruptions. Maybe it’s like the fitness bracelets everyone is wearing – it’s a constant reminder of what we should be doing but don’t have the personal determination to do on our own.
I guess if it works, more power to it!
Well, Lesa, there is a definite opinion among researchers that an addiction is at least partly involved – complete with brain chemistry effects and all that.