Dan Nainan has a problem.
Once an engineer for Intel who traveled the world doing technical demos, he’s now a professional comedian who’s performed at three Obama inaugural events and recently shot a commercial for Apple. In spite of those accomplishments, he feels he’s not reaching his full potential — and he blames the Internet.
“E-mail comes in, and I have the compulsion to look at it immediately,” he says. “I should be spending time working, but I watch highlights of the NBA and NFL games on YouTube, and look up friends from high school on Facebook.”
Sound familiar?
It’s the workplace conundrum of the digital era. The same tool many of us rely on to get our jobs done also provides a portal into unlimited distraction, leaving many grappling with the issue of how to resist the lure of the Internet long enough to get a day’s work done.
“We’re fighting this uphill battle,” says Fred Stutzman, a doctoral candidate who studies social networks. In recent years, Stutzman notes, “The devices we have to use every day have become these hyper-advanced multimedia machines that offer an unlimited number of ways to waste time.
“And,” he adds, “all of them are so much better than doing work.”
Help is coming from a variety of sources. Some people, like Nainan, are turning to tools that enable them to police their use of the Internet — tools such as Freedom, a blocking program devised by Stutzman that thousands have downloaded. Others are establishing low-tech routines that help ensure they don’t get carried away by the temptation to text and Tweet the day away. At the far end of the spectrum, there are even people throwing up their hands and committing themselves to full-blown addiction facilities.
Seasoned multitaskers may congratulate themselves on their ability to flip between interoffice e-mail, Perez Hilton and the new Jack Johnson album on iTunes in a millisecond. Yet a study by a team of Stanford researchers examining the cognitive abilities of heavy and light multi-taskers demonstrated that having all those windows pop up kills your productivity more than you think.
Nicholas Carr, author of the much-buzzed-about new book “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brain,” breaks the bad news this way: “The heavy multi-taskers performed worse on all the tests. They were less able to control their attention and less able to distinguish important information from trivia. In fact, the heavy multi-taskers were actually worse at multi-tasking than the light multi-taskers. They were less efficient in switching from one task to another.”
Breaking the habit
If the answer is clear enough — save the sports trivia sites and viral videos for after you punch out — the just-say-no approach is not so easy to self-enforce.
Jennifer Tang, a librarian at a community college and a self-described Web junkie, knows that all too well.
“The nature of my job is to find information, so for me being an Internet addict is akin to being an alcoholic bartender who must mix drinks every day as part of his job,” she says.
Addiction therapist Gregory Jantz, who’s treated hundreds of Internet over-users and is writing a book on the topic, calls the problem a “soft addiction.”
“Professionals who are on the computer all day long are at particular risk,” he says. “They’re moving so quickly that it’s hard for them to even recognize when they’re shifting from actual productive work to doing useless Twitter messages and mindless Web surfing.”
The constant struggle to stay on task is leading more and more workers to a rising number of computer programs that block or monitor Internet use. Among them are RescueTime and MeeTimer, which track online time and offer users a window into what they’re actually doing on the computer versus what they think they’re doing. LeechBlock is a Firefox add-on that allows you to block specified sites for certain time periods, or to apply time limits so the block kicks in if you go over, say, 15 minutes in an hour.
Fred Stutzman’s program, Freedom, launched a year and a half ago, disables your Web access entirely for specified periods of time. While it’s proven a hit, he’s heard from many users who need the Web to do their work but want protection from its attention-sucking vortex. So last week he premiered a second program, Anti-Social, which blocks a host of social-networking sites and other specified time-wasters such as YouTube and collegehumor.com.
“You can accomplish a lot just by blocking the most popular sites,” he says. “Just take away Facebook and Twitter, and for a lot of people you’ve given them their day back.” Of course, people can disable blockers easily enough; Stutzman’s programs can only be overridden with a computer reboot. But the small effort required to do it is enough to keep many folks in line, he says.
“It’s 90 percent psychological,” Stutzman says, noting that many users have told him they feel “ashamed” at rebooting.
Going low-tech
Other workers find smaller ways to fight the tech creep, establishing low-tech rituals or labeling certain types of technology as “off limits.”
Tang, for example, forces herself to turn off the computer for 10 minutes every hour and go into another room to hand-write everything she needs to do — an attempt to clear her head, she says. Additionally, she refuses to use text-messaging.
Brooklyn novelist Jonathan Lethem disciplines himself by keeping only Word loaded onto his work computer, creating “a pure novel-writing tool.”
“I used to let other things intrude, but now I focus my energy,” he says.
Another writer, Susan Shapiro, who’s publishing her seventh book, “Overexposed,” this summer, uses e-mail and Facebook as a reward and takes a pragmatic, measured approach to interacting with digital devices.
“I wake up in the morning, allow myself a half-hour to check my e-mail, then turn my phone and e-mail off and get to work on my book. At noon, I take a half-hour break to do more e-mail and Facebook. And then when I’m finished working, I go back to it.”
Her digital discipline is strong, but she also sets herself up for success by cutting herself some slack.
“I give myself goals in the morning that I write down — to finish a rewrite or a chapter. Then, so as long as I do that first, I give myself a little leeway.”
As for Nainan, the comedian, he’s turned to an Internet blocker called “Safe Eyes,” which limits his Internet access to two hours a day and cuts him off if he surfs for too long. He pronounces it “liberating” and says the extra time makes him “ecstatic.” He’s optimistic about getting more done now that his shackles are off — or, rather, now that they’re on.
The very need for such programs illustrates what workers are up against in the Information Age, says author Carr.
“It shows how much we’re struggling to maintain control over our attention and resist the temptations of the ’Net,” he says. “After all, we’ve always had the ability to shut down our ’Net connection or turn off our e-mail program. The problem is, we don’t.”
Rules of engagement
Here are some tips for staying on task, even as YouTube lies just a mouse click away. * Consider monitoring software to give yourself a true picture of how you’re spending your work hours. You might be surprised.
* Limit your Web surfing to particular times, or treat Internet digressions as a reward for goals accomplished.
* If it’s too hard to keep yourself in line, use an Internet blocker such as Freedom and LeechBlock to screen out tempting time wasters.
* Create low-tech rituals, such as forced computer breaks.
* Ban certain types of tech entirely — no texting, for example.
* Turn off visual alerts to e-mail, suggests productivity consultant Bob Kustka of Fusion Factor. And create designated times to check email, instead of monitoring it constantly.