June 10, 2008 10:07 AM

Work, technology, and information overload
Posted by Jesse Nunesat 10:07 AM

Between emails, text message, IMs, phone calls, etc., our attention is always divided, and we are constantly jumping from one project to the next, with little time to sit and focus on a single task, says Maggie Jackson.

The Balancing Acts columnist and author of the new book, 'Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age,' chatted with Boston.com readers on Monday about dealing with the non-stop flow of information and myriad ways to communicate in the digital age. Here's an excerpt from the chat:

Qudrcps: Recently, a person in our office was handed a Blackberry with eseentially no instructions, was told that she was to forward all her her mail to it, and, no surprise, has ended up with 90+ messages a day. I've talked to her about setting some ground rules for filtering this, but she's afraid to talk to our boss about the information overload.

Maggie Jackson: This is such a tricky question. The boss does set a tone in an office culture; if they're sending emails at 2 a.m. on Saturday, then they send a real message about working long and hard. So bosses need to role-model having boundaries between home and work, plus "giving the gift of attention." Paul Levy, the hospital chief, told me this a while ago. Still, workers too need to take responsibility for drawing boundaries. It's a two-way street.

Maggie Jackson: I think that our culture of efficiency and productivity overall also affects these questions. Frederick Taylor, the great time management guru of the 19th century, believed in chopping up work in order to streamline it. Now, we still chop up work, although we don't make widgets. We fragment our knowledge work in tiny pieces - giving ourselves no time to think!

Maggie also wrote a '10 tips to help quell distaction' article for Boston.com that provides some advice on dealing with information overload and the frenzied pace of working in a office in this technologically advanced society. One thing that gets lost in all the technology is – yes – actual human interaction. From Maggie's 10 tips:

4) Focus on one another

We're so used to splitting our focus between PDAs and TVs, and people and tasks that it's hard to truly attend to any one thing. But continuous partial attention undermines the depth and quality of our relationships and our interactions. When we give each other half-focus in conversations, on conference calls or at meals, we are effectively saying, "you aren't worth my time."

As well, the "creative energy and critical thinking" that occurs in a good work meeting is lost when everyone's madly checking e-mail, writes Intel principal engineer Nathan Zeldes in an article on the costs of "infomania" in the e-journal First Monday. Focusing in full on one another can help people better connect in a fast-paced, overloaded world.

How do you deal with distractions at work, and in your life in general? Share your thoughts on our forums.