Embrace the 'human moment' at work
There is lots of chatter and philosophizing about information overload, but it seems to apply mostly to baby boomers. Young workers are comfortable with a deluge of information. For them, filtering huge amounts of information is intuitive and the notion of information overload just doesn't exist, according to Ashley J. Swartz, the president of Eicko Media, a new-media marketing firm. This is not to say that young workers do not have issues with technology.
Most twentysomething workers look at computers all day, and the issues they face are about combatting cubicle alienation and maintaining friendships when technology no longer serves as a social gathering place.
Jose Olivo is a desktop analyst, which in many cases, means when someone's computer has a problem, he fixes it while the person goes to lunch. Other times, Olivo works on a problem computer remotely, without leaving his desk. This is all highly efficient, but completely lacking in social opportunity. What today's workers need is more ''human moments," a term coined by Edward M. Hallowell, psychiatrist and senior lecturer at Harvard Medical School.
He writes that the human moment is ''an authentic psychological encounter that can happen only when two people share the same physical space. It has two prerequisites: people's physical presence and their emotional and intellectual attention."
The need to have regular human moments at work is similar to needing to stand up and stretch on an airplane: your well-being depends on it. The human moment is a quality of interaction you don't get from computers, or even the phone.
''In order to really converse with someone you have to keep reading them -- when they look at you, when they smile, when they turn away" says Jayme Lewin Rich, an occupational therapist who helps children with attention deficit issues.
''With computers," says Rich, ''often there is so much stimulation, that there is no way to pay close attention to one thing. In fact, many kids with attention deficit disorder can pay attention while at the computer but not while talking to people."
Often the computer encourages superficial attention to streams of data, but talking face-to-face demands focused emotional and intellectual involvement that is uniquely satisfying.
A wide body of research shows that this sort of face-to-face interaction is essential. One classic study is from two epidemiologists in California who found that deaths are three times higher for socially isolated people as for those with strong connections to others. Another classic study from France in the 1940s showed that without frequent cuddling, babies develop neurological problems.
''In-person contact stimulates an emotional reaction," explains Lawrence Honig, a neurologist at Columbia-Presbyterian Eastside, a New York hospital. Bonding hormones are higher when people are face-to-face. And some scientists think face-to-face contact stimulates dopamine, the attention and pleasure neurotransmitter, and serotonin, the neurotransmitter that reduces fear and worry.
Working at the computer or talking on the phone for a long time is exhausting in the way staring at TV can be. The brain starts to crave rest from input overload and fuel from human contact.
So when you're feeling tired at work, try creating a human moment for an energy boost. Your human moment doesn't have to be earth-shattering and intimate. It can be short and professional. Both need to be paying attention to each other.
Olivo is known for walking around the office telling jokes, and people have said to him, ''If it weren't for your jokes I'd go crazy." Hyperbole, yes, but there's truth to that, too.
Consider the human moment outside of work, too. Young people spent their school-age lives socializing electronically. But when full-time work starts, says Swartz, ''e-mail changes to a work-life tool instead of a socializing tool. This is a change that happens over time. As workload increases for a professional, the usefulness of the Internet as a social tool diminishes."
Younger workers must change how they handle friendships to keep them. After all, concludes psychologist Martin Seligman at the University of Pennsylvania, a job and money are less important to happiness than relationships; happy people have strong relationships with friends, family, and romantic partners. So while it's clever to book a conference room to make a personal phone call during work time, it's not enough. Phone-based relationships, like e-mail-based relationships, are bound to be less sophisticated because cues such as body language, tone of voice, and facial expression are necessary to develop relationships rich with subtle language, irony, and wit. But each face-to-face meeting you have with someone increases the quality of subsequent electronic communications. ''So make time to have lunch with someone," says Hallowell. ''This is the kind of thing that builds loyalty and depth and these relationships take a lot of time."
Olivo makes time to play basketball with the same crowd almost every day and he's developed real, sustainable friendships that Hallowell talks about. The process of moving from college to adulthood is long at this point in time: almost a decadelong struggle. You are likely to be happier during this journey if you concentrate on building and maintaining strong relationships. And there's no way to do that except face to face.
