The word 'desktop' conjures up images of a solid rectangular oak desk in an office, walls lined with books on a shelf. On the desk, close to the chair, stand a lamp, a notebook, and a golden pen in a stand. Slightly behind the lamp are two trays marked simply IN and OUT. Everyday, I come in to work and pick a few items to work on for the day, drop them in the IN tray. Over the day, I course through the items in the IN tray, and after I am done with each, drop them into the OUT tray. Someone comes in at the end of the day to take the things from the OUT tray to dispatch them to their intended recipients. Initially, on some days, I have a few items still left in my IN tray. On other days, I get done early. After a few days, I refine my rhythm to estimate the right number of things I can work on in the day, so I rarely have left over items or excess time to spare.
In reality, the desktop in my home office is the top of a circular glass table with a shiny steel leg and a round black stone base. Most of the time, I have my Macbook on it, currently I also have my Windows laptop on it, and sometimes a Linux netbook makes a passing visit. My phone rests to the right of my computers, connected to the charger through a point on the floor. I also sometimes use a notebook to do calculations or put down my thoughts. Most of my writing is an exercise with a specific goal, meant to collect my thoughts or compute a result, and I don't ever come back to read what I wrote, so the writings are usually scribblings that I can barely read even on the next day.
This changes a few things from the conjured image of a desktop.
First, it distorts my sense of space. When I am writing on my imagined desktop, the surface behind the paper or book is opaque, made of solid wood. In my real glass desktop, I can see beyond the notebook to the floor and the things on it. I can see the mess of wires under my table. I can see the dust that has collected on that spot under the desk the cleaning lady rarely reaches. In general, I can see things that distract me from doing what I was writing about.
Secondly, there is a constant tension between my writing and switching to one of the digital devices to browse stuff. Even if I remain focused on the task, the mind thinks of several things that I could look up on the internet, and once I succumb and get into my browser, one thing leads to another, and I am off watching a video on youtube involving cats and drinking straws.
Thirdly, and less trivially, there is a desktop within a desktop thing going on. The computer has another kind of desktop within it. This one, unlike its glass namesake, distorts my sense of time. In the image of the oak desktop, the desktop represented a scope of work along a day timeframe. I begin my day by filling my desktop (my IN tray) with things to get through that day, and I usually get through them by end of the day. In some bizarre twist of neurogical cruelty, I may have come to expect that of the very notion of a desktop. So much so, that when I reach into my virtual desktop, I expect to finish everything on it by the end of the day. However, I know that is really impossible. For instance, I have a shortcut to my browser on the desktop. This shortcut represents the sum total of information on the internet, which is hard to 'finish' in a lifetime, let alone a single day. I also have a folder containing all my unprocessed pictures from the last three years, which will take months to get through. This (mapping of the image of a desktop to the concept of a desktop) may be the reason for the high information appetite today compared to the days of the oak desktop - the futile attempt to 'clear my desktop'.
Fourth, the internet that resides behind a link on my virtual desktop on my laptop on my (fake glass) desktop which maps to my innate image of an oak desktop, causes troubles of its own. When I write today, each concept that comes to mind has at least an order of magnitude more parameters attached to it, than it had twenty years ago. For instance, if I wanted to say how much I liked a movie in a letter to my friends back in the day, I may have written something like: "I saw this movie called ________ and I loved it". More importantly, that is probably all I would have thought of when I said that.
Today, when I write the same thing, perhaps as a post on Facebook, there are several parameters that are involved (mostly subconsciously, or in a fraction of a conscious moment):
- Who are the actors? Who is the director? Producer? Photographer?Editor?Casting?Writer?Special Effects? How reputed is each of these? What other movies have they worked on? Which of them were good?
- What was the rating on Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic?
- What does Wikipedia say about its reception?
- How was its box office performance?
- How do I convince my friends on Facebook to actually like it (in the world of information tsunamis such as that on Facebook, you need something more than just a note to interest the audience)
- Will this actually reach the friends who may enjoy such films?
- Perhaps I should tag it
- Perhaps I should post this from within Rotten Tomatoes as a user review
- So, I should probably review it, or find a review on the site that matches my views and share it instead
Whether or not I act on all these thoughts is irrelevant - these are things that are associated with the notion of sharing the liking of a movie with friends, none of which existed before. One aspect of this thought process is that the same activity uses a lot more mental resources in its processing, even if the end result (the single line note that I eventually landed up leaving on Facebook after a half second deliberation of these factors at the bottom edge of my consciousness) was the same. This means that the brain's processor has to run at a much higher 'clock speed' to get through the day.
How this overclocking (relative to a mere two decades ago) will affect the human mind, only time will tell. But it may be beneficial to slow down the clock speed. There are two broad ways to achieve this - one is to deliberately slow down the clock speed, which primarily means consuming less information, consuming only relevant content, even focusing on one thing and deliberately ignoring any thoughts that come up till less parameters arise, etc. There is some work that we can do on this dimension, but that approach has to fight against the current trend for pushing a lot of irrelevant information into our minds - through 'free' (like search) or even paid (like movies at the cinema) services that bombard us with advertisement and other irrelevant information, services that insist on taking us through seven different clicks before showing the complete content, in hope of us subscribing to one of the seven intermediaries (akin to crossing seven seas, if we go back to our desktop mapping metaphor, but I digress). The second, and more efficient way, involves looking deeper at the act of writing.
Back in our school days, most work had a goal of writing a test or examination. We needed to optimize our thinking process to be most efficient at the process of writing an exam - a couple of hours with pen on paper, mind diving in and out of its recesses at a cadence just in sync with the rate of pen on paper. In clock speed terms, this meant that our minds ran at a clock speed close to the speed needed to write down our thoughts. However, today, our education system as well as 'knowledge work' has strayed away from writing as the end goal. We type, increasingly often on keyboards that are racing to catch up with our minds (look at the sliding keyboards with predictive text, such as Swype or Swiftkey on Android mobiles for an example), which in turn frees our minds to think more, letting in potentially unnecessary parameters, until the mind exceeds its clock speed and overclocks again. (And then we get a notification from Twitter on our mobile, which we then click on, and spend the next half hour on Twitter, etc.).
So it is likely that the cadence of writing is far lower than the cadence of digital typing (both due to faster mechanisms in typing and distractions that the digital devices themselves bring in). We could perhaps use this to our benefit to slow down our mental clock speed. If we chose to write with pen on paper, either as a daily exercise, or as a first pass for whenever we have thoughts that we otherwise capture or share digitally, we may see a marked improvement in the quality and focus of thoughts that emerge. In turn, the mind can familiarize itself with operating at lower clock speeds (this is a reverse mechanism to techniques like meditation that deliberately slow down clock speed), and develop the ability to operate at those lower clock speeds when they seem more effective.
As a step towards this (and for other reasons), I went out and bought myself a good diary, a good set of pens and wrote my first diary entry earlier today. I set myself a few ground rules since it has been ages since I had written on paper for any length of time. First, I would only write as long as my writing was legible. Second, I would avoid striking out or overwriting text. The point of this was to think clearly and carefully before writing rather than scribbling random thoughts down, which had become my form of writing over the years. I was surprised - I wrote six pages of legible text without a single scratch or overwrite. I also felt myself in 'flow' (a state where you are so immersed that you lose sense of time) and got a fairly intense set of ideas out on paper. This article is a summary of some of the ideas from that first diary entry. Hope you enjoyed it.
In reality, the desktop in my home office is the top of a circular glass table with a shiny steel leg and a round black stone base. Most of the time, I have my Macbook on it, currently I also have my Windows laptop on it, and sometimes a Linux netbook makes a passing visit. My phone rests to the right of my computers, connected to the charger through a point on the floor. I also sometimes use a notebook to do calculations or put down my thoughts. Most of my writing is an exercise with a specific goal, meant to collect my thoughts or compute a result, and I don't ever come back to read what I wrote, so the writings are usually scribblings that I can barely read even on the next day.
This changes a few things from the conjured image of a desktop.
First, it distorts my sense of space. When I am writing on my imagined desktop, the surface behind the paper or book is opaque, made of solid wood. In my real glass desktop, I can see beyond the notebook to the floor and the things on it. I can see the mess of wires under my table. I can see the dust that has collected on that spot under the desk the cleaning lady rarely reaches. In general, I can see things that distract me from doing what I was writing about.
Secondly, there is a constant tension between my writing and switching to one of the digital devices to browse stuff. Even if I remain focused on the task, the mind thinks of several things that I could look up on the internet, and once I succumb and get into my browser, one thing leads to another, and I am off watching a video on youtube involving cats and drinking straws.
Thirdly, and less trivially, there is a desktop within a desktop thing going on. The computer has another kind of desktop within it. This one, unlike its glass namesake, distorts my sense of time. In the image of the oak desktop, the desktop represented a scope of work along a day timeframe. I begin my day by filling my desktop (my IN tray) with things to get through that day, and I usually get through them by end of the day. In some bizarre twist of neurogical cruelty, I may have come to expect that of the very notion of a desktop. So much so, that when I reach into my virtual desktop, I expect to finish everything on it by the end of the day. However, I know that is really impossible. For instance, I have a shortcut to my browser on the desktop. This shortcut represents the sum total of information on the internet, which is hard to 'finish' in a lifetime, let alone a single day. I also have a folder containing all my unprocessed pictures from the last three years, which will take months to get through. This (mapping of the image of a desktop to the concept of a desktop) may be the reason for the high information appetite today compared to the days of the oak desktop - the futile attempt to 'clear my desktop'.
Fourth, the internet that resides behind a link on my virtual desktop on my laptop on my (fake glass) desktop which maps to my innate image of an oak desktop, causes troubles of its own. When I write today, each concept that comes to mind has at least an order of magnitude more parameters attached to it, than it had twenty years ago. For instance, if I wanted to say how much I liked a movie in a letter to my friends back in the day, I may have written something like: "I saw this movie called ________ and I loved it". More importantly, that is probably all I would have thought of when I said that.
Today, when I write the same thing, perhaps as a post on Facebook, there are several parameters that are involved (mostly subconsciously, or in a fraction of a conscious moment):
- Who are the actors? Who is the director? Producer? Photographer?Editor?Casting?Writer?Special Effects? How reputed is each of these? What other movies have they worked on? Which of them were good?
- What was the rating on Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic?
- What does Wikipedia say about its reception?
- How was its box office performance?
- How do I convince my friends on Facebook to actually like it (in the world of information tsunamis such as that on Facebook, you need something more than just a note to interest the audience)
- Will this actually reach the friends who may enjoy such films?
- Perhaps I should tag it
- Perhaps I should post this from within Rotten Tomatoes as a user review
- So, I should probably review it, or find a review on the site that matches my views and share it instead
Whether or not I act on all these thoughts is irrelevant - these are things that are associated with the notion of sharing the liking of a movie with friends, none of which existed before. One aspect of this thought process is that the same activity uses a lot more mental resources in its processing, even if the end result (the single line note that I eventually landed up leaving on Facebook after a half second deliberation of these factors at the bottom edge of my consciousness) was the same. This means that the brain's processor has to run at a much higher 'clock speed' to get through the day.
How this overclocking (relative to a mere two decades ago) will affect the human mind, only time will tell. But it may be beneficial to slow down the clock speed. There are two broad ways to achieve this - one is to deliberately slow down the clock speed, which primarily means consuming less information, consuming only relevant content, even focusing on one thing and deliberately ignoring any thoughts that come up till less parameters arise, etc. There is some work that we can do on this dimension, but that approach has to fight against the current trend for pushing a lot of irrelevant information into our minds - through 'free' (like search) or even paid (like movies at the cinema) services that bombard us with advertisement and other irrelevant information, services that insist on taking us through seven different clicks before showing the complete content, in hope of us subscribing to one of the seven intermediaries (akin to crossing seven seas, if we go back to our desktop mapping metaphor, but I digress). The second, and more efficient way, involves looking deeper at the act of writing.
Back in our school days, most work had a goal of writing a test or examination. We needed to optimize our thinking process to be most efficient at the process of writing an exam - a couple of hours with pen on paper, mind diving in and out of its recesses at a cadence just in sync with the rate of pen on paper. In clock speed terms, this meant that our minds ran at a clock speed close to the speed needed to write down our thoughts. However, today, our education system as well as 'knowledge work' has strayed away from writing as the end goal. We type, increasingly often on keyboards that are racing to catch up with our minds (look at the sliding keyboards with predictive text, such as Swype or Swiftkey on Android mobiles for an example), which in turn frees our minds to think more, letting in potentially unnecessary parameters, until the mind exceeds its clock speed and overclocks again. (And then we get a notification from Twitter on our mobile, which we then click on, and spend the next half hour on Twitter, etc.).
So it is likely that the cadence of writing is far lower than the cadence of digital typing (both due to faster mechanisms in typing and distractions that the digital devices themselves bring in). We could perhaps use this to our benefit to slow down our mental clock speed. If we chose to write with pen on paper, either as a daily exercise, or as a first pass for whenever we have thoughts that we otherwise capture or share digitally, we may see a marked improvement in the quality and focus of thoughts that emerge. In turn, the mind can familiarize itself with operating at lower clock speeds (this is a reverse mechanism to techniques like meditation that deliberately slow down clock speed), and develop the ability to operate at those lower clock speeds when they seem more effective.
As a step towards this (and for other reasons), I went out and bought myself a good diary, a good set of pens and wrote my first diary entry earlier today. I set myself a few ground rules since it has been ages since I had written on paper for any length of time. First, I would only write as long as my writing was legible. Second, I would avoid striking out or overwriting text. The point of this was to think clearly and carefully before writing rather than scribbling random thoughts down, which had become my form of writing over the years. I was surprised - I wrote six pages of legible text without a single scratch or overwrite. I also felt myself in 'flow' (a state where you are so immersed that you lose sense of time) and got a fairly intense set of ideas out on paper. This article is a summary of some of the ideas from that first diary entry. Hope you enjoyed it.
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