That sweet sound of an @reply on my twhirl makes me rush to the laptop, a new email alert makes me fire the browser irrespective of that email being read & replied later. The list goes on and on..the itch to check/change the status on facebook, to continuous monitoring of analytics data.
I hate my mobile email — I check, check, check..but postpone the response ‘coz the form factor is good for reading only — so the email doesn’t get responded or time is wasted to revisit it.
Feels like we have become a Pavlovian dog to the ever increasing distractions on the web. If you are developer on a maker’s schedule, the loss of concentration is busting the efficiency.
We are not going to kick the Pavlovian habit, nor we gonna kick the tools we have — but the tools have to get smarter in their delivery of these small bits of information, which they are falling behind on. I’m still waiting for a combined email, social network tool which prioritizes, filters, reminds, and work as personal crm tool rather than separate units of email client, social client, mobile client, readers, etc.
“When I’m in a deep Java debugging session on eclipse, please do not email me, pause all the tweets except from my wife, cousin and investor” — huh, the desktop anti-virus applies a bit of that intelligence already, why can’t my email do the same?
One of my resolutions of 2010 is to do something or get something done in this area (or aggressively consume a product if someone is already doing it).