This weekend, The New York Times Magazine had an article entitled Meet the Life Hackers, about people who study human-computer interactions. They have quantified some conclusions that are not surprising. For example,

Each employee spent only 11 minutes on any given project before being interrupted and whisked off to do something else. What’s more, each 11-minute project was itself fragmented into even shorter three-minute tasks, like answering e-mail messages, reading a Web page or working on a spreadsheet. And each time a worker was distracted from a task, it would take, on average, 25 minutes to return to that task.

The article goes on to cite some ways that people have found to effectively deal with this over-abundance of information and interruptions:

None of them used complex technology to manage their to-do lists: no Palm Pilots, no day-planner software. Instead, they all preferred to find one extremely simple application and shove their entire lives into it. Some… said they opened up a single document in a word-processing program and used it as an extra brain, dumping in everything they needed to remember – addresses, to-do lists, birthdays – and then just searched through that file when they needed a piece of information. Others used e-mail – mailing themselves a reminder of every task, reasoning that their in-boxes were the one thing they were certain to look at all day long.

This certainly does not bode well software systems that fall prey to “feature creep,” adding more bells and whistles that paradoxically make products harder to use.

Another interesting observation is that more effective people often have multiple screens so that they can check on various applications at a glance, without having to incur much overhead in context-switching. The researchers found, too, that bigger screens help people complete tasks more quickly; as the article puts it, “The clearer your screen, the calmer your mind.” As a result, Microsoft Research Labs is working on techniques to adapt computer-generated interruptions to their users’ work patterns.

What surprised me and irked me, however, is that I saw no mention of Unix/Linux and how they compare. See, Unix systems (or, to be more precise, certain window managers for the X11 Window System) already have virtual desktops. Virtual desktops appear as thumbnail views of your screen layout, and you can have several at once, configured as you choose: perhaps one for email and IM, perhaps another one for some code you’re writing. Switching among them is as easy as a mouse click or a key-press– and poof! one set of windows is hidden while another is brought up. This is a simple way to create uncluttered screens dedicated to various projects when you only have one physical monitor available.

This feature has been available in window managers for at least a decade, but Microsoft has not caught on (although the technology exists, how many people are aware of it?). Maybe some day they will, just like they finally caught on to the concept that more than one person could be logged on to a home computer at the same time.

UPDATE
I found that Microsoft also provides a virtual desktop manager that can handle up to four desktops as one of its PowerToys.