I was working so hard I almost missed hearing about National Take Back your Time Day:

Useful and creative work is essential to happiness. But American life has gotten way out of balance. Producing and consuming more have become the single-minded obsession of the American economy, while other values — strong families and communities, good health and a clean environment, active citizenship and social justice, time for nature and the soul — are increasingly neglected.

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.

Sisters Dr. Soo Kim Abboud and Jane Kim wrote a book on how Asian parents raise hih achievers. From the review, it sounds like it falls smack in the back-to-basics tough-love region of the self-help universe:

In “Top of the Class” the Kim sisters advise parents who want successful children to raise them just as the Kims did – in strict households in which parents spend hours every day educating their children, where access to pop culture is limited, and where children are taught that their failures reflect poorly on the family…

They are less understanding about what they view to be a particularly pernicious form of American overindulgence. “Too many parents now are into positive reinforcement for everything,” explained Dr. Abboud. “In America people are so scared about doing anything that might negatively impact their children that they applaud every little thing they do. In Asia they expect both effort and results.”

Both Kim sisters recall struggling at times with their parents’ discipline and expectations. Dr. Abboud said she felt alienated and lonely at times during high school in Raleigh, N.C., and Ms. Kim, who was more gregarious and rebellious, initially wanted to be a writer. Her parents gave her a year after college to pursue it, but after Ms. Kim’s efforts to find a job at a magazine foundered, she agreed to go to law school. Today she is happy she did. “American parents will say, ‘Do whatever makes you happy, even if the talent isn’t there,’ ” Ms. Kim said. “You need a reality check.”

While the approach lauded in the book certainly seems common among many immigrant communities (or is that just sampling bias?…), it doesn’t seem as if the question is raised of whether this is the only way to raise high achievers. Indeed, what are the drawbacks of this approach?

Still, the relentless pressure to succeed can backfire. Peter A. Spevak, a psychologist who runs the Center for Applied Motivation in Rockville, Md., where he strives to help patients build career success, says that children who are pushed too hard may eventually prosper but can end up being “very frustrated” adults who feel like they “missed their own childhood.”

I don’t know what it is about today– the wet weather, the feeble daylight, the long sleeves and sweaters that have popped up around the office. I feel like nesting. There’s a yearning for autumn leaves and the comforts of home: wool, dinner parties, firelight, and a good book.

Salon has an article on the men who are into “Real Dolls”– life-size, realistic silicone female dolls. It’s a whole subculture, apparently, some of whose members eschew “organic” women in favor of their dolls and some of whom don’t. Many of these men seem to enjoy having a “woman” around who won’t talk back, is always there for them, and, ehm, yes, can provide sexual satisfaction.

The Real Doll website (explicit content) even has a male model (explicit content). Interestingly, for this Charlie doll, unlike the female variants, the anal orifice is optional.