Productivity #

My first relationship with computers was positive. I felt empowered. The screen and keyboard in front of me allowed me to focus and to be more productive. The computer was a tool that helped me organise my thoughts and get things done.

I was writing more than ever before. The computer encouraged me and challenged me to create. Every new tool was a fun challenge to play with. And I tried to master those tools.

This relationship later changed as the computer software evolved. The computer programs started to get more complex. The computer games started to get more entertaining and addictive. Later the social media came in and with that completely new kind of addiction.

The computer stopped being a tool. It was no longer a black canvas waiting for my input or a humble servant waiting for my command. It became a source of distraction and entertainment and it became increasingly hard for me to turn it back into that silent, humble, useful tool.

Especially with social media it’s hard to just close that portal to that infinite world of inspiration. The genie was out of the box. You can uninstall all of the social media apps. But you will always know they exist and be temped to install them back. Because we’re naturally curious creatures that have a tendency to explore the available terrain. But the online world is infinite and often deceiving and potentially emotionally exhausting.

Anyways - we can figure out ways to get back at least some sort of control. To make the computer that tool that empowers you and makes your mind clear and focused rather than distorted and chaotic.

Command lines and GUIs #

The first computers utilised a command line. A computer was waiting for a command to be typed out on a keyboard - a name of the program to execute and maybe a set of initial parameters. The learning curve on this way of operating the computer could be high and so when first operation systems with graphical user interfaces emerged, they were a great success. But those first GUIs were still simple and minimalistic and it didn’t even take huge amount of time to explore the entire UI space of the operation system.

The problems started appearing later, when UIs got more complex. With large amount of options, it’s easier to get overwhelmed. With every new option, every new UI element present, it’s easier to lose the original intention you had up in your mind, get distracted and pursue a different goal. Sometimes this is useful and it can lead to creativity, and exploration - for example when you are browsing filter effects in a graphic editor. But often you might be switching back and forth, forget your intentions and come up with new ones and be lost and stuck. You end up with that question in your head “What was that thing I wanted to do? Oh right…”. And this is draining you mentally.

Later it changed even for the worse. Notifications came in - basically random inputs arriving at random times. Every notification is a potential source of distraction, leading you astray from your original stream of thought. And then UIs themselves learn new ways to distract you. With Social Media and the whole “attention economy” surrounding it that makes money from distracting you so that you spend more time on the site than you intended. Feeds, suggestions again flip the flow of user experience 180 degrees. Before you had an intention and the computer waited until you express it. With feeds, notifications and suggestions, you don’t need an intention, the program will give you one, and then another. Usually the intention you receive is “keep scrolling”, or “click here”. You’re hooked. Furthermore, you can come up with a certain intention and the intense, attention grabbing homepage you arrive to will immediately replace it with something else. Initial intention is forgotten and you’re again lost in distraction. You want to check the time, you pull up your phone, see a twitter notification and immediately start checking it. Then you put the phone back in your pocket and ask yourself, “What’s the time again?”. You want to check a specific youtube video. You open Youtube homepage you are immediately captivated by an emotional thumbnail image and click there instead. You never search for the video you came there for. You want to message your friend on facebook, you go to facebook.com, but instead of going to the contacts, you see photos from your cousin’s wedding (or just random memes).

One way to get back in control is to actually return back to the flow of command → response. It might seem illogical, going back in time, but sometimes going back to the roots is wise. We can also make the command lines overall more user accessible. We can have nice autocomplete so you don’t need to type everything so exactly. The command line can also interpret the commands more smartly, so you can even type your intentions in more free form language.

We’re getting there. Siri or Alexa are actually sort of command lines. Just voice oriented. And if you want you can set your Mac to be able to type to your Siri as well. Google understands a lot of command nowadays and smartly inputs rich results as well. And then there’s tools like Alfred, that allow you to set up powerful commands as well.

With these improvements, it’s possible to return to the original flow of intention ⇒ result for much broader audience than before. But often it’s needed to break old bad habits first.

Getting back in control #