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The Money Man Behind Rick Santorum: Who Is Foster S. Friess?According to a report by Basex Inc. the pressure put on us by technology to respond immediately to emails, text messages, and IMs cost the US economy around $650 billion in 2006. They say that the human brain is not hardwired for paying attention to several things at once or for handling constant interruptions, and due to this there is lost productivity. Sounds nutty to me. Email, text-messaging, and IM'ing save tremendous amounts of time and travel. For a businessman these tools save tremendous amounts of money. Having questions answered in a split second brings much more efficiency to a business, and to the world.
Is it better if I go grocery shopping and I get an SMS message to pick up another gallon of milk, or would these researchers say I should go home and then have my wife tell me to go out again and pick up the milk? That doesn't sound too efficient, does it? I was literally on a conference call, that just ended, which took much longer than expected. Lucky for me, I was on mute the whole time, and via email, I was able to take care of about 45 minutes worth of work, all while on the call. That doesn't sound to me like a cost to society.
The whole point of technology is to free us up to be more efficient, to have more time to do other things. How can this possibly cost society $650 billion.
Aaron Katsman is the lead Portfolio Manager and Managing Director of America Israel Investment Associates, LLC. and Senior Editor of IsraelNewsletter.com. Disclosure: Writer has no position in any stock mentioned as of 12/27/07
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
12-27-2007 @ 7:36PM
FaxMeBeeer said...
I'm not sure that it's so wrong to claim that the constant attacks on our concentration come at a cost (and, in fact, there must be a cost...no free lunch, right?). I don't know that it could be quantified at $650 billion, or $650 thousand, but there absolutely must be a cost. Assuming that your average worker doesn't have a surplus of time, then every time they get a pop-up in the middle of the day that they are expected (by convention) to respond to immediately, then whatever they were doing a few seconds before is now on hold. When they get back to the original task, they have to re-orient themselves, and even if that only takes a few seconds it creates the potential for diminished quality of work, or increased mistakes. What's the cost of our societal failure of attention to detail?
Of course, there's also the cost to our psyche: increased stress, information overload, loss of feeling of control...all creating the potential for increased medical costs (which I'm sure was figured into that $650 billion number).
3-23-2008 @ 5:31PM
Edward Heath said...
How can you make the analogy comparing the problem of unnecessary interruptions to general e-mail and IM and text messaging? I have read several articles on this and related research as well as one of the reports put out by Basex (I'm guessing you haven't read it) and they make a decent case for this.
Saying "Sounds nutty to me" in response to what in reality is a serious problem that will make it harder and harder to get work done. What is a bit nutty perhaps is the "milk" example you suggest as it makes no sense at all in the context of the problem of information overload.