The Vancouver Sun is publishing a series of articles called “20 Big Ideas” about the trends and phenomena that defined this decade.
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Part 2: Technologies are enticing, but it is harder and harder to wean ourselves away from them.

When I e-mailed Gloria Mark to ask if she would be available for an interview, I wasn’t expecting a quick response.

That’s because I knew that as a professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, and author of The Cost of Interrupted Work: More Speed and Stress and other studies on multi-tasking, she set a schedule to avoid digital distractions by checking her e-mail only twice a day.

That makes her a bit of an anomaly in a relentlessly wired and wireless world, which is starting to weary some to the point that uni-tasking or mono-tasking could come as a welcome relief.

“I can only guess that multi-tasking has increased over the decade because we’ve got a lot more devices and applications available to us,” said Mark. “For example Twitter — it wasn’t around 10 years ago and now it is one of the top applications being used on the Web.

“We’ve got a lot more technologies available that people seem to enjoy, like Twitter, Facebook and social networking sites that didn’t exist 10 years ago. There is a lot more to offer people but at the same time, it is distracting.”

Read this article from The Vancouver Sun.