Word: workers
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...official. The world's hottest human is in utero. ?Yes, I'm pregnant,? Angelina Jolie told a charity aid worker in the Dominican Republic, according to People magazine. After months of cozily co-parenting two international adoptees, Cambodia-born Maddox, 4, and Ethiopia-born Zahara Marley, 1, Hollywood's improbably gorgeous globe-trotting couple Jolie, 30, and her Mr. and Mrs. Smith costar Brad Pitt, 42, have decided to procure a new baby the old-fashioned way. The very public but oft-denied romance began amid rumors that Pitt and his ex-wife Jennifer Aniston separated because he wanted...
...revealing set of studies, a team led by Gloria Mark and Victor Gonzalez of the University of California at Irvine tracked 36 officeworkers--in this case information-technology workers at an investment firm--and recorded how they spent their time, minute by minute. The researchers found that the employees devoted an average of just 11 minutes to a project before the ping of an e-mail, the ring of the phone or a knock on the cubicle pulled them in another direction. Once they were interrupted, it took, on average, a stunning 25 minutes to return to the original task...
...WONDER SO MANY OF US SUCCUMB to the panicky feeling that we can't keep pace with workplace demands. A series of new studies that examined the modern, multitasking worker show that the constant splintering and diversion of our attention wastes time and money. In a study of 1,000 officeworkers from top managers on down, Basex, an information-technology research firm in New York City, found that interruptions now consume an average of 2.1 hours a day, or 28% of the workday. The two hours of lost productivity included not only unimportant interruptions and distractions but also the recovery...
...circuits help address the problems it has created? Czerwinski and her bosses at Microsoft think so. She's helping design an intelligent office-communication system that calculates whether an interrupting e-mail or IM should be transmitted immediately or delayed on the basis of, among other factors, the worker's appointments and projects that day, his past preferences and habits and the organizational-chart relationship between sender and receiver. "Something like this has got to happen sooner or later," says Czerwinski, though she acknowledges that it raises privacy issues. The alternative is to turn off the IMs, phones...
Czerwinski has also been helping Microsoft design alternatives to current software products to allow workers to stay on task for longer periods, even as onscreen interruptions arrive. In next-generation systems, which Microsoft's competitors are pursuing as well, interruptions are designed to be less intrusive--nothing flashes, pops up or makes a noise--and the alerts appear on the periphery of a screen that's larger than today's standards so that workers stay centered on their main task. The key, she says, is for an incoming message to provide just enough information for the worker to judge whether...