MIND GRENADES
these microtasks. They said it made them
feel more productive: “It’s like chipping away
at the document,” one noted. “It was nor-
mally time I would be wasting.”
This concept is called microproductiv-
ity—and you might be working this way soon
too, because companies like Microsoft have
begun weaving microtasks into commer-
cial software.
Microproductivity emerged in part as an
evolutionary response to everyone’s num-
ber one complaint about office life: inter-
manager for Office 365, tells me. The com-
pany has just made it explicit and tethered
those tasks to your macro work.
One could imagine microtasks blooming
everywhere. As AI gets better at extracting
small tasks from our big projects, it could
start tweeting us to-dos or hitting us up on
Slack. It might even be kind of fun. A few
years ago, MIT researcher Carrie Cai co -
created a language-learning plug-in for
Gchat: During down moments, like waiting
for a reply, it would teach you a new word.ruptions. It takes 25 minutes to truly resume
a task we’ve been distracted from, on aver-
age. Even still, our attention shifts across
our computer screen every 47 seconds, as
research by Gloria Mark, an informatics pro-
fessor at UC Irvine, has found. And with each
interruption we often lose context. When we
come back, we tend to forget what the heck
we were doing.
Jaime Teevan of Microsoft Research tells
me she thought about this problem because
whenever “you take a break ... you go off into
some rathole on social media.” She wondered
if she could co-opt the fragmented nature
of screen life. Instead of incessantly lectur-
ing people about mindfulness and staying
focused, what if you engineered work to fit
into those fractured moments? “You have to
meet people where they are,” Teevan says.
The Facebook experiment worked so
well that Microsoft now plans to put micro-
tasks into Word itself. As you’re working, you
will be able to identify small bits that need
doing—like finding a fact or finishing off a
paragraph—and flag them with an @ sym-
bol. Then Word pushes them out as emails to
yourself (or to a colleague, if you’ve pinged
them with an @), each message contain-
ing one task, which can be completed right
inside the email itself. Once it’s done, Mic-
rosoft inserts the edit back into the Word
doc—no cut-and-paste necessary, even if a
colleague completes the work.
Email is already “just a bunch of micro-
tasks,” as Rob Howard, Microsoft’s general
(On average, people learned four a day.)
Viewed one way, microproductivity is a
clever hack of our frazzled lives. Viewed
askance, it seems deranged—digital Tay-
lorism run amok. Email has already metas-
tasized to the point where it can consume
more than a quarter of our work days;
should we be adding more? This is what
you’d expect Microsoft’s subjects feared
when they started the microtask experiment.
But once they’d tried it, Teevan says, they
liked how it fit real work into small bursts.
In fragmentary moments, instead of grazing
on social media or replying to endless email
chains, they were cranking away on actual
documents they really needed to finish.
And the microtasks could also be psy-
chologically useful: They reminded people
to complete their work. As Teevan notes,
we sometimes procrastinate on the big job
because we don’t know where to start. The
microtasks create forward momentum.
Many of our digital tools are, in precisely
this way, Janus-faced. And with productiv-
ity, Americans typically veer back and forth.
Half the time we’re Walt Whitman, loafing
around on Twitter. The other half we’re Puri-
tans, attacking our to-do lists with moral
fire. Microtasks manage to live in both
worlds. They might be, ironically, a creature
perfectly suited to our times.Instead of lecturing people about mindfulness
and staying focused, what if you engineered
work to fit into fractured moments?
NETFLIX,
CHILL OUT
Surprise! I have nightmares. In my lat-
est, I was stumbling through an eternal
field in the dead of night, fog so thick
I couldn’t see two inches. Then, out of
the mist, a carousel materialized. Car-
nival music jangled as the wide-eyed
wooden horsies screeched round and
round. The moment I jerked awake, the
meaning was clear: This is my freak
show of a life on Netflix. So many eve-
nings, the haze of the day gives way to
the dull shock of the Scroll. Row upon
row of bingeables, as infinite as they
are inane, siren-song me to oblivion.
If I dare pause on one, it shrieks grote-
squely alive. Oh look, Netflix has a new
movie about—YOU HAVE NO CHOICE
BUT TO WATCH THE INTERMINABLE
TRAILER RIGHT NOW. Autoplay, you
are an unconquerable horror, the sadis-
tic ride attendant who won’t let me off.
Make it stop, holy mother of cyberhell,
make it stop! Amazon respects the still-
ness (along with my ability to read a
show description); so does Hulu. Net-
flix, do you wish to nauseate your user
base? To make it impossible to breathe,
process, choose? Do you really have
such minuscule confidence in the intrin-
sic appeal of your programming? No
matter how many spins I take through
the grid, terrified to linger lest I trig-
ger a mini movie, I end up back where
I started, a little deader inside. Carou-
sels originated in ancient Arabia, let’s
remember, with real-life horsemen run-
ning in circles. The 17th-century Italian
word carosello meant “little war”—
it was a training exercise. The Scroll
appears to be training my brain for a
more modern campaign: the stream-
ing wars. When the time comes to pick
sides, I’ll be stuck inside Netflix, riding
and dying for it—forever.CLIVE THOMPSON (@pomeranian99) is a
wired contributing editor. Write to him at
[email protected].