Do you receive texts? Seems like an innocuous question, right? According to Portio Research, 7.8 trillion texts were sent in 2011 and 8.6 trillion in 2012. By 2016 they predict earthlings will send almost 10 trillion texts. That’s even more than the total number of complaints Yahoo! employees sent to their HR office this past February. What’s the rule of thumb for answering a text? Is it immediate? Do you feel the urge to answer a text right away because you’ve set your phone settings to vibrate whereas other notifications — like email, Facebook,,etc. — are simply in your to do list queue? Is there any psychology research behind our beliefs in texts versus other forms of digital communication? Have you stopped reading because you’re
mobile Archive
In a landmark 2007 paper published in the Journal of Applied Psychology called “The Good, the Bad, and the Unknown About Telecommuting: Meta-Analysis of Psychological Mediators and Individual Consequences”, authors Ravi Gajendran and David Harrison of the Department of Management and Organization at Pennsylvania State University dispelled the notion that working from home was bad for business or bad for employee morale. It’s a paper I’m certain the internet company Yahoo! failed to read when they recently announced all 12,000+ employees had to begin working from Yahoo! offices 100 percent of the time effective June 2013. What did Gajendran and Harrison prove? Through the review and analysis of 46 individual studies that featured 12,883 employees, these researchers determined working from home demonstrated seven positive outcomes:
When I left academia in 2002 I also left the trappings of an office. When I switched organizations in late 2008, I also gave up a singular desk space. I’m like PacMan careening through a corporate game board collecting points at the desks, tables and rooms I occupy. I am a floater. I’m on a quest for the corporate floater high score. There are no ghosts in this game. Wherever the wind takes me — be it the road, various offices, home or coffee shops — I am working. I float. I’m like those bubbles we blew as a kid except I don’t pop when I crash into a wall. Too many childhood childish metaphors? With no office and armed with my laptop, tablet, mobile
Picture this for a minute. You’re facilitating a face-to-face meeting with about six people. You’re presenting a couple of topics on the overhead projector that describe next year’s objectives. As you emphatically make a point, back turned to your attendees and you’re moving towards the screen, half of your audience pulls out their mobile device seemingly trying to see who just emailed, tweeted or texted some obvious morsel of urgent information to them. You ask a question. There is silence. You ask the question again, only this time you pinpoint Jason – one of the attention deficit culprits – asking him to respond. He asks you to repeat the question because in his words he “didn’t hear the point you were trying to make.” You take