[Sigia-l] Windows wide open

[Johndan Johnson-Eilola]

Although there's been a lot of hullabaloo about multi-tasking and its 
costs and benefits, most people I know are still pretty wedded to 
single-tasking. I've been gathering screenshots from students at my 
university as part of a research project, and I was surprised at how 
many of them only had a handful of windows open at any point. I don't 
have any empirical data on the samples yet, but in skimming through them 
as they've been submitted by students, I recall that most of them seemed 
to be working with only one or two applications (usually one of the MS 
Office applications + a Web browser + an IM window + WinAmp).

I'm not sure if this is skewed by the fact that they're college 
students. Although college life can certainly be busy, students also 
seem to focus their work by devoting specific chunks of time to specific 
class assignments: Do a PowerPoint presentation on X, write a report on 
Y. And X and Y are usually (at least for the majority of their classes) 
fairly straightforward tasks requiring only a few key information sources.

In some related research, I'm also gathering pictures of their entire 
work environments, which are much more cluttered, with multiple open 
books, notes, post-its, and handouts scattered all over their desks. So 
maybe what I'm seeing is a combination of the somewhat simplistic nature 
of many college assignments coupled with the fact that most of them are 
still getting their course information and notes in print or handwritten 
form--only a handful of students bring their laptops to class for 
note-taking or other work.

I just counted my own workspace, and I have 28 windows open, which is 
more or less typical for me. But (like many people who work with a lot 
of information) I usually work with dual-monitor setups.

- Johndan


> Ziya wrote:
> 
>>What *is* actually interesting and useful is the bit of info 
>>I caught in one of the videos. MS research has found that an 
>>average Windows user has a total of 4 windows open at any 
>>given time and that number is pretty much the upper range.
>>
>>Does that jive with your observations?