Credit Jim Wilson/The New York Times
We give time a hard time. We take it, steal it, spend it and waste it. Thanks to computers, now we’re chopping time up into ever-smaller fragments.
“We used to interact with personal computers daily, for two or three hours at a time,” said Phil Libin, the chief executive of Evernote, a company for storing things like photos, business cards and notes online. “With laptops, we started interacting three or four times a day for 20 minutes each. Mobile phones made that into sessions of two minutes, 50 times a day.”
In the coming world of connected devices like smart watches and Internet-connected appliances, Mr. Libin said, “we’ll be having sessions of 10 seconds each, a thousand times a day.”
Evernote was created to cope with this nonstop, fleeting interaction, but even Mr. Libin doesn’t know how we will cope.
“I’m designing jobs that don’t exist yet,” he said, “people who know how to build interfaces for a world where computers understand context, what you need to see next.”
You could see that as a further fragmentation of how people interact. Long documents printed out from PCs gave way to shorter emails and attachments on laptops. These became even shorter and faster-to-send texts on cellphones. The cost in nuance was apparently compensated for by more back-and-forth collaboration and urgency.
Evernote, along with online document creation and storage outfits like Box, Dropbox, and Hightail are responses to the trend of fragmentation, and the increasing amount of urgent collaboration. Material gets put there, not in rigid filing cabinets or the digital analogs of older Microsoft filing systems, but in digital heaps that can be easily searched.
This material is readily shared so that the document becomes an attribute of fast interaction. Soon we’ll need machines to prepare even faster-moving interactions. Each individual interaction becomes similar to the frames of a film; close enough together and moving fast, they become a movie.
“We’re going from a discrete world of interactions to a continuous world,” said Sam Schillace, the head of engineering at Box. “Now people look at Twitter when they have 30 seconds. It’s not hard to take that a step further and envision interactions you barely notice, two seconds or less.”
That speed of interaction, Mr. Schillace said, means thinking differently about what writing means. “In my ideal world, you don’t really think about creating a document. You think, ‘I have to talk with four people,’ and a document is maybe created as an afterthought to that.”
For both Mr. Libin and Mr. Schillace, more computing in shorter bursts means that even more computing will be going on in the background, learning about us and prioritizing information for the next time we interact.
“We’ll need programs that understand how the world works in general, then contextualizes you inside that,” Mr. Schillace said. “Computers augment what we’re not good at, like remembering things and adding numbers. We’re not good at multitasking information.”
Some social changes are already underway. During an interview, Mr. Libin kept checking his watch, as if he had somewhere to go. In fact, he was testing out a new smart watch and looking down every time a new message came in. The behavior was awkward, as though he were trying to operate in two worlds at the same time.
Not all the architects of our computing world believe these problems will be solved by artificial management. “The first time an agent is wrong about a message from the boss, that is the last time you’ll use it,” said Bret Taylor, co-founder and chief executive of Quip, a company that makes a new type of word processor. “I don’t believe in the magic robot.”
Mr. Taylor, a veteran of Google and Facebook who built Quip as a challenge to traditional word processing, agreed that most formal writing is falling away. “We don’t talk to customers about documents,” he said. “We talk about communications, and the features supporting that.”
Formal documents, he said, are becoming more like everyday speech — more partial than fully thought out, urgent, and supported by lots of little interactions. Quip has a “like” button you can use when someone makes a change to your writing, the equivalent of a nod when listening in a fast conversation.
When it comes to managing fragmented, communications-heavy information, he said, people will invent a new social etiquette. “We don’t answer the phone during dinner now,” he said. “A few years ago people might write emails while talking to you, now they don’t.”
In other words, we still may be left with the hard task of being polite to one other.
Mr. Taylor takes his iPad home to receive messages, but leaves his laptop at work, with the aim of working for shorter periods. “We have to make our own rules,” he said. “Leaving your phone and going away is a more efficient technology step than anything we can invent.”