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UPDATED (on Jul 14, 2014): Richard Koopmann has significantly reworked his data, and while it doesn’t change the outcome, it is worth looking at if you are a data nerd. I’ve preserved this post as original and the new data can be found here.

I had this theory, while reading something completely unrelated, and the theory goes like this: I wonder if people tend to leave people alone more if they deem the device (or thing) they are using (or doing) to be of a “work” related type of task. That is, are we more or less inclined to bug people if we think they are doing something more than just screwing off? Common sense answers this: of course we are less inclined to bug people we perceive to be busy with something of importance.

The unanswered question that nagged at me: if I am writing a novel on an iPhone, am I more or less likely to get interrupted, than I would be if I was writing the same novel, same place, but by hand with a pen on paper? I’m doing the same task, just using a different device — how would that matter to the perception others had of me?

I thought the answer would be: never bug someone physically writing — they are clearly busy. I admit, that’s a rather stupid way to think as there are plenty of ways to waste time with a pen and paper, but I still had to know if I thought the same way as others.

So imagine you walked into an open office, and you can see what each person is doing the device(s) they are using and as you walk in you know you want to kill some time talking to someone — anyone. You know all the people in the room, and have no preference who you talk to, you just don’t want to write that TPS report so you want to shoot the shit.

Someone is on an iPhone, another on an iPad, another on their laptop, another still on a desktop, and then someone writing on actual paper with an actual pen — which of those people are you most likely to interrupt?

Naturally, I took a poll to help get to the bottom of this.

I asked two questions, while both are essentially asking the same thing, I rephrased the question to try and get a more accurate set of data.

The Results

I’m not a statistician and it’s been almost a decade since I had a class on it (I aced the course though). Because of that I decided to ask for some help and Letterpress ace @rkoopmann got in touch. He, apparently is a wiz with poll data.

So he worked up this report for me and I want to present it to you in its entirety.

Here we go, thanks rkoopmann:

Methodology

The poll was presented as a post with an embedded iframe on The Brooks Review website. The post was titled Interruption Survey and contained the following introduction and note:

I’d appreciate you taking a moment to fill this out (note this is an iframe, you need to scroll the frame to get to the “finish” button):

Note: I’m assuming you want to interrupt someone and they are using the device.

Instrument

The poll consisted of two questions:

1. I am more likely to interrupt someone using:
   • a pad of paper to write.
   • an iPad.
   • a Desktop.
   • a Laptop.
   • an iPhone.
2. I am least likely to interrupt someone using:
   • a pad of paper to write.
   • an iPhone.
   • a Desktop.
   • an iPad.
   • a Laptop.

Each of these items was required and only one choice was allowed per item.

Results

Respondents

There were 499 submissions received between 2014-06-11 18:44:51 and 2014-06-14 14:34:49 (GMT?).

Note that some percentages may not sum to 100% due to rounding.

Geography

The majority of respondents (58%) were from the United States; the next-largest group of respondents (9%) was from Great Britain. The remaining 33% of respondents came from 49 other countries with each country contributing less than 5% of respondents.

Operating System

The overwhelming majority of respondents (82%) were running an iOS (49%) or OS X (33%) device. Windows (4%) and Linux (2%) were the remaining identified operating systems; the tool was unable to identify platform for the remaining 12% of respondents.

iOS 7.1 (46%) and Mac OS X 10.9 Mavericks (29%) were the largest group of respondents; 9 respondents (2%) were bleeding-edge dev-types running iOS 8; 14 respondents were old-school OS X 10.1 Puma (released Sep 2001).

Q1. I am more likely to interrupt someone using

• a pad of paper to write. 12%
• an iPad. 16%
• a Desktop. 15%
• a Laptop. 6%
• an iPhone. 51%

We can see that an iPhone was selected at a significantly higher rate and a Laptop was selected at a significantly lower rate (chisq = 317.7635; df = 4; p \< 0.001) than expected (if we assume all options would be selected at the same rate of 20%).

There was no significant differences with how frequently a pad of paper to write, a Desktop, and an iPad were selected.

By Operating System

• iOS users (49% of respondents) responded with an iPhone at a significantly (chisq = 184.9796; df = 4; p \< 0.001) higher rate than expected.
  • iPhone users (34% of respondents) responded with an iPhone at a significantly higher rate and a Laptop and a pad of paper to write at a significantly lower rate (chisq = 151.5882; df = 4; p \< 0.001) than expected.
  • iPad users (15% of respondents) responded with an iPhone at a significantly higher rate and a Laptop at a significantly lower rate (chisq = 36.5205; df = 4; p \< 0.001) than expected.
• OS X users (33% of respondents) responded with an iPhone at a significantly (chisq = 82.9102; df = 4; p \< 0.001) higher rate than expected.

Q2. I am least likely to interrupt someone using

• a pad of paper to write. 45%
• an iPhone. 21%
• a Desktop. 22%
• an iPad. 2%
• a Laptop. 9%

We can see that a pad of paper to write was selected at a significantly higher rate and that a Laptop and an iPad were selected at significantly lower rate (chisq = 264.4569; df = 4; p \< 0.001) than expected.

There was no significant differences with how frequently an iPhone or a Desktop were selected.

By Operating System

• iOS users (49% of respondents) responded with a pad of paper to write at a significantly higher rate and a Laptop and an iPad at a significantly lower rate (chisq = 151.7143; df = 4; p \< 0.001) than expected.
  • iPhone users (34% of respondents) responded with a pad of paper to write at a significantly higher rate and an iPad and a Laptop at a significantly lower rate (chisq = 105.5882; df = 4; p \< 0.001) than expected.
  • iPad users (15% of respondents) responded with a pad of paper to write at a significantly higher rate and an iPad and a Laptop at a significantly lower rate (chisq = 46.3836; df = 4; p \< 0.001) than expected.
• OS X users (33% of respondents) responded with a pad of paper to write at a significantly higher rate and an iPad and a Laptop at a significantly lower rate (chisq = 78.4790; df = 4; p \< 0.001) than expected.

Holy cow, that’s so close to legitimate journalism that it makes bloggers everywhere shudder.

What Does This Mean?

What it means is that if you want to get work done, uninterrupted, you better not be doing it on an iPhone.

And if you really want to be left alone, write on paper.

But there are bigger implications to all of this than just the above. The audience that completed this survey is pretty tech centric. Therefore the respondents (one would assume) inherently know that you can likely do more work on your iPhone than a pad of paper these days. ((Exception to crazies like Mr. Rhone and Mr. Marks.)) And yet, the perception of someone likely to be dicking off on an iPhone, and therefore interruptible, is still there.

Look at the data, it suggests that the hierarchy of what is seen as a “real” tool goes from: is essentially paper in a league of its own. The iPhone is seen as something you are clearly not using concentration for, given the willingness to bug people using them.

That’s crazy.

A few people wondered why I didn’t just use generics for iPad and iPhone — like tablet and smartphone — my reasoning was twofold:

1. I don’t care about the other devices.
2. I suspect that people would answer differently between iPhone and BlackBerry, but not between HP and Apple for laptops. So I reasoned that the best way to keep that consistent was to name some devices.

The data can’t explain why we perceive paper as being more serious — more uninterruptible — but it does let us know that there is a different perception when you are using paper. And as an employer that’s a perception which I think employees should be aware of.

Maybe you love responding to emails from your iPhone, but perhaps, if you want your boss to think you are working, responding on a piece of paper is a better strategy.

Did I really just recommend that?

Either way my curiosity is only more peaked now.

UPDATED (on Jul 14, 2014): Richard Koopmann has significantly reworked his data, and while it doesn’t change the outcome, it is worth looking at if you are a data nerd. I’ve preserved this post as original and the new data can be found here.

A long time ago I saw this post on Justin Blanton’s site. In it he found a command line tool to use Speedtest.net to test his internet speed. Sounded great, I couldn’t get it to work.

Here’s what I did, I followed these instructions, but downloaded the file manually.

Ok, that’s neat, it works in the command line. But, I’m not typing that crap out. So I flipped over to Keyboard Maestro where I can execute that command line script and write out the results to a text file for logging.

Here’s what that looks like:

All I do is run the script, write the output to a variable and then append that variable to a text file.

In the text I append to the variable I also add in a separator, the time and date, and the network name I am on. Seems like over a long enough period I should be able to collect some interesting data.

Oh, and remember, as all those links say: don’t abuse this tool. It’s not for testing your bandwidth every 5 minutes.

This would have probably been far more timely a year ago, but oh well. The one thing that users of App.net (myself included) like to point to is that you have better, deeper, conversations on App.net then what you find on Twitter and therefore App.net is better. It’s as if theory gives far more meaning, or intellectualism to the service, and therefore (should) justify using it to anyone.

The idea is that because the service is smaller, used by people that are paying for it (mostly), and offers larger character limits — the conversations themselves are far deeper and done at a not-petty level (read: trolls).

So the real question is: is Twitter more shallow than App.net?

I don’t think so. I’ve used both extensively and App.net exclusively for the last year — so I have a good basis from where I speak. What I’ve come to realize, especially after coming back to Twitter, is that Twitter suffers from a popularity problem.

There’s too many great people and accounts to follow, and they turn out an amazingly high volume of, well, shit ((I don’t use shit to mean everything is bad stuff, just there’s a lot of shit being tweeted, some good, some inconsequential.)) everyday, hour, and minute. I’d guess that for everyone one post on App.net, I’d have 30 tweets waiting for me on Twitter, but it feels more like 50 to 1.

That’s astounding.

The real difference is that with Twitter you have a problem of overload, and on App.net it never gets that way. Even on busy days on App.net, I could go all day without checking App.net, spend 15 minutes at the end of the day, and be caught up. It just took me 15 minutes to get caught up on Twitter after not checking for three hours.

There’s no way I can decipher everything I see coming at me on Twitter, and because of that there is no way I can think about everything I see. On App.net you can read a post, think about it, and move on — without taking too much of your time. That will naturally lead you to formulating thoughts, thinking, and responding in a more considered manner.

It’s not that App.net is better for discussions because of the platform — it’s that it is better for discussions because fewer people use the service than use Twitter. Is that good or bad? That’s for you to decide, I missed the chaos of Twitter after a year away, but I do admit to needing to follow some old advice of mine:

We are not friends because we both pushed a button confirming so — we just are interested in what other people say. Think of Twitter more like RSS feed subscriptions and less like a network of friends and you won’t get so worked up over all this follower nonsense.

App.net as a platform kicks Twitter’s ass, but the people are simply not on App.net. You can live in the best city in the world, but if you feel alone in that city then what is the point of living there?

It’s not paid versus ‘free’, or 140 versus 256, that matters — what matters is what and how you use the service. You want more quality in discussions, slow down and read carefully and consider. Maybe unfollow a few hundred people on Twitter.

Today LaunchBar 6 was launched (sorry) and it is a tool I have been relying on for years — switching to it after the death of Quicksilver. It’s a fantastic launcher, but it can and should be used for so much more.

LaunchBar is now put in an interesting position with the expansion of the feature set of Spotlight in the coming OS X Yosemite — and though I’ve been testing this, Spotlight is hardly feature complete so a comparison at this point is pre-mature. Suffice to say, I doubt there is need for worry from the LaunchBar camp.

As you can see above, I use the piss out of LaunchBar — it’s one of the most used apps on my Mac. I mostly use LaunchBar for:

• Launching Apps
• Finding Contacts
• Searching this site
• Clipboard History

That may seem like an incredibly short list to most people, but the tool itself is invaluable.

I polled people on twitter and here are some of the responses I received about what people love about LaunchBar:

• Instant Send
• Clipboard History

Something like Instant Send is invaluable if you start thinking about it right. What I love to do is put images I am going to use in a post on my desktop. I then invoke LaunchBar, hit CMD+G, tab, and type imo+return. I’ve just sent all those images to ImageOptim for compression. Boom. Never touched the mouse. So great.

LaunchBar 6

Now, we aren’t just talking about LaunchBar for no reason, because today we get a new version of LaunchBar. Among the biggest changes to the app is the new look. It looks stellar. With a larger focus on typography, and a bigger overall UI.

Overall I love the new UI, it brings a welcomed update to and old favorite of mine. But the UI isn’t the most important part of LaunchBar, the most important part is taking the time to learn how to do cool shit in LaunchBar.

To that end, I want to focus on some of the new additions in LaunchBar 6 — you can see many more examples of what LaunchBar can do here.

New to LaunchBar 6 is the ability to invoke Transmit Favorites. I’ve longed used Transmit to work on all of my web servers, and this is a great addition. The favorites are easily called up in LaunchBar, and invoking the action opens that favorite in transmit. I used to have a special Keyboard Maestro macro to open favorites in Transmit, but this is an even better way. Handy little addition.

I mentioned earlier that you can select from a set of themes, well of course you can select from those within LaunchBar 6 itself. It makes for a very quick change of feel — something that will come in handy when you are working late into the night.

A few other great additions:

• Support for tags, both viewing and assigning tags to files.
• Now has Emojis, which is just fun.
• You can extend LaunchBar with custom actions written in a large range of scripting languages. This isn’t something I am likely to directly use, but I could see this becoming a very powerful way of launching scripts (like the ones Dr. Drang is keen to talk about).
• File data. I love being able to get all this info in a much better format than the Get Info dialog affords.

Overall

LaunchBar isn’t just a good app, it truly is one of the great apps you can have on your computer. The way I use it, isn’t the way that other people use it — and that is kind of the point. There is so much that LaunchBar can do, and do easily, that you really have to get it and spend time playing with it to wrangle its true power for you.

LaunchBar 6 is out now, go buy it.