Illustration: John CuneoThe mental state that the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls "flow" can be genuinely magical. There is nothing quite like the "deep enjoyment" of losing yourself in an experience, of becoming one with your work or hobby or sport or...excuse me, here's a message from my
Antispyware program, proud to grant my machine yet another clean bill of health.
What was I was saying? Oh, yeah, the state of flow is...wait a minute, some e-mail here. Only spam. And...hang on, the antivirus program is announcing that it has just updated itself. Glad to hear it.
Flow? All of a sudden every programmer alive seems to think it's fine and dandy to interrupt you with news of some trivial incident or meaningless nonevent. Pop-up ads are bad enough; now their equivalents have found their way into stuff that you've paid for to work behind the scenes, not dance on the table and proclaim its glory.
In the old days your antivirus program might have been stupid enough to ask you whether you wanted to eliminate a virus or merely quarantine it--as though you wanted to maintain your own personal collection. Now it brags that it has successfully maintained itself, repelled an attack, inspected and approved an e-mail attachment, or discovered that your antivirus subscription will expire in six months--or maybe that it's standing at the ready in the background. Excuse me, but all of that is business as usual. How about interrupting me only when there's a real problem?
Maybe it's just the influence of the most flow-busting software ever made--instant messaging, which I have banished from my PC--but feckless interruption is now a way of life. Windows Vista's User Account Control safeguard nags you every time you do anything that might conceivably in some alternative universe harm your machine but in the real world is almost always benign. Memo to Windows and every other program on the planet: Shut up!
If a spyware scan reveals no problems, don't bother informing me, please. If something like Adobe Acrobat Reader can get updates on its own, have it do precisely that without bothering me after the first time I click OK. Instead of waiting for my permission to perform some grand act that might slow my computer to a crawl, figure out a way to do it when the machine is idle, and don't force me to reboot--unless doing otherwise would be the first step toward nuclear winter. Simple rule: Don't pipe up unless it's really, really important.
If you're a firewall developer, use a silently updated internal database to figure out which programs should be permitted to phone home from my machines and which should not. And at this point, I'd rather not even hear that telltale ping that lets me know a new e-mail message has arrived. I'll check the inbox on my own schedule, thanks.
The marketing idea behind many such interruptions is no doubt the notion that reminding you of the importance of these ought-to-be-mostly-unseen helpers will keep you shelling out for new versions or subscriptions. But after the tenth or hundredth annoyance, what it really does is make you wonder whether there's a more low-key alternative that can do the same thing. Alas, now that programmers and marketers have become as bent on undeserved attention as ill-bred five-year-olds, the very concept of software quietude seems to be growing antiquated.
Flow? No mo'....
Contributing Editor Stephen Manes was cohost of PC World's Digital Duo on public TV.
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