One day, with a bit of luck, someone will invent a device that silences loud-talking office colleagues whenever required, perhaps using a controlling sound device. In the meantime, a Canadian company called CanFocus is seeking funding on Kickstarter for a gadget prototype : a physical button, 3.5 inches wide, called MyFocus. In its default state, they explain, it sits on your desk and glows green. Press it, and it turns off all your incoming messages – emails, tweets, calls and the rest, on all your devices, mobile and desktop. It also glows red, serving as a highly visible signal to annoying co-workers that you're in "do not disturb" mode and that efforts to engage you in conversation might be met with the terrifying rage of Thor himself.
"Our founder works out of Israel and he has a button in Toronto," Paul Chipperton, of CanFocus,told Mashable. "When he goes on red in Tel Aviv on his smartphone, we can see in the office in Toronto in real time that he's on red and we don't make any effort to contact him." Obviously, you can't force a human to obey the red signal. But you could imagine this working well in a large office where everyone had a button, creating social pressure to respect "do not disturb" time.
If it manages to do what it promises and the prototype doesn't yet play nicely with Facebook or Gmail, it seems – MyFocus could prove a major development in "conscious computing", . Too often, attitudes towards distraction and loss of focus in the age of the internet fall into two camps: the zealots, who simplydeny thereis any problem, and the sceptics, who think the only option is disconnecting, at least somewhat, from the web. There's much to be said for that second position, but conscious computing offers a third possibility: what if we could harness digital technology to cultivate attention, focus and calm?
Source
The Guardian
