Brains and emails

I have listened to the podcast called: “Brains and emails”. This podcast is dedicated to the problems of communication at work and usage of modern technologies. Here is the link:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p009hqkh

During the first listening I understood about 90 – 95%. The rest 5-10 % were rather difficult for me because of fluent English of the speakers and some new words and phrases that they used. While listening the second time I tried to elicit the unknown words and phrases. It was quite hard but worth doing.

Although the podcast was very long (about 18 minutes) I listened to it till the end. The speakers on the record were discussing a very urgent problem of using modern technologies at work. According to this record the scientists have discovered that heavy use of technology such as smartphones and laptops affects our brains. It changes the way we think and behave. It was also said there that G-mail had launched a new system which would filter your emails. Of course this system has its own shortcomings: you would probably lose an email from somebody you don’t know offering you something interesting because the system would attribute this email to “unnecessary”. The speakers on the record also talked about annoying colleagues, who always speak too loud at work. According to the latest research the problem of loud colleagues is number one problem of communication at work. The solution is to tell that colleague how loud he speaks.

As for me, I think that using new technologies at work is on one side something we can’t go without nowadays but on the other it is kind of trap. Numerous emails, phone calls really break your concentration and you stop working effectively. You should close down all your destructions and take into account that moderation of using technologies is a good thing to be done.