In a blog essay, I riffed on Clive Thompson"s "Meet the Life Hackers," a New York Times Magazine story about how Microsoft researchers are trying to help people cope with interruptions and how alpha geeks rely on "life hacks" to optimize their attention. In an NPR interview, Thompson nailed the essence of our dilemma. It"s true that interruptions can distract us from our work, he said, but it"s also true that interruptions are part of our work. When we speak the language of interruption, our vocabulary leaves much to be desired.

Everyone has different preferences, so it"s vital that people choose which channel to be interrupted on. Phone? Sure. E-mail? Fine. RSS? OK. Instant message? Absolutely. Any of the above, based on your presence indicator? Cool.

But stuffing the same messages down one channel or another doesn"t alter the nature of those messages, or reduce the total effort required to process them. To rewrite that equation, we"ll need to tap our latent visual, auditory, tactile, and maybe even olfactory abilities. Today"s notification systems make poor use of that rich sensorium.

One of the Microsoft researchers" key findings was that use of multiple large monitors helps information workers avoid context switches, making them more productive. Expanding the field over which our visual pattern recognizer can range is a good idea, but it only scratches the surface of what"s possible. More importantly, we need to enrich those visual patterns. The visual cortex can absorb dense information displays when, as graphics guru Edward Tufte tirelessly points out, those displays are carefully designed.

Of course we can react to nonvisual patterns too. A couple of years ago, in a column entry called "The Network Song," I wrote about an experimental system that translates server logs into cricket chirps and birdsong. If living in a state of continuous partial attention is the permanent new reality, let"s engineer our interruptions to be subtle, natural, and pleasing to the senses.