Steven Johnson's latest Discover column.

We're not doing our best thinking in front of a computer screen. This is the dark side of the connected age: We have vastly more information at our fingertips than ever before but less time to make sense of it.

... email-free Fridays ... individual employees send and receive, on average, 178 messages each day via email, phone, voice mail, fax, and pager.

What we really need are better screens: interfaces built for focus and contemplation and not a barrage of distractions.

BusyBody, a new software package under development at Microsoft, is designed to sense the “cost of interruption” at any given point in a user’s interaction with the machine.