Continuous Partial Attention: Software & Solutions
The ways in which we consume and pay
attention to information are changing. The changes are not minor, they are big and
profound. Right now, it impacts us all individually - but soon the change will be visible
on a global scale. We are splitting our attention over a rapidly growing body of online
information.
To cope with that we replaced reading with skimming and learned to work in an environment with constant interrupts. We no longer have time to pause and reflect, let along think for a while.
Today we have successfully replaced attention with what Linda Stone coined and Marc Orchant recently wrote about: Continuous Partial Attention. So are we making a mistake by stretching our attention thin? Not necessarily, it is just a new way of doing things that we have to adapt to. This new way demands more from us - and from the software that helps us. Last week, in the Implicit Web post, we discussed how software can be used to automatically capture and leverage our attention. In this post we will focus on the human impact of attention. How do we, and people around us, adapt to this new, attention hungry world?
The Roots of Partial Attention
There are two major axis that cause inattention - the amount of information and the interrupts. The massive adoption of broadband gave birth to new media types; like photos, podcasts and video. The blogosphere and the social web amplified and remixed this new content in a huge number of ways. As a result, the amount of new information has exploded in recent years.
Consider one simple example - a Facebook profile. It is a continuos stream of activity about all of your friends. I have maybe 30 friends on Facebook and there is quite a lot going on each hour. My sister probably has over 200 and I cannot imagine what it is like seeing 7 times as much activity there. For an individual to keep up with the whole network is hard. Watching the world is interesting, but it is also exhausting. A lot of raw, unfiltered information is what leads to partial attention.
The second cause is the interrupts. Email and chat have migrated from laptops to wireless devices, making us all reachable anywhere anytime. If you have an engaging business and personal life, the chances are you will be interrupted at least once an hour and maybe even every 15 minutes. Because of these unexpected interrupts, you cannot fully immerse yourself into your work - you can only give it your partial attention.
Iteration - the New Way We Work
We all hate the feeling of being woken up just when we are about to fall asleep. Because we cannot fully dive into problems, we are learning to not dive at all. Instead, we solve problems iteratively. We do not map out a strategy all the way, we choose a good path, explore it and look for feedback. Based on the feedback, we adjust the path and then repeat. Perhaps before, we used to think through things more deeply, but these days we replace the deep thinking with rapid iteration.
And this is not necessarily a bad thing! Iteration is a very powerful algorithm for reaching the best solution. In math and computer science, iterative algorithms are known to solve problems that are not possible to fit into an exact formula. In nature, iteration is the key to adaptation - it has worked for billions of years. So it seems that iteration has now found its way permanently into our business and daily lives.
But there is actually a big downside. Iteration requires much more energy. The constant context-switching and rapid pace are much harder than the slower-paced planning and pondering mode. The question is: how long can we sustain such a rapid mode? Will we burn out faster than people before us? It is actually a rather likely possibility.
The Software for Iterative Mode
In the movie Memento,
the main character suffers from memory loss. He is unable to remember his state for more
than a few hours. To get by, he leaves himself clues and notes - often tattooed onto his
own body, so that he is able to pick up where his brain left him last time. This movie is
a drastic and disturbing portrayal of what happens when the gray matter in our head
malfunctions, but you cannot walk away from it without realizing that our state defines
what we are. If we constantly iterate and change activities, how are we to keep our
state?
We need a calendaring/email/project management all-in-one tool that is designed to support this iterative mode. Basecamp from 37signals was probably the first step towards such software. It is lightweight agile project management software that captures basic concepts of project management and then gets out of your way. But Basecamp leaves off a few things. For example, there is no way to map todo items onto a calendar, no way to prioritize them and no direct way to make emails into tasks. Todoist, which Lachlan Hardy profiled recently, seems to be closer to what we need - it factors in both calendaring and prioritization. In its current implementation, however, it is aimed at advanced, keyboard-centric, users.
We need a tool, an assistant, that understands our processes, understands what we are doing, when we change tasks and when we finish them. It needs to be with us everywhere - on and off line and on the go. As much as possible, this tool needs to help us juggle our tasks and restore the context, recall and store information and make our life easier for us. This is not Artificial Intelligence, this is basically a glue for all the things that we are trying to juggle and ways we are trying to juggle them.
Conclusion
In his post, Marc Orchant suggests that sometimes we just need to unplug from the grid to regain control and sanity. He said:
"There are many things you can do to regain control over your attention and shut out the distractions. But the simplest thing you can do is to turn off the alerts and alarms when you're working on projects. I said simple, I didn't say easy."
Clearly, we all do this once in a while, if anything just to get some face time with our families and friends. Yet increasingly the grid sucks us in and there is no way back. There will never be less information, there will always be more of it. Much more. The sooner we recognize it and prepare for this change, the easier it will be for us to embrace this brave new world. The age of Continuous Partial Attention has arrived and it is here to stay.
How are you dealing with it? Please share with us the ways that you manage to keep things under control. What methods and tools help you do that?
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Alex,
This is a terrific article. I 100% agree with what you wrote.
We are entering what I call "connected aloneness." Which is all of us each alone at our own PC but connected to everyone at the same time.
Are we entering the Matrix! :)
George Zachary
You may want to reread the post you cited for the origin of CTP :) Linda Stone is actually the one who coined the phrase, and Nat was just taking notes at a talk.
Being a veteran of "partial attention" all my life, I am amazed that other people can get anything done. :O) This is a superb article Alex.
I 100% agree to it, Alex!!
Alex,
This is a great article. "Continuous Partial Attention" is certainly a problem especially at this Web 2.0 stage. But it will be gradually solved during the web evolution. I have written a response to this post at my blog. Thank you for posting such a good post and lead us thinking more on the evolution of World Wide Web.
-- Yihong
I most like blog posts adressing one of my current thinkings. You did it in great manner!
As a software developer i depend strong on the internet. With some friends and a lot of digital interessts the chance to get interrupted or distracted is really high.
I think the iteration model works not for time chunks of less than 1/2 hours. In this time you can get some things done. Than you can make a break, read a blog, rethink something and go on.
But the informations income frequence ist much higher. As you stated out too, every minute something happens. So i have to discipline my self. What is - dependig on the open tasks - is sometimes really hard :)
To keep my state in sync i use iGoogle with all the different tools. There i have calender, news reader, mail inbox, todo list, post its, bookmarks and more. Because my digigtal state is mostly changed while im browsing in the internet Googles Browser Sync helps me a lot too.
The age of the ADHDs (ADHD stands for Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder) .
I "Suffer" from ADHD. It gave an extremely hard time as a child at school, where everything is structured and there is a clear road from point A to B. It took all of my will power not to cave in and believe that I’m really as stupid as they told me I was and it also took me many years (deep into my 20s) to find my true self and understand that shis "disorder" is really a blessing. Only than did my potential start to burst.
As an adult I can mange an do stuff that most of my colleagues can’t even dream of. I’ve lived a whole life of partial attention and for me the web and web 2.0 are heaven on earth. I go from link to link (I bless god for tabbed browsing) and I still keep some kind of holistic vision of all the seemingly unconnected information.
What my teachers have called Attention Deficit is really a surplus of partial attention abilities.
ADHD is not a disorder it’s a genetic variation that had a specific important role in the evolution of man. What scientist call an Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder is really the ability to look at a bigger and split vision of the world and still get the whole picture that most people around you simply can’t see. Take that ability to get the whole picture and mingle it with hyperactiveness and you get a strategist / warrior / hunter and leader.
ADHDs have had some rough times and been led to believe that they have a problem, a disorder, but now the wheel has turned.
I have bad news, sorry guys, for all those of you who suffer from a deficits of ADHD. There is no software in the world who can really help you with partial attention. Some software will make it a little better but in the end the only ones who will really be able to cope with this new reality are the ADHDs.
This is the age of the ADHDs and the rest better pray that scientists will develop an opposite drug to Ritalin (the drag that helped us ADHDs survive the school system) this new drug, if developed, would help the rest of you guys to split your attention just like a normal person that is lucky enough to have ADHD does without any effort.
Cheers
Great Piece Alex, A lot of the problem with the information explosion not only switching the context but also lack of context and orienting information. E.g. if people read this comment, there is no information about me here except when users click on the link to my blog to see who I am...This lack of context makes this information explosion all the more dizzing.
At issue is that as humans we have evolved to interact with people in our physical and temporal proximity. With Internet interactions, we lose not only the physical proximity but also the temporal connection and thereby a lot of context.
what we need are tools that can restore some of that context to make all the information more useful and less disorienting.
Technology and routines are, I think, the keys...
I follow 160 feeds, I'm reading 4 books at the time (wide variety... Godin, Auster, Vattimo, Weinberger), keep a blog, twitter (following 30 something), 3 active email accounts, Skype (no MSN!). I'm not a case, just the average web consumer you've written this for.
The technology hand is obvious: rss is the best time saver ever, Google Reader "star this"... made me read this post now cause it was impossible when it was posted... and tiny things like firefox tabs (4 of them now active with sites I know I have to check but simply not now)...
Routines is the key to not forgetting the basics... still have my 8 to 8 job, typical demanding clients, bills to pay, employees to advice and friends to laugh or cry with. No task manager can organize that for you and you'll never know if a new crisis is going to blow your day after the ring. A random system of rituals help me to stick with my routine and pay enough attention to all the stuff.
There's one issue I can't solve yet: other media. As you can see, almost everything I mention is pure text. Podcasts can wait for me to be listened for a month and I never ever place my eyes on a tv set... Why? You made me understand it right now: is a different kind of attention, needs to be concentrated in some other way not compatible with this fragile human system... Weird.
1/2 hours in #6 means 1 to 2 hours - not a half.
Avi,
interessting to read your comment.
Many of my friends don't understand how i can handle so much information. But often i have the feeling that i have a big picture in my head what the others could not imagine.
Maybe Scoble "suffers" from ADHD too, by reading about 600 feeds per day.
Now i have to work on ...
Good stuff Alex, I just posted quoting you on the topic of CWADD: Church Website Attention Deficit Disorder.
That is I agree entirely that as producers of web content, we must remain continually aware - AND ADAPTIVE - to the content consumption habits of our respective audiences.
This on the heels of J.Nielsen writing that many web sites still rock (suck) like it's 1999!
Tools you propose are really intertsing. I Understand there is evolution with human behavior. But for attention is very subtle. From my study in cognitive ergonomics there is different type of attention: spatial, temporal, visual.
We (human) are very bad keeping up with temporal attention. When we execute a procedure (step by step) and got interrupted, we tend to forget were we were. Mode is another example of such a problem.
I believe interruption for some task will always be bad
Alex-
great stuff - some thoughts here:
http://defragcon.com/Blog/?p=68
ejn
excellent post, but a little too long for me to read continuously. ;] I've always thought of my own attention "deficit" as a gift rather than a defect, and the CPA model gives that a solid base.
echoing Avi's post, I'd also recommend Thom Hartmann's writings on the subject, particularly his "Hunter in a Farmer's World" model. His The Edison Gene is a good introduction to the model.
Iterative mode has so dominated the working style of most web professionals that we need tools to help us work with ourselves asynchronously - like basecamp, conceptshare, protonotes, delicious, fleck....
i switch off rss reader/twitter/email/facebook for 4 hours and then do a speed-check. these apps then quit automatically after 30 minutes.
i tried to switch off the phone too last week but it cost us a major contract so i am not doing it ever again.
one good way too is pick a book. it forces us to focus for at least a couple of non-stop "work".
finally, we used to work with basecamp but i switched to a notebook (paper). it's a moleskine i can take everywhere.
Great article. Like others I have always had partial attention (probably undiagnosed ADHD). My teachers and then professors were always mystified about why I couldn't just pick ONE thing. Well, because.... Now I have a great job that combines technology, training, knowledge management, e-learning development and whatever else needs to be done. I am asked to help out on numerous projects, which to me reads as job security!
Great, dig it!
Thanks for this great article. It really rang a bell and got me thinking; I decided to write an article about it as well, combining this article and some more information that I found. You can read it here.
Alex, as usual you have forgotten that Particls is actually working toward this goal. ;)
Manual Trackback
http://www.particls.com/blog/2007/07/more-chatter-about-particls.html