I’ve been tracking the noise in the blogosphere on Linda Stone’s Continuous Partial Attention concept ever since her presentation at SuprNova in June. In Linda’s view
With continuous partial attention we keep the top level item in focus and scan the periphery in case something more important emerges. Continuous partial attention is motivated by a desire not to miss opportunities. We want to ensure our place as a live node on the network, we feel alive when we’re connected. To be busy and to be connected is to be alive.
We’ve been working to maximize opportunities and contacts in our life. So much social networking, so little time. Speed, agility, and connectivity at top of mind.
We’ve become ultraconnected. We carry blackberries and cell phones, have multiple landlines, multiple emails addresses, multiple IM personas and so on and so forth. How connected? Well, Kathleen Pierz of the Pierz Group publishes a table of the range of ways we can be reached, which I’ve stolen, and added a few more to. How many of these apply to you? Four, six, eight? Usually when I ask that question, most people nod their heads all the way to 12, 14, 16. It’s quite amazing!
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Range of Contact Points for an Individual |
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At Home |
At Work |
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Here’s the paradox. Although we live in this ultra-connected world, it’s harder to reach us — most people give up after two or three attempts. Three out of every four phone calls end in voice mail. The calls we do receive? Many are simply inappropriate, or unwanted.
Some people thrive in this environment. Rick Segal talks about his days at Microsoft where he would handle as many as 800 emails in a day. Scoble apparently manages 500 a day today. How does one get any work done in that environment? When does Continuous Partial Attention simply become Attention Deficit Disorder?
People are developing coping mechanisms.
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Change the polling frequency of email so that it polls just once an hour instead of every 15 minutes.
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Turn the "toast" feature of IM off. No more pop-ups to let you know that your friend has just appeared online.
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Set your phone on Do Not Disturb to get some work done.
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My own personal favorite: I filter everyone who sends mail to me that ISN’T already in my contact list into a "follow-up later" folder.
Stowe Boyd, on Corante, advocates a social filter. Spread the load across your friends, and network with your buddies. You run the risk of creating a self-referencing system, though. Never mind alienating your friends.
The key to solving this problem is not Continuous Partial Attention. What we really need is to have continuously relevant interactions with those around us. We need to be able to instantly assess the importance of a particular communication, and deal with the most important interactions first using whatever value system appropriate to define importance. Ed Batista gets to the idea very nicely in his piece What’s Important Isn’t Necessarily Urgent. We all get lots of communications requests in a day — lots of demands for our attention — but very few must be attended to immediately.
My contention is that technology created this problem, and technology will play a key role in solving it. Relevance filtering technology — software that can discriminate and make choices on your behalf — will become common over time. You’ll train it as your assistant, and then rely on it utterly and completely. But that’s a topic for a future post.
Alec Saunders is the Vice President of Developer Relations for BlackBerry make Research in Motion. This is his personal blog, with his personal viewpoints. Prior to this Alec was the CEO and co-founder of Calliflower — the easiest way to hold a meeting, online, on a conference call, or on the go. A double-decade veteran of product management and marketing, he spent nine years at Microsoft where he helped launch Windows 95, the first two versions of Internet Explorer, the Universal Plug and Play initiative, the push into home markets, opt-in email marketing and what might well go down in history as the very first direct email list ever.
{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
I was prompted by this to imagine a cool feature for PDAs that would send a user’s message to all of his contact’s contact points automatically, with “one click”. I developed the idea into a small paragraph on my website at http://www.geocities.com/jameswi.geo/Computer/BusinessIdeas.htm
Hey James. Wouldn’t it be better to converge all the mailboxes on one, instead? I would find getting bombarded with 10 of the same messages an annoyance, personally.
Yeah, come to think of it, it would be better to do this on the recipient end.
Even though I wrote that the sender could select a subset of the contact
points, it would probably be such a small subset that this feature might
not be worth implementing. Voice-to-print and vice-versa would probably
be a neat feature on its own, however, for whichever way people prefer
to put down their thoughts. It could be useful for those who make voice
notes on their tape recorders while driving.
-Jim
Well, then again, again, I find myself having to call a couple of numbers
and send a couple of emails in order to reach someone, so it seems that
a flexible implementation of this kind of thing would have some limited
usefulness.
…On a clear disk, you can seek forever…
James:
It sounds like a "hammering" system to try to get hold of someone. I really hope that that someone has lots of patience. Imagine coming back to the office after the weekend and having your voicemail, email and fax machine loaded with the same message. If I am not on a good mood, I might actually set out to hunt down that person
V.
Alec,
I’d like a personal view of your engine and using your steal and add approach, would create a version to run on a mobile phone.
When can we talk?
Henry at http://www.model.ca knows me.
Cheers,
Nick
PS
I was at my Sufi session las month when someone told me that spam harvesters were gathering images in bulk and placing them at the front door of porn sites to get the monkeys to do free data entry.
When was the last time you changd the ’7′? Just a thought about innovation…Cheers, Nick
I am sure at some point there will be convergence. The phone as we know it will probably completely be replaced by VoIP some day. Its the integration of VoIP and wireless that I am very curious about. Can VoIP replace cellular? What about email convergence? Chat clients (meebo is a step in the right direction, but I like the user experience of individual clients).
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