Partial

Bryan Richard’s piece What if Presence and Voice are a Bad Combination? is asking a really important question. He writes:

Imagine for a minute if a percentage, any percentage, of the relevant email and instant messaging you get on a daily basis were phone calls. Would you get more work done? Or would your phone ring so much that you started screening your calls and dumping some directly to voicemail?

The telecommunications industry has spent a decade wiring us up with multiple phone lines, cellular phones, IM, email, and so on. I have two home landlines, an office extension, a couple of fax lines, two IM IDs, at least four VoIP IDs, and four email addresses. I’m not unusual. I’m just another ultra-connected person living in today’s hyper-connected world. The paradox of all this connectivity is that over 60% of calls end in voice mail today. It happens for two reasons — we use voice mail as a call screener, and we’re now so available in so many ways that the important calls don’t actually reach us because people give up.

Bryan advocates better time management.

All of us are either available or we’re not and I’m not sure it needs to be more complex than that. There’s a great book on time and project management by David Allen called ‘Getting Things Done’ that is worth everyone’s time to pick up. One of the basic tenets of it is that we need to limit our input and assign priority to everything that we need to do. The concept of marrying voice to presence doesn’t strike me as a step in that direction.

Bryan is right that presence isn’t a step in the right direction. However, availability is not binary. At any point in time, the likelihood I will take a call from my spouse, an important customer, my children, a head hunter, an employee, friends, the landlord, or the local travel agent trying to sell me on their services, is different. I am available to some people, but not others. What’s important isn’t necessarily urgent. I screen those calls today using caller ID, which is inefficient, inaccurate, and a breach of etiquette in some situations.

Presence is too blunt a tool to solve this problem.

Think about what presence means, for a second, and you will understand why it doesn’t solve the problem. The word literally means the state or fact of being present. It doesn’t mean available, interested, or free. It means present. Presence advertises physicality, not intention, and that’s where presence fails.

In business, we used to have assistants to screen calls for us. Those assistants knew which calls were relevant, and how willing we were to take those calls. They helped us to organize our days, and prioritize our time.

Most of us don’t have the luxury of a "gatekeeper" anymore. Cost cutting, and technology took those assistants away from us. As I’ve written before, 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.

Bryan’s right. Presence, without managed availability, will be a disaster.

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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!

Range of Contact Points for an Individual
At Home	At Work
Home address Home phone Personal mobile phone VoIP Phone Personal email addresses Personal IM address(es) Pager Push-to-talk ID Personal web site Personal SMS Home FAX Home office phone line Skype / P2P Blog	Office address Office desk phone Office mobile phone Corporate email address Work IM address Work pager Push-to-talk ID for work Company web site Personal web site in corporate network Work SMS Blackberry Work fax Skype / P2P

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.

Change the polling frequency of email so that it polls just once an hour instead of every 15 minutes.
Turn the "toast" feature of IM off. No more pop-ups to let you know that your friend has just appeared online.
Set your phone on Do Not Disturb to get some work done.
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.

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