Caught a thread from Joi Ito (with elaboration at Smartmobs) regarding Linda Stone's (see photo) distinction between multitasking and her new term: continuous partial attention.

[from Inc.]

Despite her bureaucratic title [Microsoft vice-president of corporate and industry initiatives], Stone is a creative thinker who has coined the term continuous partial attention to describe the way we cope with the barrage of communication coming at us. It's not the same as multitasking, Stone says; that's about trying to accomplish several things at once. With continuous partial attention, we're scanning incoming alerts for the one best thing to seize upon: "How can I tune in in a way that helps me sync up with the most interesting, or important, opportunity?" She says: "It's crucial for CEOs to be intentional about breaking free from continuous partial attention in order to get their bearings. Some of today's business books suggest that speed is the answer to today's business challenges. Pausing to reflect, focus, think a problem through; and then taking steady steps forward in an intentional direction is really the key.

CPA is a different kind of load-balancing algorithm. Some people think that the only practical way to work is to take a single task and grind away until it is done, and then (and only then) look around to determine what is the right next piece of work to do. The reality is that we need to be constantly scanning the horizon for events that are worthy of our attention. We can't a afford to stay heads down for hours or days at a stretch when critically important events may be occuring that could require us to immediately respond to them.

So, while first-in-first-out is a workable discipline for some situations (like super market check out lines), it fails drastically in some circumstances (like hospital emergency rooms).

Our work lives are increasingly like the ER and not the supermarket. So we will have to revert to a mindset that our earliest forebears must have applied while fashioning hunting gear, and with one eye scanning the savannah for predators and prey.

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This relates to the idea (that I have explored in the past) of synchronization amplification. If you work heads down for hours or days on end, and some event occurs that could impact the course of some project or plan, it is not just your agenda at issue. There are others in your work networks who are implicated in these activities. If you don't respond quickly, their on-going work is at risk of being invalidated. Imagine that you respond the day after tomorrow to something that occured today -- because you were heads down on something else -- giving "full attention" to it. Five members of a project could all be heading merrily down some path -- developing product, contacting partners, whatever -- and when you finally get around to reading your email, or working through your offline IM messages you realize that you need to hit the rest button. Five people may have wasted two days of work, each.

Alternatively, if you had responded to the event ASAP, and convened a strategy session with your partners, you could have avoided the cost and time involved in the two day detour. And of course, the impact of this propagates through the networks of those five project members, outward through the company and other partners. And if other network members likewise respond in real-time, similar productivity savings can be accomplished. This is the idea of synchronization amplification: paradoxically, increasing synchronous communication early in event response leads to an overall increase in asynchronous performance as the communication streams through the greater network. And continuous partial attention is a necessary precondition: without moving to that mode of time and communication management we will never get that ability to steal a march on events.

The trick may be to filter events so that only those that are material intrude on our reflections and heads-down work. We shouldn't jump up and run in circles every time the wind shakes the leaves, but we cannot afford to become so engrossed in what we are doing that we miss the leopard about to pounce.

There is no absolute here. Those that simply refuse to carry cell phones, or never log in to IM are dangerous to their organizations. If you are a solitary journalist, or a very senior executive, such behavior may be workable: in the former case, no one is harmed by your opting out, and in the latter case you are likely to have staffers who filter the outside world for you. But for the average person, linked in a dense, cascading social network of collaborators who depend on your timely response to critical events, it will prove increasingly difficult -- if not impossible -- to veer away from continuous partial attention. We will have to learn a new balancing act, and it will be strongly canted toward spending more cycles scanning the horizon and fewer looking down at the piecework in our laps.