Neal Stephenson, tha author, minces no words about his unending battle to remain out of touch:

[from his FAQ page]

My ongoing struggle against "continuous partial attention"

Linda Stone, formerly of Apple and Microsoft, has coined the term "continuous partial attention" to describe life in the era of e-mail, instant messaging, cellphones, and other distractions. This curious feature of modern life poses a problem for a someone like me. Every productive thing that I do requires ALL my attention.

I cannot put it any better than Donald Knuth, who writes on his website, "Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration. "

Knuth also provides the following quote from Umberto Eco: "I don't even have an e-mail address. I have reached an age where my main purpose is not to receive messages."

In a recent review of one of my novels, I was described as "Umberto Eco without the charm" and so it should be pretty clear in what direction I am going.

The purpose of this web page is to help me focus all of my attention on productive activity. Three strategies are used:

• explicit discouragement
  Persons who wish to interfere with my concentration are politely requested
  not to do so, and warned that I don't answer e-mail.
  
• FAQs
  Persons who wish to ask me questions are encouraged to look for the
  answers here on this page.
  
• redirection
  Persons wishing to make business proposals are aimed in the direction of my agents.

What with all of these different strategies, this web page admittedly gets somewhat long and wordy. Lest its key message get lost in the verbiage,
I will put it here succinctly:

All of my time and attention are spoken for--several times over. Please do not ask for them.

Some years ago, I wrote a document that tried to explain why I am not very diligent about answering my mail, and why I only accept speaking engagements on rare and special occasions. The document is entitled Why I am a bad correspondent and you are welcome to read it.

More recently I found an article in the Atlantic Monthly by
Jonathan Rauch that describes my personality with uncanny accuracy. It explains why, whenever I find myself in a room full of people, or discover a lot of e-mail from strangers in my inbox, my first thought is: "where did all these people come from and how do I make them go away?" This---i.e. the discovery that I am a classic introvert---does not render "Bad Correspondent" invalid, but it does fill out the picture a little. In particular, extroverts ought to read this article!

The bottom line is as follows: I simply cannot respond to all incoming stimuli unless I retire from writing novels. And I don't wish to retire at this time.

Please don't, Neal. But I disagree with Knuth's characterization, however catchy. Many extroverts stay close to the bottom of things, not just skimming along superficially on the top. And I also don't believe that CPA is only for extroverts, although its strongest motivation is for social connectedness. However, the truly incorrigible introverted will always think of CPA as a vampire sucking blood.