A recent CNET article noted that the typical office worker is interupted every three minutes by an e-mail, IM, phone call, etc. If you are working on something creative, it takes about 8 minutes for our brains to get into that state. With all these distractions how is anyone able to get anything done?
The result, says Carl Honore, journalist and author of "In Praise of Slowness," is a situation where the digital communications that were supposed to make working lives run more smoothly are actually preventing people from getting critical tasks accomplished.
"People are ultraconnected. And you know what? Now they are starting to realize, 'Wow, I want to actually stop getting interrupted.'" Notes Chris Caposella a VP in the Microsoft Information Worker Business Unit.
Dan Russell, a researcher at IBM's Almaden Research Center, turns off the instant notification of e-mail and only looks at e-mail 2X a day and has cut the time he spends with e-mail in half. Other organizations, like Veritas Software have implemented "no e-mail Fridays." Employees can't e-mail one another on Friday, but they are allowed to e-mail customers or other parts of the storage company if they have to. The result? Workers spend more time connecting face to face.
A study by Hewlett-Packard earlier this year found that 62 percent of British adults are addicted to their e-mail--checking messages during meetings, after working hours and on vacation. Half of workers felt a need to respond to e-mails immediately or within an hour, and one in five people reported being "happy" to interrupt a business or social gathering to respond to an e-mail or phone message.
Even airlines are starting to offer broadband Internet access. So how will we be able to deal with this tidal wave of communications?
"With Office 12, we will do things to make it a lot easier for people to be more effective in the way they manage all of these communication mechanisms," Capossela said. IBM also is looking at solutions to manage scheduling for the next version of Lotus Workplace, part of IBM's collection of software that rivals Office.
But technology may not be the solution. Like many issues in collaboration it is the "people and process issues" that are the crux of the problem.
"The problem, Russell said, is that there are only certain types of tasks that humans are good at doing simultaneously. Cooking and talking on the phone go together fine, as does walking and chewing gum (for most people). But try and do three math problems at once, and you are sure to end up in frustration."
I have written a lot about what I call "attention management" and what everyone else calls "Continuous Partial Attention" (term coined by Linda Stone). Stowe has been blogging about this for months, and he and I have had a few discussions on the subject.
Basically, he believes that your social networks are your filter for information overload. If A likes it and I like and trust A, then I should like it. I agree with Stowe to a point, in that social networks only deal with part of the problem. I do not believe that you will be able to filter enough through these networks to stop the overwhelm of your bandwidth for both information and attention.
I believe that the problem needs to be attached also from the other direction. That is to augment a person's ability to "attend" to content and events. In my view of the future there are a variety of technology solutions that might help. But I don't think the scheduling tools that Microsoft and Lotus are building are it. I believe that you will need to multiply your bandwith and attention by multiplying your self.
Some type of virtual agent that not only knows where you are, what you are doing and what collaboration programs or devices you have, but it also has a subset of your personality and is assigned to deal with specific types of tasks demanding your attention. For example, this virtual agent or avatar can deal with lower-level requests for attentiona and decisions around what to pick up at the grocery store. It knows your likes and dislikes, what is in the refrigerator and what is not, and you have empowered it to make those shopping decisions, and have the groceries delivered to your house at 6:00 pm (it knows your schedule and that you are due to have dinner with your family by 7:00 pm).
This leaves you free to deal with critical requests for your attention from your family, your boss, negotiating with a client, dealing with a crisis, etc. Since many fewer items fall into these "critical" categories your bandwith and attention are on overwhelmed, and yet all of these other demands on your attention are also being satisfied.
In a recent article by Dr. Doree Seligmann from Avaya Research Labs, she describes a virtual communications agent that is system agnostic and facilitates communication (or not) based on rules you give the system and what it knows about you and your devices. It is my belief that Avaya is building such a system as an abstracted layer that can be used by both developers and end-users. It is the closest to the Avatar or virtual agent that I described above that I have heard about.
However, I can't pay attention to everything, so if any of you out there know of other projects or services that will serve to augment my attention abilities I would love to hear about them!
1. kris on July 28, 2005 06:50 PM writes...
I'm reminded of when I first entered the work world back in the late 70's how the media was speculating about all the extra leisure time we’d all have in 20 or so years due to the ever expanding scope and efficiency of technology. How ironic.
Proof, I guess, that nature really does abhor a vacuum.
Permalink to Comment2. Zbigniew Lukasiak on July 28, 2005 08:31 PM writes...
Hi,
I was quite frustrated when Many to Many blog engine refused to register my comment, so I found your email and I send it directly to you. Please post it at the blog if this become possible.
The question how many things you can do concurrently has one answer - you can focus your attention on only one thing, but you can do much more automatically. So it all depends if you can learn to do something automatically - chewing gum and walking is quite easy to do automatically, even easier is breathing. It is important to note that you don't need to carry doing something automatically in all circumstances - you just need to learn to shift attention when in the right time, constant observing the environmet and watching for things that you cannot do automatically is a part of the 'automatic' mode.
Permalink to Comment3. David Coleman on July 28, 2005 08:52 PM writes...
Well, I guess some of you were paying ATTENTION. Kris, I agree with you that "nature does abhore a vacuum." Of for that matter some people. They fill up every spare minute, and are always paying attention to something (usually other then themselves). Believe it or not, this is encouraged by our society.
As for Mr. Lukasisk,
I am glad to see Corante was able to fix the "comments" capability. Now that it is fixed. The question really is not how many things you can do at once, it really is about what your paying attention to. I agree with you that you can only pay attention to one thing at one time, but not everything needs to be paid continuous attention.
Does a supercomputer only do one task at one time? No, it time slices and works a bit on one task at a time for a very short time, makes some progress and then moves on to another task. Think of a supercomputer as a much less powerful processor then our brains.
The tasks you takled about doing two at one time, like walking and chewing gum, I agree with your analysis, chewing gum is more autonomic, like breathing or having your heart beat, whereas walking is volitional and requires conscious attention. I agree that we can all do autonomic things without fragmenting our attention. This is not true for all forms of life, for example, dolphins are "conscious breathers."
However, what I am looking at is the ability to as you say "shift your attention based on environmental cues." Does "environment" include cyberspace, is a cue an IM popup, or a Skype call? As more and more of these cues begin to intrude on us how will we deal with this both behaviorally and technically?
For Mr. Ed Batista,
You suggest that Attentiontrust.org has a solution. I guess in looking at the site I was not able to figure out what that solution was. I do agree with the philosophy of the site that
attention is a valuable commodity, probably our most valuable asset. I also agree that the one generating the attention should have the right to own it and share it with others if they choose. I would like to learn more about attentiontrust.org and how they are going to make the world a safer, better place for those of us "paying attention" (pun intended).
However, I still believe that this problem is going to get worse (not better) and that both behavioral and technical solutions are necessary. It is my hope that there is someone out there who understands this attention issue and is working on one or more solutions!
Permalink to Comment4. Kris on July 29, 2005 07:42 AM writes...
David - I'm not so sure its 'encouraged by our society' as much as it is a matter of people becoming paranoid that they may miss something. The whole 'Information Society' thing has resulted in people absorbing more and more and actually doing less and less.
Which is why 'Continuous Partial Attention' (a.k.a. ADD?) is a valid phenomenon - if one is just absorbing and not actually doing, one doesn't need to focus on any one thing (to Mr. Lukasiak's point) at all.
Permalink to Comment5. Ed Batista on July 29, 2005 01:32 PM writes...
Hi David,
Just to be clear, I never said AttentionTrust has "the solution," only that they're working on the issue, and that my discussions with the folks involved have convinced me that they're on to something important. Simply by promoting the concept that our attention is a valuable resource, and that as owners of that resource we should "spend" it wisely and be aware of our rights, AttentionTrust is already serving a valuable purpose. Great post, and I look forward to reading more.
Ed
Permalink to Comment6. David Coleman on July 29, 2005 02:37 PM writes...
Kris,
I am not sure what Linda Stone ment by "Continuous Partial Attention" is ADD, which I think is mis-named in the first place. People with ADD don't have a deficit of attention, they just pay attention to a lot of things, rather then focusing on one thing.
I think this goes to your comment about being part of the "information society" and no one wants to miss anything, so they are continually scanning to see what is being said or for opportunities. What is critical here is some self disipline (behavior) to stop scanning and do some work. For example, I am trying to get my newsletter (Inside Collaboration) out this week or early next week. I am constantly inturupted by phone calls, e-mails, IMs, RSS feeds, etc. In order to finish the document I set aside some time where I have no phone calls scheduled, ignore IMs and e-mails, and actually get the work done. Once it is done I can go back to scanning.
I wrote a blog about the evolutionary aspects of ADD looking at the "hunter/gatherer theory." This essentially says that those with ADD are decended from hunters where scanning the environment (for prey) is a good survival characteristic. However, the agriculturalists are able to focus their attention on one thing at a time, like planting a row of corn. The corn does not move, and having a linear focus and getting through planting the whole row is also a survival advantage.
In today's society the "agricultural" model of attention dominates and the "hunter" model is seen as disfuntional (ADD). I am not sure this is true. In addition, if you talk to people with ADD and ask them if they could remove this "disfunction" most of them prefer to keep it. Why? Well it can have some real advantages, especially in an information-rich environment. The fact that whole generations of people are learning this behavior seems somewhat ironic to me, but is also a symptom of moving from an agricultural/industrial society to an information-based society (kind of a second order effect).
Ed
Thanks, and I would love to learn more about what attentiontrust.org is doing, and how they are doing it, as I also like you believe that attention is our most valuable personal asset.
Permalink to Comment7. Kris on July 29, 2005 02:45 PM writes...
nice explanation. I've never believed ADD was an imperfection - always felt its symptoms were an indication of misplaced instincts and skills. I think your hunter/gatherer analysis is pretty good although I'll bet there are a few school psychologists choking on their Starbucks right now.
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