Attention: Giving It and Getting It
Dave Pollard writes in How to Save the World that "What people seek from others more than anything else, is attention and appreciation." He references an earlier post where he wrote, "It’s really all about attention, and paying attention. The attention we pay to others, and that others pay to us, defines us, far more than our appearance or our name. And how can we appreciate what someone (a life partner, a business partner, a customer, an employee, a friend or foe is about and has to offer) unless and until we pay attention to her, really listen and observe with (as much as is humanly possible no judgment, no personal filters or frames impeding. And once we’ve paid enough attention that we really understand that person (or for that matter, that creature of any species), how can we not appreciate her….watch, listen, observe, pay attention and you will know the reason."
I couldn’t agree more and I couldn’t practice it less. Just ask my children.
And of course I have a million excuses and explanations for this but that doesn’t change the outcome which is that the people that I care most about don’t get my full attention and therefore do not feel appreciated. Linda Stone coined the term "continuous partial attention" in 1997 and described it as a way of life for the past two decades in order to keep up with responsibilities and relationships. She says, "With continuous partial attention we keep the top level item in focus and scan the periphery in case something more important emerges." She doesn’t mention the outer edge of continuous partial attention when the top level item is so constantly shifting that there really is no way to distinguish between the top level and the periphery. I think you have to be a single mother with adolescent sons to experience that.
Newsweek covering the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference that had as its theme the Attention Economy says that "carrying a BlackBerry is admitting that your commitment to your current activity is only partial." Linda Stone, Newsweek noted, draws a line between the benefits of perpetual contact through email, IMs, text messages and so on to the overloaded contact that puts us in a place of constant crisis; where continuous partial attention becomes distraction and we can’t make a commitment to any one thing. She describes continuous partial attention as being motivated by our need to be connected which is enabled by the technologies of connection; we meet a friend for lunch and during that hour we talk to others on our cellphone, eat, email, and answer text messages. We are busy, we are scanning. We don’t have a clue. There is no meaning . It is noise not music.
Edward Hallowell, who is the co-author of Driven to Distraction the first book to, if nothing else make us feel okay about attention deficit disorder (ADD) has declared that there is an epidemic of attention deficit disorder. He has written a new book called CrazyBusy Overstretched,Overbooked, and About to Snap - Strategies for Coping in a World Gone ADD.
He uses the name attention deficit trait (ADT) to describe the condition when we get overloaded with incoming messages and competing tasks that we are unable to prioritize. Hallowell offers some solutions to "multi-tasking mania" such as allowing for 30 minutes a day for thinking or relaxing and to take time to connect to other people without your mobile device or laptop. I think we all know what we should do…what we don’t know is how to do it. Furthermore, we don’t have time to read his book. Note to Hallowell: Please write a blog so I can read that.
Research has shown that mulitasking reduces productivity. Research conducted by Joshua Rubenstein, PhD.indicates that task switching is counter productive and can even be dangerous when we don’t realize the limitations of our attention. As a matter of fact, Seth Greenberg, a professor at union College, says that "current cognitive models suggest that people have a limited amount of attention available at any moment…Attention can be thought of as a fuel that can be dispersed. Thus tasks can be performed simultaneously with efficiency as long as the required attention for both tasks does not exceed the limit." In other words, attention divided cannot stand….do more accomplish less.
So…back to the issue of giving and getting attention. My kids will ask me to, for instance, watch a TV show with them and say and "you have to come in here" which means without my laptop. Kathy Sierra wrote a post called Your Brain on Multitasking and says that the solution is to just give things your undivided attention, to be mindful and do one thing at a time. In a more recent post she states, Multi-tasking Makes Us Stupid. Well, ok then…that is settled. Who wants to be stupid? I’ll turn off the computer, not answer the phone, not read, or otherwise not give you and the TV my undivided attention. Maybe we can even skip the TV part.
Scott Berkun really summed it up in an attention titled post, Attention and Sex. He writes, "Your obituary will not list the hours you fought off boring meetings or ignored your friends by reading forgettable blurbs about forgettable things on your cell phone or laptop. Instead it’s the intimate, deep moments that refuse division that matter." He goes on to set an attention value proposition: "how we spend our attention changes the value of what we spend it on." His analogy, "if you only spend a fast food amount of attention, you will never have a 5 star dining experience" puts it all into perspective. I think this means, be mindful.
Last week we received an email about the death of a student who was a class ahead of my older son. The kids got out of school for spring break on Thursday, March 17th. That night he was the passenger in a SUV that flipped over and he wasn’t wearing his seat belt. I need to give my children much more of my undivided attention. We would all benefit and no doubt be more focused on our tasks knowing that attention was a continuous whole, not a continuous partial. I agree with Dave Pollard, that the attention and the appreciation that we give defines us and my definition right now is lacking.
Technorati Tags: attention, continuous partial attention, ADD, ADHD, multi-tasking
Life Hackers and Shaving a Yak
Courtesy of a 43 Folders post I learned some interesting facts regarding some of the reasons that it seems to becoming more and more difficult to GED*, Get Enough Done which is a step down from Getting Things Done on the personal productivity hierarchy. The source of this information was a really interesting NYT article, Meet the Life Hackers by Clive Thompson which I probably would not have read since one of my newest GTD inspired strategies is to delete the daily NYT email without reading. I might have found it, however on Thompson’s own blog, Collision Detection. So, here are the facts, stats, and accompanying jargon that I learned from Clive Thompson via Merlin Mann:
- There are actually scientists of "human-computer interactions" who study how high-tech devices affect our behavior.
- A study of "cubical dwellers" revealed that they spent 11 minutes on a given project before being interrupted to move onto something else…the 11 minutes included answering emails and viewing web sites….then the REAL kicker: after the distraction, it takes 25 minutes to return to the original task. ouch!
- The "science of interruptions" began with telegraph operators 100 years ago…the original high stress high tech information worker job. The discovery was that if someone spoke to a telegraph operator while they were keying a message, the distraction caused errors…"switching channels". For workers monitoring data, it was found that the presentation of the information aided focus. Hence, pilot’s cockpit were configured so that the instruments could be read at a quick glance.
- Continuous partial interruption, so dubbed by Linda Stone is the overload of too much information and too many interruptions that sabatouge our productivity and sometimes our sanity. Brad Feld who also noted "Meet the Life Hackers" on his blog writes that research into pci, personal computing infrastructure ,will help us manage the enormous amount of trivial things that keep us from taking our pci to the next level.
- Yes, I do remember the days when the phone and the mail were our only two communication interruptions and they were both very manageable….hold my calls? Now, we may have to decide between opening the email that our notifier just interrupted us about and the phone call that we are on…well we can always do both. Hmmm? I didn’t catch what you said..or wrote, or both…
- Now back to that 25 minutes to return to the task….well, we can’t remember what we were working on! Yes, 40% never make it back to the original task. What short term memory? I have no idea what I was doing!
- Well, the researchers found that the bigger the computer screen, the easier it was to complete multi-tasks; in fact 10-40% were able to complete multitasks faster, the bigger the screen. Presentation once again helps attention.
- People who sit next to each other in cubicles are "co-located"…they are referred to as "distributed" when they are connected online but working from different locations.
Improving Personal Productivity
I was sitting at my computer multi-tasking….with part of my brain I was going through my Blogline feeds and with the other part of my brain I was pondering once again the issue of, what is best summarized as organizing for improving personal productivity. My list of business ideas (or ideas for business), both the ones that actually make it onto a list and the ones that remain inside my head or are formulated in a conversation and then go straight up to forgotten idea heaven….the part of heaven which is adjacent to balloon heaven where I used to tell my kids their cherished but let go of balloons went so they wouldn’t cry….is far longer than my actual businesses, products, or services. As I scanned my feeds I was thinking about everything from ways to tweak/track my project organization structure to the questions of maybe I should hire a virtual assistant or hire a coach. And then, I got to Matt Homan’s blog post called "Printable Partner" referrencing David Seah’s blog post with the "Printable CEO" template….Matt is correct, it is simply brilliant. So thanks Matt and Dave… I’m going to give it a try!
Headlines that Push Instead of Grab
The headline, Finding
Time to Exercise is the kind of headline that makes me not want to
read the article that follows. It makes me want to pretend I didn’t see it. I already know that I should exercise
more and I know why I should exercise more (Is there anyone out there
who doesn’t?)…but since this article was part of a series
of other things that we should find time for that I thought sounded more
interesting than exercise, I took note. I may not be obsessed with exercise but
I admit I am a little obsessed with completion…the
exercise article was part of the series so for me, it was all or nothing.
So, I read the article on exercise; after all, it was short and I did have a
little extra time. As it turned out, after all the usual shoulds and even President
Bush finds the time the bottom line was to lower the bar really low….start with 10 minutes per
day and you can count going up and down steps. Sounds like a winning plan to me!
As I read the other “Finding Times†I noticed that they really were not
about finding time but rather about
making better use of time. For instance the article on finding time to read
suggested essentially having something to read with you at all times so that no
idle moment goes unread. I concur
wholeheartedly with that one…I just thought that behavior on my part was more about ADD than time management.
I did notice that the Finding Time to Exercise article was the
#3 most emailed article in the WSJ today…I guess it did grab attention after all. Or, they just emailed it away.
Now, the #5 most emailed article did grab my attention, Why
Don’t Kids Do Chores Anymore. My kids tell me that this is an absolute fact, phrased like this: “Mom, none of our
friends have to do chores.†I suggest then
that perhaps we not look at them as chores but as opportunities to learn skills
that their friends do not possess.
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