There’s a good post at tech.memeorandum called The Looming Attention Crisis -- something I’m sure you’re intimately acquainted with. The author (Fred Wilson) muses on a quote that says that a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.
I see this in my work life when I have too many small, separate things to do: an overflowing inbox, news deadlines, meeting notes, usually accompanied by a balky, temperamental computer. I can’t concentrate on anything. I bounce between tasks, not finishing them and getting more anxious about not finishing them.
I saw this in my outside-work life during the Hurricane Katrina disaster. There was more information than I could absorb in three lifetimes about weather systems (natural and computerized), the legacy of poverty in New Orleans, funding priorities of the Army Corps of Engineers, levee engineering, the working relationships between the federal, state, local governments, and on and on. How can a reasonable person have an informed opinion on a situation so complex?
I see a different aspect of it in my kids who (say they) find it hard to concentrate on homework without music in the background and friends IMing them. I suspect they aren’t really concentrating with or without the music, but I’m not sure if that’s because they are teens or because we live in a world where paying quiet attention is a rare skill.
The people who can pay attention aren’t multitasking geniuses – freaks who read more news or answer more emails than the rest of us. They’ve figured out how to tune out the noise. They work at home, they delegate, they don’t answer the phone, they check email only twice a day, they think in the car, they tend to their home lives and they get enough sleep.
So what do you do when your really, really have to concentrate on work?
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