Continuous Partial Attention

After yesterday's e-mail addict experiment I started to realize that I needed to clean up some digital clutter.

It was becoming problematic. The problem is not that I want to check my e-mail all the time. That's not so bad. It's that I have reminders set up all over the place that tell me when I have a new e-mail.

It's bigger than e-mail, though.

I just keep getting interrupted. Not just by emails and twitters, but by passing headlines and the like. With all the ads and links on the web that are likely to grab my attention, I started to ask myself, "Why am I making it even harder on myself?"

So I scrapped half the widgets on my Google homepage. Now it's set up so that all the widgets are self-contained. No more links to Gmail, Google Reader, and recent headlines. I have a sports ticker, my Netflix queue, and a quote of the day. I also have some fun things like Google Latitude (which I'm trying out right now) and a widget that shows me on a Google Map where the International Space Station is orbiting in real time.

The important part is that I don't have a bunch of outbound links anymore that pull my attention away.

It's a good first step.

For an interesting read on multi-tasking, I'll refer you to Walter Kirn's story in the November 2007 Atlantic.

Through a variety of experiments, many using functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure brain activity, they’ve torn the mask off multitasking and revealed its true face, which is blank and pale and drawn.


Multitasking messes with the brain in several ways. At the most basic level, the mental balancing acts that it requires—the constant switching and pivoting—energize regions of the brain that specialize in visual processing and physical coordination and simultaneously appear to shortchange some of the higher areas related to memory and learning. We concentrate on the act of concentration at the expense of whatever it is that we’re supposed to be concentrating on.

This concept also hit home a bit:

Here’s the worst of the chilling little thoughts that have come to me during micro­tasking seize-ups: For every driver who’s ever died while talking on a cell phone ... there was someone on the other end who, chances are, was too distracted to notice.

Ouch.