Tag: Productivity

Concept of the Day: Continuous Partial Attention

I am sat at home and the TV is showing a programme that I like, but I’ve seen it before. I’m also engaged in general chit-chat with my wife. I occasionally look down at my phone as various notifications pop-up. Then my watch vibrates and tells me that it’s time to stand up. I am suddenly conscious that my wife is looking at me expecting a response. I know where the conversation was going, but somewhere in my automated switching between stimuli I’ve lost the thread and it’s floating away. This is where I have a choice, I can try to style my way out of the situation and hope that a chuckle and a smile is enough to get things going forward in the hope that the thread will return, or I can own up to being distracted again, take the consequences of this revelation, and continue watching the TV, engaging in the chit-chat and flicking through my phone. Another possibility is that I apologise for being a poor husband turn the TV off and put the phone out in the foyer and seek to engage fully in a conversation with my wife.

This is the world that we live in. This is the world of continuous partial attention.

Something interesting pops up on my watch, it’s too long to read on the phone so I pick up my phone to investigate a little further. I see that it’s another report on the latest celebrity news so move on quickly. While I have my phone in my hand, without thinking, I open a social media app, death scroll my way through it. Then switch on to another social media app and do the same. Everyone is a member of at least four social media apps right? I scroll through each one absent-mindedly. Almost automatically I move on to a couple of news apps and get depressed by the world. Finally I take a quit look at the stock market and check who’s up and who’s down, unfortunately for me today is a red day.

This is the world that we live in. This is the world of continuous partial attention.

I am sat on a train trying to write a blog post, this one, I’m making good progress when a chat from a colleague pops onto my screen. While I’m responding to the message I notice the person on the other side of aisle from me. They are a tall athletic looking individual cuddling a tiny white fluff of a dog while, at the same time, running WhatsApp across three different phones. He’s jumping from one to another as we travel, switch-scroll-type-switch. My watch vibrates and it’s a friend asking if I’m available for the usual Wednesday breakfast catch-up. I look back at the blog post and wonder I was up to.

This is the world that we live in. This is the world of continuous partial attention.

You might be reading this and thinking that I’m describing multi-tasking and perhaps you are right, but I like the differentiation of Continuous Partial Attention as something diffeent.

Linda Stone, who first publicized the term, puts it like this:

Continuous partial attention and multi-tasking are two different attention strategies, motivated by different impulses. When we multi-task, we are motivated by a desire to be more productive and more efficient. Each activity has the same priority – we eat lunch AND file papers… At the core of multi-tasking is a desire to be more productive. We multi-task to create more opportunity for ourselves – more time to do more and time to relax more.

In the case of continuous partial attention, we’re motivated by a desire not to miss anything. There’s a kind of vigilance that is not characteristic of multi-tasking. With CPA, we feel most alive when we’re connected, plugged in and in the know. We constantly scan for opportunities – activities or people – in any given moment. With every opportunity we ask, “What can I gain here?”

Time Management Continuous Partial Attention — Not the Same as Multi-Tasking – BusinessWeek (archive.org)

I spend far more time in Continuous Partial Attention than I do multi-tasking. I’m much more likely to be switching to fulfil my desire to be in the know, on the pulse, all caught up, connected. When I sit on my sofa in an evening with multiple screens, usually at least three, I’m not seeking to achieve something on each one, I’m quietly urging each one to be bring me something interesting.

This isn’t good for us. We aren’t built to process all of the inputs that are being fired at us every day. We are meant for a simpler life.

The Wikipedia article on Continuous Partial Attention highlights some of the areas where this behaviour is probably not good for us. I don’t have the attention cycles available to go and check, so I’ll let you link over there and see whether it makes sense. If nly half of what is written there is true we have a lot to be worried about.

Header Image: This is the view along the length of Thirlmere whilst descending Steel Fell after a day of two halves weather wise.

"Companies need to help employees unplug"

This is a quote from Ndubuisi Ekekwe in the Harvard Business Review talking in an article entitled Is Your Smartphone Making You Less Productive?:

Companies need to help employees unplug. (Of course, every business is unique, and must take its own processes into consideration. But for most companies, giving employees predictable time off will not hurt the bottom line.) In my own firm, when we noticed that always-on was not producing better results, we phased it out of our culture. A policy was instituted that encouraged everyone to respect time off, and discouraged people from sending unnecessary emails and making distracting calls after hours. It’s a system that works if all of the team members commit to it. Over time, we’ve seen a more motivated team that comes to work ready for business, and goes home to get rejuvenated. They work smarter, not blindly faster. And morale is higher.

Give it a try in your own company. As a trial, talk to your team and agree to shutdown tonight. I’m confident that you’ll all feel the benefits in the morning.

How do you try to create shutdown times and unplug?

(May I apologise for my ramblings last week, there was way to much information in one post, I promise to be get back to my normal approach of little and often)

Working on a day of important interruptions

Interruptions have a massive negative impact on productivity. You might think that you can easily switch from one place to another but you can’t. every time you switch you have a period of time when you are not being productive at doing what you are doing.Blackpool Prom Scuptures at Sunset

With this in mind there are many time management and activity management philosophies around that help you to focus on the important things and to drive out the interruptions. Most of the time I would agree, but today is one of those days that is an exception.

Today the important things are the interruptions. There are a set of people who are working away on things and they need help doing it, they don’t know when they need help so they need to be able to interrupt.

That leaves me with the challenge of staying productive between the interrupts.

I don’t want to start anything significant because I’ll just spend all day being frustrated.

I can’t sit around waiting for the interrupts because I’m likely to fall asleep and then miss the interrupts.

I don’t want to go and look for the interruptions because that would interrupt the people doing the productive work.

So what do i do?

It’s a dilemma.

I’m up-to-date on my email.

I’m up-to-date on my feeds.

I’m up-to-date on my twitter.

I almost wish that i was behind on my administration.

Slow Logon v Slow Applications

I hear a lot of people complaining about the amount of time it takes them to start their device and get working. Glen CoeI hear this complaint a lot more often than complaints about slow applications. I’m sure that people have both problems – but they complain about one, massively, above the other.

Slow logon is an issue that is certainly very visible to people, but I wonder how much impact on someone’s days to day productivity it really has. So I’ve done some analysis comparing the impact of slow logon with the potential impact of slow applications.

image

It can be seen from these numbers that a 15 minute interruption for logon would be roughly equivalent to me of my applications going 4% slower.

Given the choice of slow logon or slow applications which would I choose?

I would choose slow logon over slow applications every time. Why? Because it has a lesser impact on my productivity but also I’d rather have a single 20 minute interruption at the beginning of the day.

Also, I’m not necessarily comparing apples with apples here. The numbers for application usage are times when I am really working on a computer. The numbers for slow logon are times when I might have been working, but equally, I might have been getting myself a coffee, or talking to a colleague.

Obviously, I’d rather not have either!

So how did I get to these numbers?

The logon numbers are based on the amount of non-productive time I’d have, assuming that I logon 6 times in the working week and I’m not doing any work for the duration of the logon time.

The application numbers are based on the amount of time that I have used my applications since the beginning of the year according to Wakoopa.

For all of this I’ve assumed that I work an 8 hour day, which isn’t true, but it’s near enough and doesn’t change the ratios only the absolute numbers. hence there is quite a close alignment of the application impact on overall productivity.

(Update: I noticed a mistake in my numbers so I’ve changed it a little)

Writing and reading – getting down to it

Over recent years I’ve noticed a significant shift in my attention span. I’d like it to be getting longer but unfortunately it’s getting shorter. Island Hoping

There may be a reason for this; we recently discovered that the central heating boiler in our house had been incorrectly fitted and was doing its best to poison us all.

But I’m not sure it’s that simple.

I wonder whether it’s also a problem with the number of distractions that I now have available to me.

This week I decided to do something about the distractions.

One of the main distractions is my phone, it always seems to ring at the most inopportune times. This week I made a decision (please don’t tell anyone), I put my phone onto silent and waited to see what would happen.

I’ve written and read more in the last few days that I have for weeks.

I haven’t missed a single really important phone call – and there have been some.

Make screens a priority

How long do you think that you spend looking at some form of screen every day?Wisley in the Autumn

Television? Laptop? Mobile phone?

According to the New York Times it’s likely to be longer than you think:

In fact, adults are exposed to screens — TVs, cellphones, even G.P.S. devices — for about 8.5 hours on any given day, according to a study released by the Council for Research Excellence on Thursday. TV remains the dominant medium for media consumption and advertising, the study found. The data suggests that computer usage has supplanted radio as the second most common media activity.(Print ranks fourth.)

That’s right 8.5 hours a day.

Even excluding TVs that’s a lot of time, spent on screens at work. So why do we spend so little on the actual screen itself? It’s the primary tool that we use.

I’m constantly amazed when I go around offices to see the way that people are using and abusing the screen that they use all day, every day.

I’ve already written about multiple monitors. If I could communicate one thing to people that I know would radically change their productivity it would be that. But there is more to it than that.

In most organisations that I know screen purchases are tightly controlled. You have to be really special to have anything more than the standard screen. In many ways this control is completely disproportionate to the value that a good screen gives and the relative cost.

The number of people who have cracked or severely scratched mobile phone screens never  ceases to amaze.

There are times when I feel like going around with a cleaning cloth and revealing to people the wonders that lurk beneath. Go on, I dare you, clean a screen today.