Filed under: Features, E-mail, Office
Attention fragmentation and computing health risks - Emailers Anonymous
Previously in this series we discussed the user interface advancement of collapsing emails in the same thread together, and how that can help to deal with a high volume of incoming email. It's worth asking whether this is really a solution unto itself, or if it is maybe just a way to cope with a bigger problem, that of attention fragmentation. Have you ever found yourself having multiple conversations with the same person (or group of people) at the same time? Most often this will happen in email; you find yourself quickly writing a reply to one thread, and as you send your reply you notice a new update to a different thread from the same correspondent. It also sometimes happens in instant messaging programs, or even social networking sites - and often all of these at the same time. Is this truly more efficient than speaking to people either face-to-face or over the phone? Is it even healthy?
The topic of email as it relates to health is top-of-mind this week, due to a very in-depth article published at the Huffington Post by Linda Stone, titled Just Breathe: Building the Case for Email Apnea, which was highlighted by Robert Scoble. Linda Stone, if you're not familiar with her name, has been an executive at both Apple and Microsoft, and was the person that coined the term "continuous partial attention". Continuous partial attention refers to the way in which we attempt to multi-task, but really end up only giving a fraction of our attention to any one task, project, or conversation. Linda argues that we end up accomplishing less, damaging relationships, and generally accomplishing the opposite of what we intended when we practice continuous partial attention.
Her interest in healthy computing habits brought Stone to focus her attention on email, one of the most ubiquitous computing tasks. She recently found herself not breathing as she was checking email, which she found surprising since she had just previously been practicing a breathing exercise while meditating. After observing many subjects process their email, she was able to conclude that this is an issue that affects many of us, and she coined the term "email apnea".
It's possible that email is not the only computing task that causes us to change our breathing pattern. As Scoble postulates, Twittering or blogging might also be culprits.
The modern computing world has certainly opened up a fire-hose of information that we now need to learn how to deal with. As if doing so without becoming overwhelmed wasn't enough, we also now need to pay attention to how we are breathing while we do it.
While it's not focused on the health risks of fragmenting our attention, Merlin Mann recently gave a talk at Macworld '08 called Living With Data: Attention Sinks and Time Burglars. In it, he talks about the fact that not only do we fragment our own attention, we often don't set any sort of barrier to entry for other people, giving them free reign to further fragment our attention. Merlin's slide show and talk are included here for your viewing and listening pleasure.
Are you feeling pressure on your attention, or possibly in fact health issues related to email and computing?
So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do.
Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game.
The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...
