templatedata

I've moved house. Again. And one of the things I hate about moving house, aside from the obvious things, is the lack of internet access that can occur.

I'm waiting for my ISP to sort the move of my cable connection and in the meantime I have no access, not even dial-up as I have no phone as yet.

Anyway, the point of this moaning is that I have realised that I am afflicted by some kind of disease and today I found a name for it: continuous partial attention.

To pay continuous partial attention is to pay partial attention -- CONTINUOUSLY. It is motivated by a desire to be a LIVE node on the network. Another way of saying this is that we want to connect and be connected. We want to effectively scan for opportunity and optimize for the best opportunities, activities, and contacts, in any given moment. To be busy, to be connected, is to be alive, to be recognized, and to matter.

An illustration:

A usual scenario for me is to have two laptops going at once, a PC and Mac, side by side. My usual concurrent software consumption is:

On the PC
- Outlook for one email account
- Web-based email account, always open
- iTunes with sharing turned on, connected to a number of others
- A small Firefox extension RSS reader for selected feeds
- Firefox
- Internet Explorer
- Various other programs, depending on the task I am doing 'centrally' (Word, Notepad, Photoshop, Visio etc)

On the Mac
- Gmail checker
- Safari
- Firefox
- NetNewsWire subscribed to 195 feeds (including notifications of blog comments and various website mentions on Technorati etc), checking on the hour
- iTunes with sharing turned on, connected to a number of others
- iChat
- Skype
- Various other programs, depending on the task I am doing 'centrally' (TextEdit, Photoshop, Omnigraffle etc)

So, I am continally keeping an eye on two email accounts, I am maintaining a number of websites through the work content management system, I am writing on various blogs, I am monitoring feeds, I am following links raised by various feeds, I am monitoring blog comment spam, listening to music, etc etc. I am in a continual state of high alert.

We pay continuous partial attention in an effort NOT TO MISS ANYTHING. It is an always-on, anywhere, anytime, any place behavior that involves an artificial sense of constant crisis. We are always in high alert when we pay continuous partial attention. This artificial sense of constant crisis is more typical of continuous partial attention than it is of multi-tasking.

The two things I would consider my main 'tasks' are designing and writing. Two things that require an amount of calmness and focus. WHat I have found is that I have developed the ability to perform these tasks while continuing my other 'attentions'. I have changed the way I Work simply because of my desire to stay connected. It is very difficult for me to close my web-based email. I don't look at it all the time, far from it, but it's always open. Same goes for my NewsReader. I am not always checking it, but it very rarely is closed down. As long as I can see it there in the dock with a little arrow underneath it, I feel like I'm not missing anything.

In fact, I would argue that the thing I miss most when disconnected is not my email, it's the NewsReader (ok, so I have an RSS feed for my email...). I feel in control of my 'web world' when I have it. I don't browse sites anymore. This has become impossible. I have tried to set up as many things as possible to send information to me rather trying to find it myself. I have feeds for news, for blogs, for del.icio.us subscriptions, Technorati and PubSub subscriptions, blog comments, Flickr tags and all sorts of other stuff.

I am sent a continous stream of information that has changed my working habits, both at work and at home. I am starting to wonder how easy it would be for me to adapt to a life without it. Sad isn't it? At least I can still read books...