David Coleman posted at Corante yesterday on Too Much Collaboration, describing the toll that interconnectedness (and the attendant interruptions) can take on our productivity, especially when it comes to creative tasks. Coleman describes the problem as "attention management," and the obvious dilemma is that we have only a finite amount of attention to pay to the ever-increasing demands on out time. One of his proposed solutions is create the equivalent of more attention via virtual cloning:
That is to augment a person's ability to "attend" to content and events... I believe that you will need to multiply your bandwith and attention by multiplying your self. Some type of virtual agent that not only knows where you are, what you are doing and what collaboration programs or devices you have, but it also has a subset of your personality and is assigned to deal with specific types of tasks demanding your attention.
Coleman also cites companies like Veritas that have implemented "email-free Fridays." But whether the solution is an avatar that automates the handling of low-level requests, or policies that revise cultural norms about when and how quickly we can reach each other, all these changes involve putting a higher value on our attention, and raising the threshold of urgency for anything or anyone that's seeking to claim a share of it.
I've been paying closer, uh, attention to this issue as the result of some discussions with the folks working on AttentionTrust (more on that shortly), and I'm convinced that they're on to something tremendously important.
