Continuous partial attention

Interruption science is the study of why people get distracted and how best to interrupt people. For example, in the late 1980s NASA needed to find ways to deliver important importation to busy astronauts. This might seem trivial but if an important communication is not distracting enough it may get ignored, while anything too distracting could ruin a multi-million dollar experiment. In other words, the timing and style of delivery of communications is vitally important. Text-based communications, NASA found, were routinely ignored while visually-based communications seem to get through. So what’s the relevance of this to people with their feet firmly planted on earth?The simple answer is that many of us suffer from too much information thanks to faster computers and connectedness. We are constantly subjected to a torrent of interruptions ranging from e-mail to mobile phone calls. Indeed, a recent survey found that employees spend on average eleven minutes on a task before being distracted by something else. Furthermore, every time an employee was interrupted it took almost half an hour for them to return to the original task and 40% wandered off somewhere else. In other words, information is no longer power. Getting and keeping someone’s attention is. We are so busy watching everything and multi-tasking that we are unable to focus on or finish anything except after hours or at home. Given that computers and the Internet are largely to blame for this, it’s not surprising that computer and software companies are taking the issue very seriously. Part of the problem is that our memory tends to be visual and computers only allow the display of limited amounts of information on a screen. Some people solve this problem by sticking low-fi post-it notes around the sides of their screen. Another way might be to say no — unsubscribe and unplug parts of your life.If this isn’t for you then technology may once again come to the rescue by changing the way that information is delivered. For example, if a computer could understand when you were busy (via a camera, microphone or keypad monitor) it could rank e-mails in order of importance and then deliver them at the most appropriate moments. Information could also become more glanceable in the same way that aircraft instruments are laid out. In the more distant future we may even figure out a way of getting rid of computer screens altogether and embedding glanceable information in everyday objects.

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