Attention Crisis
There’s some interesting conversations going on today about
attention crisis – the way I read it, the scarcity of attention due to
too much information. From Fred Wilson’s blog:
"Most
of us have day jobs. Many of us have families. So we have a
limited amount of attention left. And I suspect we are consuming
most of it with what we’ve got on our plates today."
This is too true. As Clive Thompson wrote in his N.Y. Times article a couple of weeks ago (Meet the Lifehackers),
it is becoming increasingly difficult for an individual to consume
information available to them in a useful manner while still
maintaining focus on the task at hand. No exaggeration, I have
been interrupted 8 times while trying to write this paragraph!
Along these lines, Stacey Douglas has posted some tips on how to cope with this problem. The advice is sound, but even better is the reasoning on why this should be important:
"Why
should you care about taking in more information effectively? It’s how
you learn and grow. If information is a tool in your business, it’s a
survival skill. Understanding how to take in information effectively is
also a stepping stone to understanding how to help others take in
information more effectively."
Back in my project
management days, one of the five or six key competencies we reviewed
our employees on was good time management skills. Today, I think
that has broader implications. The employee who exercises good information management
skills has a huge advantage over those who allow themselves to become
mired in too much data. They still both have a leg up on the guy
who has no interest in the outside world, though…