pay attention

Some late night magazine reading had me stumble across this article in the latest Harvard Busines Review entitled Overloaded Circuits: Why Smart People Underperform. The author Edward Hallowell discusses what he calls "attention deficit trait" or "ADT" which is a disorder of simply having too many distractions, things to do, and an inability to focus or pay attention to the task at hand.

From an interview with Hallowell in Computerworld magazine:

What is attention deficit trait? It's a severe case of modern life. It's my term for what happens to the brain when it becomes overloaded with information, obligations and more data points than it can keep up with. You start to resemble someone with actual attention deficit disorder -- distractibility, impulsivity, impatience, restlessness, irritability. In an attempt to get everything done, you become less and less efficient, and that leads to underachievement and deteriorating performance even as you're trying to improve.

And this morning in the New York Times, another similar article on the same theme entitled "You There, at the Computer: Pay Attention."

Interesting "related thoughts" snippet from that article:

Others might say, however, that Dr. Halevy's self-induced interruptions remove him from essential cognitive flow.

Dr. Bederson, Dr. Ratey and others often refer to the notion of flow, a concept coined by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, (pronounced CHICK-sent-me-hi-ee), professor of psychology at the Claremont Graduate University and the author of "Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience" (Perennial, 1991). Flow, in essence, is a state of deep cognitive engagement people achieve when performing an activity that demands a certain level of focus, like writing.

Mary Czerwinski, a cognitive psychologist who is a senior researcher at Microsoft, is studying the effect of interruptions on such deep cognitive immersion, with Dr. Bederson. "We're thinking that if you're deeply immersed in a flow state you'll be less amenable to a distraction from an incoming notification, much less likely to even know the notification came through," she said.

In related work, other Microsoft researchers are developing software that can learn to gauge where and how a computer user is directing attention, part of what they call the Attentional User Interface project.

Ironically when reading this, I had several new mail icon announcements, messenger "signed on/signed off" signals, and a couple of weather popups for good measure. Not to mention the obnoxious banner ads on the New York Times site itself...

Now back to work.