Levy: Digital Distractions Bad for the Workplace - Newsweek Technology - MSNBC.com

Steven Levy on continuous partial attention and "The Attention Economy" at ORA's Emerging Technology Conference.

But there's a problem in the workplace when the interruptions intrude on tasks that require real concentration or quiet reflection. And there's an even bigger problem when our bubble of connectedness stretches to ensnare us no matter where we are. A live BlackBerry or even a switched-on mobile phone is an admission that your commitment to your current activity is as fickle as Renée Zellweger's wedding vows. Your world turns into a never-ending cocktail party where you're always looking over your virtual shoulder for a better conversation partner. The anxiety is contagious: anyone who winds up talking to a person infected with [continuous partial attention] feels like he or she is accepting an Oscar, and at any moment the music might stop the speech.

In her talk, Stone was careful to acknowledge the benefits of perpetual contact. But her message is that the balance has tilted way too far toward distraction, creating a sense of constant crisis. "We're not ever in a place where we can make a commitment to anything," she explained to me when I called her a few days later. "Constantly being accessible makes you inaccessible." All so true.

I have to concur on the ironic hilarity of an ETech ostensibly being devoted to the topic of "The Attention Economy." As someone who's been both on the dais and down in the pit, I don't think I've ever seen so many overstimulated people struggling to find even more stimulation. It's harrowing.

[ via the 43F Board ]

quickfix.txt

While Googling the best way to fix a slamming door, I came across this great ASCII file of "all-time best hints for making household repairs." It's cribbed from a mid-90s issue of Mother Earth News, and has a bunch of great little tips.

• To cut down on slamming noise, put tabs of leftover peel-and-stick foam weather stripping at several spots all around the doorstop...
• A squeaky floor is usually caused by two or more boards rubbing against each other. Silence the noise by sprinkling talcum powder over the boards and sweeping it into the cracks...
• When drilling into the ceiling, poke a hole through the center of a throwaway aluminum pie pan. Hold the pan over the area to be drilled, and poke the bit through. This way the pan will catch most of the dust.

The file's part of the survival section of the awesomely old-school textfiles.com, which is a large collection of old text files from BBSs in the 80s and 90s. So fun. Don't miss the sections on mass media, internet, and anarchy.

Browse Life Tools

UK-based collection of "life tools" covering topics like time management, stress management, decision making, etc.

Similar to (the oft-linked and more exhaustive) "Mind Tools," there's several cool articles in here if you dig around a bit (along with the now-ubiquitous Capital Letter Nouns for you corner-office types). A few I particularly like are Force Field Analysis, Meditation and Changing Behaviour.

Nothing earth-shatteringly new, but I do think these sorts of extreme distillations can sometimes be useful in providing people a foothold toward improving their world. Just underneath the candy-colored shells of pop psychology and "personal development," you can often find some profound, reliable, and time-tested insights into what makes us tick.

Then, of course, there's "Mission Statements." If you're -- you know -- looking to state your mission.

[ via del.icio.us/popular ]

This post is part of the Inbox Zero series.

The truth is that you probably can take the average email inbox -- even a relatively neglected one -- from full to zero in about 20 minutes. It mostly depends on how much you really want to be done with it. The dirty little secret, of course, is that you don't do it by responding to each of those emails but by ruthlessly processing them. Is that how you thought this worked? Answering 500 emails in 20 minutes? Jeez, it's no wonder you're such a mess. Your cognitive dissonance is epic.

Here's the deal: your email has been accumulating because you don't have the time to answer it properly, which is certainly reasonable and accurate. You also fear losing track of the email you haven't responded to -- that it will fall between the cracks. This fear is also reasonable and accurate. But you're just as keenly aware that with the backlog of email you have plus the increasing rate of incoming messages you receive each day, you can't possibly ever catch up. This, sadly, is also entirely reasonable and accurate. It's all reasonable and it's all accurate, but come on: something's gotta give.

Like Kirk's "solution" to the Kobayashi Maru Scenario, there's an easy but non-obvious way to win at this Catch-22: you cheat. You don't answer them all. Not even most of them.

You rewrite the rules. You adapt at a higher level. You have to, or else the Klingons will overwhelm you with their superior fire power and brute force -- and then your email would remain unanswered for eternity. Think how sad that would be.

Kinkless GTD 0.83 [Relative Motion] | Kinkless

The wait is over, kids. Ethan Schoonover has just released his .83 version of Kinkless GTD, and, brother, does it ever bring it. (For an intro to what kGTD is, start here, then go here and of course, here.)

So, first great thing: the syncing problems people (including me) were having -- getting changes in Action views and iCal to get reflected correctly back in Projects view -- has been fixed most elegantly. So it's just a lot more usable and dependable right out of the box. But that ain't all E's been cooking up. Among the trove of new and updated features (cribbed from Ethan):

• Everything syncs: all changes to all columns are now synchronized across all views of a task (Projects/Actions/iCal)
• Deletions now handled with the good old delete key on your keyboard
• Singleton tasks section, now a full citizen
• Better QS action… and fancy “task shorthand” to make it easy to send a task to a specific context/project
• Task aging

Visit the kGTD .83 release page for full details

Ethan, as ever, has done a terrific screencast explaining how the app works -- DO NOT MISS the video if you aren't "getting" kGTD, because it's super useful in showing exactly how it works -- plus I'm sure there will be lots of lively discussion over on the kGTD forum, so for today I'll just focus on my favorite improved feature: what Ethan calls "fancy “task shorthand.'"