#attention

In many jobs, employees must manage multiple projects or tasks at the same time. A typical workday often entails switching between several work activities, including projects, tasks, and meetings. This paper explores how such work design affects individual performance by focusing on the challenge of switching attention from one task to another. As revealed by two experiments, people need to stop thinking about one task in order to fully transition their attention and perform well on another. Yet, results indicate it is difficult for people to transition their attention away from an unfinished task and their subsequent task performance suffers. Being able to finish one task before switching to another is, however, not enough to enable effective task transitions. Time pressure while finishing a prior task is needed to disengage from the first task and thus move to the next task and it contributes to higher performance on the next task.

"I figure I should probably be respectful to the spirit of the promise with the "meditation me" so that I'll continue to trust my requests for deferred yak shaving during my meditation."

"These kinds of bots -- attention filters, perhaps, or focus assistants -- are likely to become important parts of how we handle our daily lives."

"I feel like all these emerging (emergent?) "ambient" communication technologies actually help to make me happier, and feel less alone in our highly abstract and disconnected world."

"Think of an Attention Stream as a way of noticing all of the steps you take to gather and consume information."

"Paradoxically, the best way to handle it is to attend to it, to focus on it, to be mindful of the migraine"

"Attention continues to get my attention." Link-dense round up of recent discussions.

"We need new paradigms for following what's happening in the blogosphere."

"Ban the advertising industry. Ban it now, before it's too late."