[…] I’ve written several times here about what I see as the myth of multitasking. But for everyone who sees it as a myth, there seems to be at least one other who sees it as a core competence. (I’ve often wondered whether that phenomenon has anything to do with whatever it is that makes people who use their celphones while driving think that it’s only their driving skills that are unaffected by the distraction). Well, whatever - I think I have my answer, from 43 Folders: But the researchers found something far more interesting. Subjects who made incorrect decisions under “noisy” conditions tended to have extremely high confidence that their decisions were right. They were far more confident than the subjects dealing with a noncluttered image. Related Posts […]

Wow, so that ruins the old “I need to listen to music while doing my homework” arguement for thousands of teens across America. Ha.

Soccer (mentioned in the excerpt, reminded me of the wo/men who drive with screaming kids in the back seat, the windows down, the stereo on, while talking on the phone. Now I have proof that’s unsafe ;-)

What does it say about all of us that Annalee points to “spending far too much time reading Merlin Mann’s blog” as a symptom of highly granularized attention?

I find this phenomenon (high confidence of decisions made in a cluttered environment) the single most damaging behavior that affects my work and productivity. Example: I deleted an email that provided directions to an off-site meeting I had to attend today. No problem—I mapquested the address. Turns out mapquest does not give you correct directions for this location—a 3+ year-long problem as it turns out. Result: 30 minutes late to my meeting, never mind the near stroke I had out of sheer frustration.

Solutions—not sure what they are, but disciplined ignoring of email and phone interruptions, coupled with a strong “No!” ethic for committments figure in prominently.

Ed

First of all, “attention economy” ranks among the worst metaphors I’ve ever seen. Seriously, it’s awful.

But more problematic is that Annalee abuses this study to illustrate an entirely different point. The Italian study (yes, I read it) is about visual clutter affecting our confidence in time-constrained decisions. Remove the time constraints, and you might remove the errors. Or might not. We have no data in this study to suggest either way.

Where does Annalee get off turning this study into a rant against info-overload? It’s not about too much information, it’s about meaningless visual clutter. It has nothing to do with attention. Maybe we should talk about distracting desktop patterns. But we have already rm’ed those, right?

One final point, especially in regards to the commenter who said this disproves the high school kid who claims to study better with music. Consider how a certain level of external, non-related stimuli can help you focus. It might be white or pink noise, or pacing in a dark room, or a walk around outside, or standing on a balance board. Music might indeed help, if it’s the right kind (I hear Merlin sometimes likes “Music for Airports;” for me it’s Arvo Part’s “Tabula Rasa”). Sure, those high schoolers are talking about Slipknot or something, and it’s just a dumb kid thing, but they’ve got a conceptual point, at least.

Board nothing, you’re already the Alan Greenspan of the attention economy, Merlin.

I hope that the conclusion that people make bad decisions with high confidence of their correctness under noisy environment doesn’t get widespread. What it means for advertisers is that if you advertise a bad product you should make more noise to assist buyers in making the purchase decision confidently.

That’s the last thing we want as customers.

Jeff wrote: First of all, “attention economy” ranks among the worst metaphors I’ve ever seen. Seriously, it’s awful.

It’s actually a pretty decent one if you know anything about economics. Economics is the social science that studies how society chooses to allocate its resources.

The Economics of attention concerns itself with how people and society allocate their attention.

Attention: we often ask people if we can have it, Antony of Shakespeare fame asked people to lend it to him, and out moms told us to pay more of it in class. Yep, sounds like a form of currency to me.

If you buy the premise from the Cluetrain Manifesto that “All Markets are Conversations” in addition to buying into the idea that the blogosphere is a global conversation, then the blogosphere is a global market of sorts.

The commodity being traded is information, and it is valued in terms of how much attention it gets. For example, highly valued blog posts get tons of comments, trackbacks, incoming links and email links. Those are our units of acocunt, but nobody’s settled on which is the universal measure of value in the blogosphere.

On a related note, whatever happened to that Asian Tsunami thing?

[…] Metroactive Features | Techsploits (thanks to 43Folders for the pointer) […]

The Allen wants more of the 43folders posts!! He’s having withdrawl symptoms… post more, Merlin!!! :)