It makes me wish there were some rigorous way that we could talk about these states, the problems they cause and the means we have of dealing with them. Some kind of pattern language, or indeed a calculus of action and organization.
Once you pare away the tickler files, electric labellers and Californian style, GTD gets close to this. Havi Brooks of The Fluent Self is also doing some great thinking in this area, understanding it as an aspect of Yoga. She came up with the term "Distractor Mouse Mode" that Bice wrongly credits me for.
I guess you've also got Edward de Bono, the life hackers. Also the authors of SICP, who claim that computer science is the first tentative steps of a primitive civilization toward a calculus of process.
There's got to be something above the level of source code and staplers, but below the level of spirituality, something that we can reason rigorously about. Theologians reach amazing levels of precision discussing the inner nature of God, why can we not do the same when thinking about dealing with email?
As it is, De Bono has got his hats, the life hackers fold up index cards, no one can agree on what a pattern language is, Brooks uses kooky language deliberately and maybe one out of ten people I speak to about GTD agrees with me.
Still, I get the feeling that something is happening.
2 comments:
The mind can only do one thing at a time. People that claim to multi-task are simply task switching very quickly (and usually extremely inefficiently). I think the problem with Pew Pew! moments and Mouse Distractor Mode is that most of us don't know how to calm (and thus focus) our minds.
Talking about these states is important, names are good because they help us create context, but once we have a clear idea of these states what are we going to do about it? Recognition is the first stage, so that you know when you're heading toward Pew Pew! moments, but the next stage is action. You have to actually change your state if you want the outcome to be different than what you know will already happen.
This requires training. Training to learn what to do and training to change the habits we have that lead to these situations.
A weakness of systems for managing process and attention is that they may eliminate productive distractions.
A distraction can also be thought of as a "stepping outside" of the task at hand, and on occasion that's exactly what's needed to make real progress, or (especially) to redefine progress. Of course, one cannot know at the time one steps out side the frame whether that's going to be a productive move. I suspect this impossibility of prediction is one of the reasons we seem compelled to distraction even unconsciously -- because our normal decision-making procedures are not suited to deciding when it is time to be distracted, almost by definition.
None of which is to say, of course, that all distractions are productive, or that I don't want more control over mine! (I want much more control over mine.) But any general calculus of process is unlikely to take into account the potential value of distractions.
A possible analogy might be crime. We rarely measure the productive value of crime to society, but surely it has some, along with all of crime's bad effects. Yes, embezzlement is bad. On the other hand, what if that mother used embezzled funds to send her daughter to college, whereas the rightful owner of the funds was going to use them to buy another yacht? Calcluating the cost of the crime overall (as opposed to just the cost to the embezzlee) would require an impossible formula involving the cost of investigation and trust lost, the gain the embezzler's daughter got from college, the gain to the college, the cost to the yacht-maker (who maybe now can't afford a good college for his children), the policeman's salary, the oft-overlooked benefit of keeping society's crime "immunization" updated (i.e., other crimes are investigated more promptly, or even prevented, because this one was discovered but unsolved), etc. (Indeed, one could think of property as basically a convention about which costs to consider and which to ignore.)
You see what I'm getting at re distractions, I'm sure. :-)
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