Continuous Partial Attention

More on the issue of doing one thing at a time: My friend Anne-Marie Oomen sent me this from Linda Stone (born 1955),  the writer and consultant who coined the phrase "continuous partial attention." Stone also coined "email apnea" in 2008 which means "a temporary absence or suspension of breathing, or shallow breathing, while doing email."Have you ever noticed that? I have.From Linda Stone:“To pay continuous partial attention is to pay partial attention — CONTINUOUSLY. It is motivated by a desire to be a LIVE node on the network. Another way of saying this is that we want to connect and be connected. We want to effectively scan for opportunity and optimize for the best opportunities, activities, and contacts, in any given moment. To be busy, to be connected, is to be alive, to be recognized, and to matter.”She says we pay continuous partial attention in an effort NOT TO MISS ANYTHING. We stay tuned in this way all the time and everywhere, in an artificial sense of constant crisis. We’re always in high alert. This is not the same as multi-tasking. It’s more a sense of constant crisis.“It’s like having one foot in cyberspace and one foot in ‘meatspace’ all the time. It’s not that easy to do,” she says, “and occasionally you stumble trying to accomplish both.”  Stone calls attention "the most powerful tool of the human spirit." She says you can enhance it through things like exercise and meditation, or you can "diffuse it through technologies such as email and Blackberries."It looks to me as if we’re paying the price every day, every minute, for that hyper-awareness. There is such fear! The fear of being left out, missing out, being forgotten, being conquered when our guard is down. How exhausting, and how depleting of our immune system. And how sad for our real, authentic lives, that we’re missing them while we think we’re being alert to them. Sigh.Okay, I am going to make a pledge and let you know how well I keep it. Starting tomorrow I’m going to keep my email turned off every day until after lunch. I’m going to do this for a week and report back. I won’t look at my IPhone, either, until then, unless I get a call. My husband’s been urging me to do that for a long time. I will do it.  There are so many good reasons to reduce the noise in my life.  Writing is one. Living in another. But mostly, just more clarity.