mamamusings

Great article. I'm easily distractable and need to refocus I think. Oddly enough, my wife and I are expecting our first child and one of my first questions was, "Well what the hell are they going to do all day, won't they get bored?" I thought to myself how I've got e-mail, rss feeds, phone calls, work, mowing the lawn, etc and this child won't be doing any of that.

Of course you snap back and start to think of all you did as a child when we had none of those things. The good thing is that they have us to play with and learn from. Distractions today seem more intense and sometimes overwhelming. Again this probably goes back to how you deal with those distractions as Paul Ford just seems to go about them differently.

Linda Stone (who coined the phrase "continuous partial attention") gave a great talk at SuperNova 2005 on this theme. She quotes Dan Gould: "I quit every social network I was on so I could have dinner with people."http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2005/06/supernova_2005_2.html

Betsy-

One of the reasons I came to Seattle was to be able to work with Linda on the CPA issue. :)

great resource by the way.

Well, say hi to her from me! I met her in NYC in June at an insane Golden Plate Award event, having no idea who she was. As I kept bumping into her at different interactions, I started thinking, "Who is this incredibly smart woman?" Too much else was going on to think much about it. About two weeks later after getting home, I googled "Linda Stone." Ooohhhh, right--Continuous Partial Attention! I look forward to seeing great stuff from the two of you.