While it’s the explosion of electronic communications and media that has pushed us into the Attention Age, good old fashioned clutter is still a source of distractions that needs to be dealt with.
Ryan Healy has a great method he calls the Three-File System to deal with paperwork. Most of us have a tendency to collect […]
Attention Rich
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Category Archives: General
Physical Distractions
Pay attention to your kids
I was going to soccer practice with my son the other day. He’s only 3 years old, so the practice has a high degree of parent involvement. We were out on the soccer field and in between two exercises I noticed that another dad pulled out his Blackberry and checked his email. What email […]
Copy Something From Bill Gates - His Thinking
Twice a year Bill Gates has made a point of taking a Think Week - a week where he isolates himself from all daily distractions and focus on strategic thinking. Can you do the same? Can you afford not to? If the man running one of the worlds largest companies can take a week off […]
Train your customers/partners/coworkers
If you always respond to emails within 2 minutes and if you’re always available by phone (at all hours of the day), that is what people will come to expect of you. And with expectations set this high, it’s very difficult to get off the treadmill.
When I sent out my first invitation to potential JV […]
Never check your email (first thing in the morning)
Is your email inbox in the morning overflowing with thoughtful and strategic information that is directly related to what you intended to focus your day on? It never happens to me.
Instead it typically contains a myriad of minor problems all screaming out for my attention. If I get involved in all those minor problems first […]
Don’t respond to emails (right away)
Most email programs have this “helpful” feature that notifies you each time a new email arrives. It can be a sound effect, or a small window that flashes the name of the sender and the subject in the corner of your screen. Turn that “feature” off now. Stop reading this article and turn that feature […]
The Attention Age is already here - it is just unevenly distributed
Several of my blog posts have been referenced in Web 2.0 sites like Digg, del.icio.us and reddit. No chart toppers, just a vote here and there. (You’re welcome to change that by using the Share This link below.) What I find amazing when I look at my web stats is the large amount of traffic […]
Information Overload - 6 Causes
All knowledge workers of today can attest to the overwhelming amount of information they need to deal with on a daily basis. This constant state of information overload is caused by several conspiring factors:
#1 – More Information Than We Can Process
Search the web for almost any topic and you will get millions of web pages […]
Work in Batch Mode
Back in the dark ages when mainframes ruled the earth, real time processing was an unknown concept. You would create the instructions for the work you wanted performed on punch cards or magnetic tape, hand it to the mainframe operators, cross your fingers and wait until the next day for the results. If you made […]
The Attention Age Doctrine - Are You Paying Attention?
Nick Dalton reviews Rich Schefren’s latest missive: The Attention Age Doctrine. He finds that it contains an excellent description of recent cultural phenomena and business problems. But it falls short on concrete advice and solutions. Given that this is only the first part of the doctrine, that is understandable. And it sets the bar high for the next installment.