KnowledgeForward

In researching attention management I have run across many personal attention management tipcs in newspapers, magazines, and books. I have compiled a set of these tips along with my own ideas and included them below. I used the components of my Enterprise Attention Management conceptual architecture (input, processing, throttle, output at a high level) as a structuring mechanism.

I hope you find them useful. Let me know if you have any additional suggestions.

Manage the Input

• Unsubscribe to magazines, newspapers, or content streams that generally go unread
• Politely ask to be removed from mass e-mail lists of friends and relatives that send unwanted “friendly spam.” Or set up a filter in e-mail to block them without their knowledge
• Set up proactive scans, such as saved searches to alert you to new information
• Use news aggregators. RSS feed readers such as Attensa, KnowNow, and NewsGator or the RSS functionality in new versions of browsers can syndicate information from dozens or hundreds of sources

Manage the Processing

• Set aside an afternoon to learn the attentional capabilities of the technology you are currently using. A few moments spent learning how to set up e-mail filters, creating more granular IM status categories, or customizing cellphone ringtones for groups of callers can pay off handsomely over time. Learn to use the “number of unread items” indicators on e-mail, RSS readers, and discussion forums to alert you to new content
• Use the personalization functionality in portals to place important applications and content on your personal pages where it can be easily scanned
• Use portals as alerting mechanisms to show summaries of content such as reports that you only need to explore in detail in rare instances when further research is prudent (such as exceeding a threshold)
• Get in the habit of using presence capabilities and keeping their “buddy lists” up to date
• Build a social network – learn what people “in the know” are reading
• One of the biggest promises of modern communication technology is having messages “follow” you (forward to devices you travel with) or alert you to important messages on e-mail or voice-mail. First, consider your appropriate level of response. Then, if you determine it is worth having messages follow you, explore the methods you have available to send alerts via devices you have frequent access to or how to set up forwarding
• Set up separate accounts to catch messages that deserve different levels of attention. For example, set up a rarely checked free e-mail account for free content that requires registration or temporary communications
• Send messages using a channel with appropriate urgency and your responses will come back accordingly. For example, post FYI information in a discussion group, send e-mail for messages that can be responded to by the next day, call or personally stop by if an important task demands it
• Be the first to recommend switching the channel when needed. A phone call that is getting bogged down with details or requires more input may be switched to an e-mail or discussion forum. An IM session that is turning into a short novel may be moved to a phone call with a quick “can I call u?”. A lengthy multi-person e-mail thread should be moved to a discussion forum

Manage the Throttle

• Set a personal SLA (Service Level Agreement). Many busy executives openly state their response times in their e-mail signatures or voice-mail messages, but even setting the SLA as a personal goal may relieve stress associated with feeling responses must continually be faster. This is particularly important when traveling or on vacation. Do not set expectations for responsiveness that you can’t keep up with
• Know when to turn off the cell or Blackberry, set IM to “away”, or turn on “out of office” on e-mail

Manage the Consumption

• Set aside reading time each day or week on the calendar. An hour of uninterrupted time once a week can be worth several hours of interruptible time spread throughout the week
• Be disciplined about not letting various inboxes get out of control (within the bounds of your personal SLA)
• Prepare yourself for interruptions. You can increase your resilience to interruptions by leaving breadcrumbs. Regularly dump thoughts being juggled to a persistent form, such as a pad of scratch paper or computer. On your computer: close unused windows, name files and tabs with names that will convey understanding later, and place manual bookmarks within documents being read (i.e., type “[bookmark]” within a long document when stopping for a break)

Understand Yourself and Your Environment

• Look around to gauge the acceptable level of responsiveness for your job. When evaluating more disruptive forms of technology, determine if the response time benefit exceeds the interruption cost. What would happen if you noticed and responded to the message when back in the office? What are customers/clients expecting? How do your competitors and peers respond? Consider the worst case scenario - “what is the worst that would happen if I turned off the cellphone before dinner?”
• Use introspection to evaluate how you handle demands for your attention. What are your primary causes of info stress? Are the costs of your current level of availability worth the benefits?

Interesting posting from Ross Mayfield. Excerpt below:

Here’s a thought experiment, one I had in a hallway with Jerry Michalski and Linda Stone last week. What if attention, the last good some of us think will be scarce, is actually abundant? …

Attention isn’t an act of consumption, but one of giving. Steve went past that with gestures, a framework I can buy. But are we really limited to an amount of gestures we can give? Does it cost me something to mention Steve’s name, let alone linking to him, in a post? Or wave to him in a hallway? The cost of either is nominal. …

When you make your gestures public, enable them to be discovered, you are acting with abundance. This is what I think is changing. Sharing control over your gestures creates more value than the gesture inandofitself.

I like his questioning of the common basis for attention management (the whole “attention is a scarce resource” bit). I posted the following:

Mentioning someone in a blog post may cost nothing, but my instinct tells me that if I have to read through X blog posts a day, I’ll hit up against the limits of what I can pay attention to in one day. Add to that Y emails, Z instant messages, and you get the idea. So making gestures abundant doesn’t cost you anything, but if you’re adding to that X+Y+Z it’s costing me something, whatever you want to call it.

Just had a great conversation with David Marshak at IBM about presence, attention management, and interruptions. David had a good point that shows the value of thinking in terms of Enterprise Attention Management rather than just personal Attention Managemement. When determining whether an interruption should be allowed, one has to look at the value to the interrupter rather than just a myopic view of the value to the interruptee. If I just need to ask one question to put me on the right path for the next few weeks of work, the company as a whole is better off if I can interupt that person even if it annoys them.

When I talk about Enterprise Attention Management, I refer to the entire system of message senders and receivers. So one goal of EAM is therefore optimizing the system - the grand total of the value of interruptions minus their costs. One needs an Enterprise view to make accurate judgements about interruptions.

Of course, this is theoretical. From a practical point of view there isn’t a useful method for attaching dollars and cents (sense?) to each message and a negotiation on price when it arrives. But it is helpful to think about this at the academic level so that it can be applied in whatever minimal fashion at the desktop. The practical moral of the story is: You may not be able to afford to block all interruptions.

As technology industry analysts, we tend to look first to technology to solve problems.  Usually, however, technology simply reflects our own weaknesses. In trying to write a summary of the root problems that drive the need for Attention Management, I found myself thinking back - way back - to the 6th century and the Seven Deadly Sins. They demonstrate that the inherent faults with humanity drive many technology adoption and usage problems, and Attention Management is certainly no exception.

As long as humans are flawed, their sins of greed (spammers), pride (an unwavering belief from senders that their message is of the utmost importance to everyone on the email list), gluttony (subscribing to too many feeds, newsletters, reports, and e-mail lists), and sloth (letting inboxes pile up until they get out of control, choosing communication channels by expediency rather than efficiency) will continue to infect the way we use technologies to communicate and collaborate.