Paying Partial Attention Continuously

We covered quite a few topics today, so I think I’ll just focus on Continuos Partial Attention.

It can be said that CPA is an effect of multi-tasking, and that multi-tasking is essentially the core of CPA. However, in a sense, CPA and multi-tasking are still different, in a sense and shouldn’t be confused as the same things.

According to Linda Stone, “The two are differentiated by the impulse that motivates them”.

Multi-tasking

Multi-tasking is primarily driven by our desires to increase our productivity and efficiency, to keep up with this fast-paced world where everything has to be delivered now. I think us city people are champions of multi-tasking. The world constantly introduces technology that is “faster”, “more efficient”, “more effective”, “more productive” and “more energy-efficient” to meet our needs. Sometimes I wonder, have we harnessed technology to meet our needs, or have our needs changed to keep up with the constant revolutionary characteristics of technology?

Continuous Partial Attention

On the other hand, CPA has a more negative connotation compared to multi-tasking. While multi-tasking is basically us doing many things at once, CPA is us paying “partial attention continuously”. It’s a state of mind, rather than a reference to physical activities, which is what multi-tasking is associated with. According to Stone, extensive CPA  ”contributes to a stressful lifestyle, to operating in crisis management mode, and to a compromised ability to reflect, to make decisions, and to think creatively”.

Do I think multi-tasking is a bad thing? No. Rather, I think it is something highly necessary today. At the Corporate Reputation Seminar last week, one of the speakers shared a quote “You may not like change, but you’re going to like irrelevance even less”. Multi-tasking has become an adaptive behavior, if you will. You can still get things done with multi-tasking, and do it well. The key is balance again. You don’t expect to complete an assignment in as short a time as possible if you type a sentence and then talk online every 5 minutes. Or do research and then check your Facebook/Twitter updates once every 3 seconds. Sooner or later, something has to give.

More information about Continuous Partial Attention theory can be found here.

http://www.lindastone.net/

Anyway, here’s the mind map summing whatever we talked about today.

Um, if you’re wondering about the spelling error, I did try to change “TECHNLOGY” into “TECHNOLOGY” but Adobe Photoshop only let me save the file in TIFF or PSD so I couldn’t convert it to JPEG.

Credits to Maisara at http://maisaraa.wordpress.com/ for correcting the spelling error and uploading the new mind map!

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