It seems ironic that in this current age of convenience and automation and computerization that we have less time and not more. We rush from activity to activity and seem to have little time to stop and "smell the roses", not to mention spending some quality time with our friends and families! Perhaps this is a result of expectations being raised for personal productivity due to these modernizations along with the increasingly competitive world market. Whatever the cause, we find ourselves with an attention shortage as a result. As the amount of stuff we deem important to track/consume continues to increase, we are reduced to a frenzied, multi-tasking state where we are never fully engaged with what we are currently doing *now* because we are constantly thinking about three other things at the same time!
So what do we do to combat this growing attention/time shortage? It may not be rocket science, but I recommend the following tactics:
- SIMPLIFY/SHOW RESTRAINT: Do you really need to keep up with every episode of your favorite show(s)? Do you really need to consume every X gadget that Y produces? We need to pick our battles (attention targets) wisely and not become embroiled in trivial things that don't make a difference in the eternal scope of things.
- DELEGATE: Are you a control freak? Do you feel like you are humanity's last great hope? Get over it! We are only going to make it through this together. Distribute your load throughout a team, although preferably one with congruent goals and desires.
- AGGREGATE: Use tools and techniques to allow for you to be "abstracted" away from the line-by-line details. Instead of constantly trying to monitor everything you care about yourself, invoke some intelligence agent/pundit to do it for you, which in turn will provide you with a distillation of the material in question.
With regard to #3, this is where we hope to make a difference at Grimaldi Productions. We are building a product called Mentations that will be able to "learn" what is important to you (i.e., what you think about... your mentations) and monitor these things for you, providing you information at a glance through dynamic pictures (a net-driven dashboard of sorts) which visually summarize your status with regard to these categories. We'd love to get your feedback on our progress so far - you can download our work-in-progress from www.mentations.com!
