Unpredictable. Unfocused. Just like life.

Kathy Sierra has noticed a trend where we seem to be spending more time talking about what we are doing than actually doing it, using the example of Twitter, which exists purely to capture what we are doing:

For those of you who don't know about Twitter, it has one purpose in life... to be (in its own words)--A global community of friends and strangers answering one simple question: What are you doing? And people answer it. And answer it. And answer it. Over and over and over again, every moment of every hour, people type in a word, fragment, or sentence about what they're doing right then. (Let's overlook the fact that there can be only one true answer to the question... "I'm typing to tell twitter what I'm doing right now... which is typing to tell twitter what I'm doing right now." Or something else that makes my head hurt.)

She eloquently points out that answering the question "what am I doing?" takes us out of the flow of life, since we have to stop doing it to say what we are doing. And then we'll need some time to get back to what we were doing before we interrupted ourselves.

Kathy also quotes Linda Stone, originator of the term Continuous Partial Attention:

We pay continuous partial attention in an effort NOT TO MISS ANYTHING. It is an always-on, anywhere, anytime, any place behavior that involves an artificial sense of constant crisis. We are always in high alert when we pay continuous partial attention. This artificial sense of constant crisis is more typical of continuous partial attention than it is of multi-tasking."

We think we multi-task but we really don't. We stop doing one thing in order to do another, on the assumption that the new thing is a crisis that is important and must be attended to immediately. Which breaks our concentration and keeps us from focusing and completing what we are doing.

We are increasingly getting trapped in a belief that urgency is equivalent to importance; that we must handle each new event as it happens.That we can't concentrate on a single thing until we are done. And in the end we don't accomplish more; we accomplish less or sometimes we don't finish anything at all.

Lately I've taken to closing the computer, turning off the television, and just sitting quietly to think and process the events of the day. A break from constant input, and a few minutes to actually just absorb and filter.