Defrag Blog

This morning I crawled out of bed at about 6:30, took our dobie for a walk around the neighborhood, threw open the patio doors, and sat down to dig into a conversation that’s been happening that I haven’t previously been able to pay attention to. The nexus of it all is a talk that Stowe Boyd gave at Reboot –you can find all of the necessary resources over on Stowe’s blog (I went with watching the video of the talk and then reading through the entries). The gist of it all hinges around the topic of “continuous partial attention,” or the changing of that - a state of connected, unfocused attention that Stowe refers to as “flow.”

Stowe’s basic argument (simplistically paraphrased) is that the tools we’re using (social networking, etc) are actually changing the way our neurons are dealing with things — and that has led to 2 central propositions:

1. Time is a shared resource.
2. Connectivity is more important that productivity.

(I’m not doing this justice here, so please go take a look at what Stowe has to say.)

This is all very interesting to me, on both a personal and professional (ie, Defrag) level — “attention” is one of the areas I originally thought was deeply connected to Defrag (still do). So - dealing with the points:

1. Time is a shared resource: which is to say that your time is no longer “your own”; your connectedness to the network and your ability to respond to networked events helps the entire network move forward.

Okay, I can *feel* that. But I also actively work to fight that (in some ways). Scoble responded to all of this by talking about how he’s trying to twitter less, exercise more, and take off to mexico and purposefully turn off his cellphone and email. I’ve been thinking about precisely these things lately.

My “work schedule” is incredibly fluid. I “check email” and “read feeds” every morning (is that work?). Folks that I’ve worked with have told me how “constantly connected” I seem to be — and yet, honestly, I’ve structured whole portions of my life *not* to be that way. I live on small island (ie, it feels like a small town). I hate my cell phone (I never carry it with me). You couldn’t *pay* me to have a smart phone that gets me my email all of the time. And yet, were it not for the “work week” increasing the connected-ness of the rest of my network from monday through friday, I probably couldn’t tell the difference between saturday and tuesday (ie, if people were “in the office” on saturday, I could come to a point where my tuesday “work day” looks the same as my saturday “work day”). Some of this, I’m sure, comes from the fact that I work from home — but I will say this: since leaving “the office lifestyle,” my “personal producitivity” has gone through the roof. Reason: I’m still incredibly “connected,” but I also have the ability to disconnect when either a project, or some time for personal rest calls for it.

What’s the most valuable thing in my life? My connections. What determines my “work week”? When I need to be connecting. When I try to get “more productive” what do I focus on? Changing how I connect with my connections (ie, not everything needs a phone call, etc).

So in the midst of all of this, I’m running conferences, receiving several hundred emails per day, doing my “work” and keeping up with over 1000 RSS feeds.

My point: Time probably *is* a shared resource, but I’ve worked to impose some structures on my life that help me to leverage that time to my advantage. Am I “always connected”? Nope, and I wouldn’t want to be.

A last thought on this small point: I think you have to “disturb” your network occasionally….ie, ideas come from changes to networked connections. That’s why attending conferences is valuable.

2. The second point: connectivity trumps producitivity.

This is a weird one. I get where Stowe is going, and I don’t necessarily disagree — for the “web worker.” Which is to say, “yes” a whole lot of my value is my connection to the network. But there is something inherently productive that comes from things in my head that I bring back to the network. I don’t know- it feels like there’s a piece missing here.

For instance: Time zones. I’m EST. My day tends to start a lot earlier than folks in the bay area — I also tend to choose to walk away from my computer a lot sooner than they finish their day. Am I the one losing out on this level of “connectedness”, or is the entire west coast losing out by sleeping in?

All in all this is very interesting stuff - I’m going to get something around this on-stage at Defrag (still noodling on how, etc)….stay tuned.