Listening to some podcasts, I came in touch with the concept of continuous partial attention by Linda Stone.
As far as I understand is a kind of ‘evolution’ of the concept/myth of multitasking following the new era of always connected / super – communication / multimedia / social network …
The idea is that we are moving from ‘do many things in the same time’ to ‘scan the continuous alerts we are receiving to select the best to get/act upon’.
Have a look at this post on O’Reilly radar in which you can read notes from a speech by Linda Stone about this topic.
PierG
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PierG (aka Piergiorgio Grossi) 
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July 21, 2006 at 9:41 am
Linda
for more information on this, you can check out:
continuouspartialattention.com
July 21, 2006 at 11:14 am
pierg
Thank you Linda for your suggestion.
I really appreciate your ideas and I hope you had fun in reading my blog.
PierG
July 22, 2006 at 6:58 am
Mark Horstman
Continuous Partial Attention doesn’t work. Nor does anyone who says they are multi-tasking actually multi-task with any efficiency or effectiveness.
At least, from a standpoint of what works BEST. CPA is the tech equivalent of what HBR recently called Executive Attention Deficit.
If you’re allowing yourself to be pulled in 10 different directions, you’re not focusing. The whole POINT of focusing is to eliminate all other inputs. If you’re “focusing on A while scanning B and C”, then you’re NOT focusing on A.
You don’t need to scan all that stuff. When you go on vacation, the world doesn’t collapse. If you check your mail on vacation, your family notices.
Being connected CAN be a good thing, but it is not an excuse for lack of focus.