- Published on
TCWOTD: Continuous Partial Attention
- Authors
- Name
- Teddy Xinyuan Chen
https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Continuous_partial_attention
It's a a modern adaptive behavior of continuously dividing one's attention.
Continuous partial attention may lead to increased stress and decreased ability to focus and concentrate on the present moment, prohibiting reflection, contemplation, and thoughtful decision making.
Yes this happens to me, and I do not like it. Sometimes I feel like I was just waiting for a certain time to come, and do what I planned to do at that time, be it relaxing activity, going to bed, or just do anything but work.
I first read about this term from https://www.indiehackers.com/post/aim-fire-scan-the-80-20-of-executing-on-big-projects-571580cd0a .
I do this a lot more when I'm bored. Sometimes I'm waiting for CI to build, for DALLE to generate an image, or for a stupidly heavy app to load, or a list of software to install on a new server. It could be just 10-20s, but waiting is hard. I read about this somewhere, about how blockings of 10-20s are the worst for software engineers. I might allow myself to do a quick detour on YouTube or Twitter to not having to wait. I'm not addicted but frequent context switching is awful.