Laurent Haug Joins The Attention Economists

Inspired by Steve Rubel's recent post on the Attention Crash, now Laurent Haug (of Lift) has started to gripe about his attention as a 'precious resource' (although I do agree with him about dropping his LinkedIn account, for totally different reasons):

[from The Attention Bubble]

As our time becomes the most precious resource we have, the millions of web pages competing for our attention are becoming a problem. Early adopters – the canaries in the coal mine? – are reacting, arbitrating between all their time consuming actions. When I lost my mobile phone two month ago, I almost didn’t renew my subscription. It’s only after I got blamed by a client who was trying to reach me that I decided to re-order a mobile. Email? I am increasingly forcing myself to only answer them once a day. I let the flow of information get in anytime, but I stack all the answers together, trying to get in a more productive flow once a day to answer. Best practices are coming together to counter the overflow. We just need to create them.

No, we need better techniques to live in the flow, not shut it down. We need to shift away from the web of pages to a web of flow, where what we need will find its way to us. By all means, throw away your RSS reader, spend less time in the email client: but not because of attention economics! Those tools are just really bad at treating time as a shared space.

The real problem underneath everything, the premise never examined, is that browsing the web and living in the email client are simply not where we should be. It's not that we are overloaded with too much, its that the tools we use are doing a bad job of connecting us to the important things. They are bad tools.

We need to unseat email and browsing -- Web 1.0's linchpins -- and move into the web of traffic and flow.

tags: attention+economists, the+attention+bubble, laurent+haug, steve+rubel, traffic+and+flow, flow, death+to+email, death+to+the+browser

Comments

[Laurent]

My view is that the solution will be a bit of both: new tools and new attitudes.

I still think that overload is an issue because it is a fact. The quantity of information has been multiplied by an insane factor, and the problem is that the quantity of relevant information for my job and life has followed the same path.

My capacity to integrate information is capped. I need 1) new tools 2) to stop thinking that I need all the info in the world to make good decisions.

Anyway, who needs all this information when the best decisions are often instinctive? Blink.

[John Bell]

I buy that we need to manage our time better (schedule email response time et al...). And I buy that we need better tools and that it's about flow, etc.. Why "throw away the RSS reader"? I have heard this again and again yet my "reader" is where my flow goes, so-to-speak. I actually like it (in lieu of a new, better solution). Mine doesn't have 300 feeds. More like 50. And I scan them a few times a day.

What's the better route?

[Almar van der Krogt]

Ever since your presentation at Reboot 9.0 I don't suffer from this problem anymore: I have 'Network Confidence'; sooner or later my network will notify me of what is important.
I treat the information flow like my mobile phone: I'm always reachable, but I hardly ever answer a call.
Also my threshold varies over time and depends on various things (e.g. if it is a new tool and there isn't a Netvibes-module, I will not consider it at first). I actually experience a 'flow' when I'm 'on to something' and then the information flow tends to widen only to narrow again when I'm satisfied for the moment.