E-mail and corporate attention deficit disorder

Last night over dinner, Michael Neal and I talked about how businesses are increasingly run by e-mail.

Neal, who came to Microsoft after the Connectix aquisition and is now the vendor's product manager for virtualization, says the transition from a small, 100-person company to Microsoft's management by e-mail culture took some getting used to.

Like others at Microsoft, Neal gets hundreds of e-mails a day. He starts by getting up early in the morning and spends one or two hours reading e-mail at home before going to work (thanks to Microsoft's global presence, e-mails accumulate around the clock). Then he drives into the office and puts in a full day at work, where he spents a significant part of his day reviewing and acting on hundreds more e-mails before returning home for dinner. After dinner he spends another hour or so reading e-mail before calling it a day.

What was most startling, says Neal, was that Microsoft's e-mail-centric culture extended into meetings. People would come into meetings with their laptops and would be reading and responding to e-mails while others were speaking or presenting. Neal says he was taken aback at first. His his initial reaction, understandably, was that such behavior was impolite. But then, he says, he realized that reading e-mails during meetings was a necessity due to the sheer volume of messages coming in. It's nothing personal. It's a survival strategy.

This is the phenomenon that once lead Microsoft executive Linda Stone to coin the term continuous partial attention.

I asked Neal if he thought the fact that people were blatantly focused on non-meeting work in meetings says anything about the effectiveness of how those meetings are run. I understand the rationale behind such behavior. If there are segments of a meeting you are not actively involved in why not fill those vacant processing slots in your daydreaming brain with other work? On the other hand, if people aren't giving the meeting their full attention, why are they there in the first place? Machines multitask well. People don't.

The idea of large businesses acting on strategies that were created in meetings where no one was giving matters their full attention just boggles the mind. Such group behavior amounts to a collective attention deficit disorder.

The important issue for Neal with regard to e-mail is how thoughtful people are before deciding whether or not to send it. It's important to not waste peoples' time, he says, so a key to keeping e-mails down is to be careful about what is sent to whom and when. He tries to be careful, for example, not to bury upper management in e-mail minutia.

Stone first coined the term continuous partial attention in 1997 but the phenomenon certainly hasn't abated. If anything, it's probably worse today, some nine years later.

Sometimes e-mail silence is golden. Don Knuth once said "Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration." Imagine you're one of the thousands of programmers working on Windows right now. Would processing several hundred e-mails a day and participating with continuous partial attention in meetings help you meet those pressing deadlines? E-mail is the enemy of those whose creative work requires intense, focused thinking. Hopefully, those programmers aren't ruled by it.

Ultimately, Stone has stated, we will move to a new and more exciting phase: full-attention focus.

A world where people are paying attention. Imagine that.