What do you do while reading this text? Or looking up from the newspaper, watching the TV in the background?  Or reading with one eye a text message, just arrived in your cell phone? Or updating your Facebook status? Thinking quickly about an email you should have answered yesterday? Yes, you probably take  your time with a lot of little things as you are trying to focus on reading an article.

This is how our media and communications processes often look today. This form of “wandering attention”, that comes from the way we always are available, is called “continuous partial attention”,  by the American scientist and technology thinker Linda Stone. She is a writer and consultant who coined this phrase in 1998.  Stone also coined “email apnea” in 2008, showing that people tend to keep their breath while e-mailing, starting biochemical processes in the body, in the long run resulting in stress related illnesses.

But even if  the ever shared attention is stressful for us Linda Stone and other researchers have found that there are advantages in being  distracted or taking small breaks when we are focused on a task. Short breaks from job may give new energy and new ideas about how to solved tasks.  According to study results from researcher Michael Kane, University of North Carolina, our focus moves from what we are doing about one third of the time. It indicates that this behavior probably plays an important part  in our brains. Other studies also show that when we are daydreaming,  or allowing the mind to fly freely for a while,  brain regions associated with savings in long-term memory are activated, helping the brain to save information better. When the mind flaps away in non mental demanding breaks it activates the  parts of the brain that helps us to solve problems. So when we look out of the window thinking of nothing special or standing in the shower, where we are not connected, our brain  keeps doing advanced creative work. This is something completely different from continious partial attention!

 So think about  how you breathe when unopened e-mails fill the screen. And begin to see Facebook and looking out of the windows not as time wasters or signs of poor work ethic but as important parts of your job performance. For even though most of us cannot take a three-hour walk in the woods during working hours, maybe a bit wandering surfing through the  images from your friend’s bachelor party can make you a little more creative and efficient.

 I quote Linda  from her web: “Attention is the most powerful tool of the human spirit. We can enhance or augment our attention with practices like meditation and exercise, diffuse it with technologies like email and Blackberries, or alter it with phamaceuticals. In the end, though, we are fully responsible for how we choose to use this extraordinary tool.”

Read more at www.lindastone.net