Ignite Talk: Attention and Sex
We had our third Ignite Seattle a couple of weeks ago and the videos are now up. The first one that I am going to share is Scott Berkun's great talk entitled "Attention and Sex".
In it, Scott discusses a time when presidential debate questions were answered in hours instead of a couple of minutes (and the whole debate lasted half a day). He contrasts that to today where we do things in the smallest amount of time possible so that we can do other things (or multi-tasking) and presidential debates last an hour. Scott brings up the latest research that casts multi-tasking in a counter-productive light. He ultimately suggests that if we want to achieve greatness that we should pay attention to how the great people who came before us paid attention -- by blocking distractions out and focusing on the task at hand. Given all the focus on attention today on the web, this talk is timely.
Where does sex come in? Other than just providing the talk with a great title, Scott points out that it's one of the few places where people today don't multi-task; we still pay a lot of attention during sex.
You can see the rest of the videos from Ignite 3 on Blip.tv. The video was shot by Allegra Searle-LeBel and produced by Bryan Zug and Paolo Tosolini. I'll be sharing more over the next weeks.
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I have to admit, I do multi-task when having sex. I won't elaborate, but those with an imagination as wide and open as mine will know exactly what I am talking about...
But at work, I do not multi-task. I find it highly counter productive. Giving one task all your attention is the best way to get things done.
Brady -- thank you for posting this presentation -- It was by far my favorite one at the last Ignite Seattle, and I've told several people about it since then. I wish I could more easily post the video to my blog, but I'm sure I'll be able to track down that blip.tv link if I look a bit harder. And, thanks for the awesome effort at Web 2.0 Expo; I thoroughly enjoyed it.
And, I look forward to presenting at the next Ignite Seattle... not sure when that is, but I'm posting this publically, to hold myself to it!
Dave
Funny enough Jon Uddell also wrote a piece about multitasking on his blog:
http://blog.jonudell.net/2007/04/25/multitasking-tradeoffs-individual-versus-group-productivity/
Lennert
Funny enough Jon Uddell also wrote a piece about multitasking on his blog:
http://blog.jonudell.net/2007/04/25/multitasking-tradeoffs-individual-versus-group-productivity/
Lennert
I guess you haven't seen the Seinfeld "Pastrami" episode:
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Ian Crew [04.23.07 01:41 PM]
You wrote "Scott points out that it's one of the few places where people today don't multi-task; we still pay a lot of attention during sex." This is not as true as it once was--according to http://www.smartcontent.info/frogpad/New-Research-Informs-Where-People.htm 42.6% of women answering the phone during sex. Sigh!