Scanning
June 20, 2007 | 10 comments | permalink
http://www.flickr.com/photos/chimchim/429086812/
How many inputs have you had today? Here’s my list and ‘methodology’ for an average day:
| Emails | 220 |
| Newspapers: Four, containing an average of 400 stories and news nibs each | 1,600 |
| Twitter: Messages in and out (am not a big fan) | 10 |
| Facebook: At least ten times a day where I guess I link across say, 4 items each time | 40 |
| Blogs: I have 70 on my Netvibes aggregator, and I guess I follow a link on every other one (I keep my online news feeds here too) | 105 |
| BBC Radio 4 Today programme in the morning for 15 minutes, say 10 stories | 10 |
| Texts: | 20 |
| TV News in the evening: the half hour evening shows contain about 12 stories | 12 |
| Total | 2,017 |
Now obviously I don’t read all of these, that’s why I use the term scan. But in some brief moment I have, even if only to reject further time spent, glanced at all of them. And it’s not like they are contained in one part of the day. I would think my morning accounts for the bulk, but as we all know it just keeps on coming. My colleague Steve Rubel posted on what he called the Attention Crash the other other day. Linda Stone coined the phrase Continuous Partial Attention to describe what this does to people and why we are drawn to scan.
I had intended this blog to fit in with that world in that I called it sixtysecondview because I guessed I’d not hold people for longer (still here?). It has made prioritising my time more challenging and I’m not sure our management training and time management courses are equipping us for this new world. And if you are in PR the ability to be able to switch from ‘input and scanning’ mode to ‘focus and doing’ mode is an increasingly important skill.
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For what it’s worth I remember reading somewhere, sometime ago, that we consume as much information in a day as a Roman centurion used to consume in a lifetime. How they came to that conclusion I have no idea…
If only a centurian could have blogged we would have known exactly what the Romans did for us.
David, half as much as the Greeks
Is this a new game - like Mornington Cresent? If so can I play too?
Ian good idea. I was talking to Stephen Davies about this and he was going to do his version, so yes, lets see just how manic your day is too!
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[…] Great post by David Brain on the number of inputs he receives in a given day. The amount of messages that we receive through both regular media and social media in a 24 hour period is massively high. To a point where you simply can’t take all of them in. And remember, this is excluding advertisements. […]
[…] More: continued here […]
[…] Dealing with information overload isn’t a new phenomenon. I constantly read people’s blog posts or tweets declaring “email bankruptcy”. David Brain touched on the subject this time last year and discussed the amount of inputs he receives during the work week. His conclusion is spot on: “…if you are in PR the ability to be able to switch from ‘input and scanning’ mode to ‘focus and doing’ mode is an increasingly important skill.” […]