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Information

Hyper-focused attention is good when you explore something - it lets you accumulate and process a huge amount of information. But now when I am looking at those 10+ open Mozilla windows with ~5 tabs each plus some IE windows and thinking - what to do with all this information now?

Reminds me of something Līga said recently - "i wish i could move open tabs between Firefox windows".

This would not solve the question what to do with all this information, but still would help to group and manage them. There was a Mozilla extension Multizilla that lets you do this. Is there something like this for the Firefox?

Attention

Luckily, these windows have appeared during a number of days. If that all was just one night, that'd have been way too much. Which again leads to the question of how do we all cope with the information that is out there?

Joi Ito: Continuous Partial Attention - talking about an idea of continuous partical attention by Linda Stone:

" ... at conferences or the multi-modal distance learning projects where you have a video of the speaker, the power point presentation, the chat, the wiki and the back channel going at the same time. ... It CAN be very overwhelming, but I think it's because we are conditioned to think that we need to understand all of the information that is being transmitted.

I think an interesting metaphor might be the difference between loss-less and lossy compression technology. There is so much information being transmitted and it doesn't matter if you [get] everything exactly (or if you are getting exactly the same bits as someone else).

... The trick is to get a picture of what is going on from a perspective that makes sense for you in a format that compresses well for you. ... I think that if we stop trying to "catch it all" which we are conditioned to do, and think more in terms of lossy compression and surfing parallel streams and multi-modes, maybe it is easier. "

Related:

• Responsibility, Accountability, and Follow-Through - a discussion on "43 Folders" list.
• Is my obsession a feature or a bug? - a discussion on "attention deficit disorder" - is it a feature or a bug?