Hey, Hey..Made you Look....Employees switch tasks every three minutes..

This looks like an important study. The consumerism, rapid impulse shopping and age of information overload are shifting attention spans and focus and standard operating procedure of life in the modern office.

Gloria Mark, a UC-Irvine professor, studies attention overload and multitasking. The Seattle Times reports that she's found the average employee switches tasks every three minutes, is interrupted every two minutes, and has a maximum focus stretch of 12 minutes. ....No longer constrained by any virtual limits, we're feeling the effects of this flood of digital assets in our inboxes and news aggregators, on our hard drives and iPods, overloading our very capacity for managing it all. Our 60,000-year-old patterns of information processing simply can't handle such overwhelming excess."

The O Reilly network always seems to find the neat technical focus and mine great studies of emerging technology and use pattterns. The job of network-centric advocacy and new campaign practitioners is to look at these trends and interpret the implications to campaigning and organizing. Is it still realistic to expect "membership and long term engagement with an issue in this new environment? Are you planning new campaigns, strategies and content that take less than 3 minutes and don't involve constant re-touch or interruption of the supporters already crazy work day?

You get 10,000 people for 12 minutes if you are lucky. Design social change campaigns that are increasingly about synchronizing and aggregating lots of brief encounters not campaigns that require endless open ended membership and participation.