continuous partial attention

A post to the often interesting iDC (institute for distributed creativity) list caught my eye today.

The post had this quote from Neal Stephenson:

Every productive thing that I do requires ALL my attention. I cannot put it any better than Donald Knuth, who writes on his website, ‘Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration.’

It also looks like one of the foremost minds in computer science, Don Knuth, author of The Art of Computer Programming hasn’t used email since 1990.

Update: At my old job at McMaster-Carr, we once had a two- or three-week experiment where none of the managers were allowed to check or send email after 10am and before 4pm. As I recall, there wasn’t any real change in productivity.