“Continuous Partial Attention” at Microsoft
What was most startling, says [Microsoft executive Michael] Neal, was that Microsoft’s e-mail-centric culture extended into meetings. People would come into meetings with their laptops and would be reading and responding to e-mails while others were speaking or presenting. Neal says he was taken aback at first. His his initial reaction, understandably, was that such behavior was impolite. But then, he says, he realized that reading e-mails during meetings was a necessity due to the sheer volume of messages coming in. It’s nothing personal. It’s a survival strategy.
This is the phenomenon that once lead Microsoft executive Linda Stone to coin the term continuous partial attention.
Robert Mitchell in his Computerworld blog E-mail and Corporate attention Deficit Disorder, April 5, 2006
