I had a great post in mind on the topic of continuous partial attention, but I have forgotten what it was. Generally, I have about dozen things on my mind at any particular moment.
Look what happens:
- I run windows. When an app locks up or stalls, as they do with regularity, unless it is absolutely critical, my attention will wander. I will lose my place. Or, I sit in my seat fidgeting, feeling the stress grow as time slows.
- When the network is slow for whatever reason, same thing happens. My attention wanders away. Or, again as above, I simply sit and watch the computer screen do nothing.
- Getting anything done usually has to balance instantaneous motion with relatively infinitely slow operations. For example, I am backing up an archive to a new server. This is tedious, the archive is too big to tar.gz, but too small to hire out. But I don’t want to delete the old until there has been overnight backups on the new. My attention wanders…
How to bill? Lump sum? Overhead 3 hours, client 5 hours? That’s not really helpful for learning time value of activity for future cost estimation. What about working on overhead and client problems, or two different client problems at the same time? How is that recorded?
As a postscript, it amazes me that I wait for my data on my 2GB ram machine just as long as I waited on my first 4M ram Apple laptop. Or so it seems to me. What’s up with that?
