Marketing Technology » cognitive drift

Cognitive Drift redeux

iamreff — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 09:00:44 +0000

One of my more popular blog posts is “Cognitive drift” which touches on the concept of how ones mind tends to drift after a few moments. For the last 8 months I’ve tried to be more focused. A bit less scatter-brained.

My attempts have met with mixed results. I am more comfortable with several things going on at once. A tangible example, I tend to have a dozen browser tabs open as well as 6-10 apps. That just feels “normal” to me.

Recently I had the opportunity to attend Kolbe training. I’ll leave out the details on the assessment, but essentially my primary modus operandi is Quick Start.

Quick Starts thrive on new ideas, taking chances and chaos. They like to brainstorm new solutions, ad lib on the job, experiment with different methods, play a hunch.

What are they not great at? Focus.

Moral of the story? Be yourself. Be happy. Be great.

Photo credit Dan @freedigitalphotos.net

Cold Turkey

iamreff — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 15:59:08 +0000

As an experiment, I’m going to try and get all my news from a twitter feed for one week.

So, what does that mean? It means:

No market info from my WSJ subscription
No info from e-mail subscriptions
No RSS feeds
I will ignore the dozen podcasts I listen to every week
No radio…no sports talk radio, no NPR news *shudder*
No TV newscasts (that’s an easy one)

Why the heck am I doing this? If you don’t drive down new roads you never see new sights. I expect I will overcome adversities and find new social avenues of getting information and news. What will I lose? I expect my fantasy hockey team is going to continue to slide towards the cellar.

The fun starts this Sunday, 10/17/10.

Source: http://xkcd.com/756/

Cognitive drift

iamreff — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 11:27:02 +0000

Listening to the SuperFreakonomics audio book I heard a term today that was new to me – “cognitive drift”. The authors used the term to describe our tendency to lose focus on what we’re doing. For example, when we’re looking at a website that is taking too long to use.

A person using a computer experiences “cognitive drift” if more than one second elapses between clicking the mouse and seeing new data on the screen. If ten seconds pass, the person’s mind is somewhere else entirely. That’s how medical errors are made.
Levitt and Dubner, Superfreakonomics

Randy Mayeux wrote a good post about the topic already so I won’t reinvent the wheel, but take a look. There have also been good articles in the WSJ and in Wired magazine on related topics. A friend recommended this article to me and I pass it along to you.

Are any of you working on focusing and “uni-tasking”? Any success stories out there?

image sourced from creativecommons