Digital Common Sense

I’ve realized lately that too many if us suffer from IDD. We’re overconnected. We IM, text message, Skype, call, email, crosslink from before dawn into the wee hours of the evening. We don’t focus on any single task long enough to complete it. We multitask. And too often that means we do several things poorly. We don’t pay enough inattention to things we should defer or overlook entirely. How many of us have too many irons in the fire?

That said, acknowledging I suffer from IDD, here are a couple of things I’ve either been to attentive or inattentive to the last few days, and am working on.

Some of you may recall that I posed eight questions to the candidates in the last election cycle. The candidates, as candidates are wont to do, ignored them because they were hard questions. Candidates don’t like hard questions. They prefer sound bites to substance. Nonetheless, I’ve been working on a revision of those questions to pose early to the candidates this time around. Questions from a technologist’s viewpoint. I hope to finish that post and get it online this weekend.

I’ve stepped into a new brainstorm idea pretty heavily. The VoIP ThinkTank is taking shape and coming into being. That takes braincells and will require some technical system implementation on my part. I’ll contniue investing time and brainpower into this, and more will follow shortly. I also registered the domain voip-thinktank.com as part of this effort, but haven’t had the time to place any content there yet. I envision that as a fairly static pointer environment initially. That domain will at the very least contain a blog. Probably not a wiki as I’m not a fan of wkis in general. Most are too much work for too little value. Perhaps a content management system behind it all. Whatever the start, it will be modest. I’ll share more soon.

I have a paper on VoIP and Firewalls that I’ve been working on forever it seems like. It’s not that big a paper. It’s brief. But continual distractions from other things have kept me from getting it finished. And it won’t get done this weekend. Perhaps next week.

Freedom to Connect (F2C) is upon us. I can’t be there due to other commitments. Along with the conference, perhaps as painful as missing the conference, is the lost chance for an evening/morning of freewheeling brainstorming with Dean Landsman, Frank Paynter, Mary Godwin, Martin Geddes, Bob Frankston and several others who just elude conscious thought right now. I’ll be there in spirit, but not in fact.

Inattention to downtime is part of the problem. I find the past few weeks that the week, that Monday to Friday portion of life, is traveling at a frenetic pace, with working thoughts and activities, whether truly work, or just work of interest in technology areas. consumes every waking moment. This weekend I’m focusing on some downtime too. Battery recharge cycle.

This weekend I may just need to be a little inattentive to detail.

Technorati Tags: Inattention Deficit Disorder, VoIP ThinkTank, Freedom to Connect,

Filed by Ken at 9:44 am under General