On Concentration and its Enemies
For a couple of weeks I’ve been thinking about what I read at the website of author Neal Stephenson. He’s qouting Donald Knuth:
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.
Checking up on the Knuth citation I discovered, that he hasn’t had an email-address since 1990 and furthermore asks people to write him a letter, if they want his attention. Letters that are dealt with per batch every three months. Now, Knuth is a very respected computer scientist, writer and inventor of LaTeX, so it’s not that he doesn’t dig. He does. But he needs to concentrate. So does William Gibson in his supposedly last blogpost.
Email, Instant Messaging, web browsing, blog reading, blog commenting and blog posting are all activities that takes time. And concentration from the job at hand — let alone the situation where all of the above is the job at hand.
It’s not that I’m quitting. I’d just like to be more efficient and maybe shut down various pieces of software from time to time, not caring about who’s signing in or out just now or how fresh I want my email to be when I read it. Or my fish when I eat it. No. Skip the fish part.