05/ 30/ 2007
by Harvey King
I've given up on reading e-mails all the way to the third sentence. If you can't tell me everything you want to say in the first 140 characters, then forget it. Indeed, I just stopped reading this column, as it's now already 100 characters over my limit. Apparently, 140 characters is the cut-off length for some text-messaging services (or, as my tech friends call it, SMS, for “short messaging service”), and so, if you're like me and your employees and children have discovered how to “text you,” you begin to understand the critical nature of boiling down everything you could possibly have to say on one topic into 140 or fewer characters (including spaces).
The 140-character limit is just the latest co-conspirator to join the gang that robbed whatever attention span I once possessed. When I first started out in business, the term "management by walking around" was popular. I never took time to learn what it actually meant, as the distractions I encountered by walking around soon meant I had no time to read books about management approaches.
And it wasn't just books. Soon I discovered I didn't have time to read magazine columns like this one--the one I stopped reading 1,100 characters ago. Because that was just about the time CompuServe and e-mail and online forums and cell phones and faxes and networking events and client off-site meetings all came into my life. Soon AOL and WWW and RSS and a long parade of other three-letter initials joined those enemies of the attention span. And then came blogs and podcasts and YouTube and instant messaging and 140-character cell-phone text messaging and something called Twitter that blasts 140-character messages to all of the above.
With all those distractions, my managing-by-walking-around is limited to 140 steps at a time.
I've given up on having an attention surplus. I've actually given up on having an attention span. I've come to the conclusion that the best way to handle the competitors for my attention throughout the day is to give each of them my fully focused and complete attention--for exactly 140 seconds.
