Kathy Sierra is right, our attention is badly used and unfocussed and it’s not just our own fault – your aggregator checks for updates every hour, but that’s probably from when it started, so at what time will it next notify you of new items? Your email scans every five minutes, so the likelihood is that you’re being constantly interrupted.

Being able to schedule these interruptions is an important part of managing your attention (and being able to priortise and sort these interruptions when they arrive is another). We should be able to say “interrupt me at x hour intervals starting at x o’clock” to every application that wants to tell us something, rather than being slave to being told as and when they deem it appropriate.