A few seconds attention span.

As I need to do many different kinds of things during the course of day, I seem to have developed an attitude of acting based on "a few seconds attention span". I receive a mail, and I am reminded of a manuscript that I was supposed to send in the day before. Unless I start to work on it straight away, the agenda is likely to be "swept away", to be retrieved into my attentional system only after a prolonged delay.

I suspect that the growing need both psychologically and practically to "act on the spot" is an increasingly acutely felt reality of contemporary life for many people.

I seem to be waking up to and dealing with the needs of prompt and flexible actions with the help of a soccer metaphor. In that sport, you need to make judgments and act appropriately on the spot. Otherwise it is difficult to do good in the match. The contemporary life is starting to look more and more like the soccer match. You keep running to-and-fro and zigzag in the pitch of life, and try to excel in the instant judgments and actions. Since the competition and cooperation is increasingly becoming global in character, each one of us will be playing in the World Cup of life long after the final whistle is blown in South Africa.